Paul Brady at Cork Opera House

Born and raised in Strabane, Northern Ireland, Paul Brady was into a wide variety of music from an early age. A Fifties child, his first sounds were the Swing, Jazz, Show tunes of his parents’ generation. Then 50?s Rock ‘n Roll, 60?s pop and Motown, Blues, R’nB and Country and Western. Through all this ran the potent flavour of Irish traditional music and song.

Learning to play the piano pretty much by ear, trial and error, his early heroes were Jerry Lee Lewis, Winifred Atwell and Fats Domino. By the age of eleven he had begun to play guitar, spending hours of his school holidays learning every tune the Shadows and The Ventures recorded, every lick Chuck Berry played. Mid-teens saw him take summer jobs playing piano and guitar in Bundoran, a seaside resort in nearby County Donegal. But it was around 1965 in Dublin, at college, that he began to develop as a singer and performer joining a succession of R’n B / Soul bands including The Inmates, The Kult and Rootzgroop, covering the songs of Ray Charles, James Brown, Junior Walker and blues legends like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry.

2010 saw Paul releasing his 14th solo album, ‘Hooba Dooba’ to widespread acclaim, with Hot Press editor Niall Stokes saying “This is by far Paul Brady’s most assured and deepest album since the seminal Hard Station. But give it time: we may yet conclude that he has finally eclipsed that extraordinary record”. As the year drew to a close, the cherry on the cake was a concert in Belfast’s Waterfront Theatre with the Ulster Orchestra as part of the 2010 Belfast Festival.

Paul Brady continues to push out the boundaries not only of his own talent but of Irish contemporary music in the new millennium