View from the Green Room: Back to Black
Mary Black performed at Theatre Royal
It feels like we’ve all grown old with Mary Black. It’s been a comforting voice over 35 years and far from feeling the years, Mary is dead proud of having been there for a generation or so. And she’s not afraid to reach back with memories of her performing in earlier concerts in venues like the Theatre Royal.
It’s easy to explain, really. Mary Black defines what many people want to find in an Irish woman’s voice: pure, deep, and slightly ethereal and beyond those popular trends that never last.
For a number of years, ‘What Hi-Fi?’ magazine considered Black's voice to be so pure that it was used as an audiophile benchmark for comparing the sound quality of different high fidelity systems.
Mary is the ultimate professional with a superb band. Her list of credits reads like a wish list for any aspiring singer.
Her first solo album ‘Mary Black’ went gold and is still regarded as one of the best Irish albums of the 1980s.
IRMA named her Entertainer of the Year in 1986 and Best Female Artist in 1987 and 1988. 1987 saw the release of her first multi-platinum Irish album ‘By the Time it Gets Dark’.
However, her popularity reached new heights with the release of the ground-breaking album, No Frontiers, in August 1989. It rocketed to the top of the Irish album charts, achieved triple-platinum status and remained in the Top 30 for over a year.
Following several tours to Australia and the USA, Mary's appeal became international, while her single "The Thorn Upon the Rose" reached No. 8 on the Japanese singles chart after it was used in a national railroad television advert.
The compilation album ‘A Woman’s Heart’ that also featured her sister Frances Black and other big names such as Eleanor McEvoy, Dolores Keane, Sharon Shannon and Maura O'Connell is still a big seller in the Irish market.
Everyone loves the honesty of Mary’s singing. It’s the joy of the song and the truth of the interpretation that sets her apart. Mary’s songs look back through tunnels of memory carrying legends of ‘mirrors that won’t talk and old pedal singers that just won’t sing no more.’
Very often, the elusiveness of the lyrics draws the listener back and back like a bird to a feeder. Hand on heart, I’ve often felt like ‘the geek with the Alchemist’s stone’; aware of a meaning that was just beyond my outstretched hand.
‘No Frontiers’ will always be THE album for me. Memories of a family holiday in the Burren in Clare with a clatter of kids all piled into the car. ‘No Frontiers’ was just released, and the cassette deck blazed away as we bounced along the highways and byways of Clare to the thump of Carolina Rua’s shillibopopu, set dances on flag stone pub floors in Ennistymon, a crazy Willie Clancy Festival in Miltown Malbay, pretend-swimming in Lahinch, massive breakfast fry-ups and big spud evening dinners in Inagh and, all the while, Mary Black singing away to us all that ‘black nights feel warmer for the spark’. My gang certainly knew what she meant because Mary sang for all of us.
It was a golden time when Heaven had its way and heaven knew no frontiers and we all felt Heaven through Mary’s eyes.
