The following article is an overview of the career of Irish pianist, songwriter, producer, arranger, and conductor Phil Coulter. The content below is a mix of passages from two interviews with Phil Coulter, conducted by Bas Tukker, March & July 2026; and Coulter’s memoirs, “Bruised, Never Broken”, with many thanks going out to Phil Coulter for allowing the free use of quotes from this book. The article below is subdivided into two main parts; a general career overview (part 3) and a part dedicated to Phil Coulter’s Eurovision involvement (part 4).
All material below: © Phil Coulter & Bas Tukker / 2026
Contents
- Passport
- Short Eurovision record
- Biography
- Eurovision Song Contest
- Other artists about Phil Coulter
- Eurovision involvement year by year
- Sources & links
PASSPORT
Born: February 19th, 1942, Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland (United Kingdom)
Nationality: British (1942-) / Irish (c. 1963-)
SHORT EUROVISION RECORD
With his songwriting partner Bill Martin, Phil Coulter signed his name under the first-ever UK Eurovision winner ‘Puppet On A String’, performed by Sandie Shaw in 1967. One year later, the Coulter-Martin partnership came close to a back-to-back win with ‘Congratulations’ for Cliff Richard. Coulter went on to write the arrangement for Ireland’s first Eurovision winner ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ for Dana in 1970. Eventually, in 1975, with his fourth involvement in the contest, Coulter had the opportunity to conduct his own composition and arrangement, as he led the orchestra for Geraldine Branagan, who represented Luxembourg with ‘Toi’ on the festival stage in Stockholm.
BIOGRAPHY
Phil Coulter grew up in a terraced house in Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland. His father was one of a minority of Roman Catholic policemen in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Both of Phil’s parents were keen amateur musicians, with his mother being an avid pianist and his father playing a bit of violin.
“I suppose I must have shown some early musical promise,” Phil recalls, “because at the age of about nine, my folks decided I should go to piano lessons. I was duly enlisted with a Mr Joe Doherty (…). My teacher was old-school. Before I was allowed to even think about playing a melody, the nitty-gritty of scales, arpeggios, and five-finger exercises were the only things on the menu. On top of all that, Mr Doherty had a pretty direct way of correcting my fingers, when they’d either be too flat, parallel with the keys, or – God forbid – I’d play a wrong note; he’d sit at the top of the piano with a ruler in his hand, administering a swift crack on the knuckles. (…) I hated it. I hated the scales, I hated the arpeggios, but most of all, God forgive me, I hated Mr Doherty.
“I was supposed to practise on the Challen piano in the front room for half an hour every day. I soon came up with a scheme to shorten those thirty minutes. Pride of place on the mantelpiece was a chiming clock, a wedding present from a well-to-do uncle. I figured if I moved the minute hand forward, the time signalling a half hour passing would come early. I got away with this for a surprisingly long time. Then, the inevitable happened. I broke the clock. No chime, no movement, nothing. When Sergeant Coulter got home from duty that evening, my misdemeanour was reported. Swift justice was meted out. I got a thick ear. (…) The lessons were cancelled and I was off the hook. In retrospect it was a very smart move on my father’s part, except for the thick ear. If I had persisted with Mr Doherty, I may very well have been turned off music for good. As it was, in the months that followed, I gradually gravitated back to the piano, to try to pick out tunes by ear. I even managed to work out the melody of ‘Buttons And Bows’. My curiosity was reignited. This was fun.”
Phil spent his secondary school years at St Columb’s College. “[There] I met a teacher who was to become my mentor and a huge influence on my life. Having gone back to the piano on my own time and become fascinated by the possibilities, now I wanted to learn properly. I could pick out melodies with my right hand, but I needed to find out how the left hand worked and how they fit together. Music was not part of the curriculum at St Columb’s, so if you wanted to add it onto your list of subjects, you had to do it after hours. When I declared my interest, I was directed to meet Mr John Maultsaid. He turned out to be the best teacher I have ever encountered in all my life and travels.”
“He explained that he would teach me piano, but that music theory, harmony, etcetera, would be taught after hours by an outside teacher called Redmond Friel. Again, I was blessed. The word I’d use to describe John Maultsaid is thorough. He had a gift of imparting knowledge in an organised way and a system of preparing you for examinations that was completely focused. On the other hand, the word I’d use to describe Redmond Friel is passionate. Music was just oozing from this man’s pores. He wasn’t the supremely organised teacher that Maultsaid was, but his musicality was infectious and irresistible. When he sat at the piano, demonstrating how to harmonise some random melody, I was fascinated.”
Phil (on the right) with his brother Brian and sister Cyd
“During my teenage years, pop music changed profoundly, because you had the advent of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Everly Brothers, and of course Elvis Presley. That kind of rhythm and blues, as they called it back then, was very different from pop music in the previous generation, where there had been songs like ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ or ‘There’s A Pawn Shop On The Corner In Pittsburgh Pennsylvania’. This was also the type of songs which went to the Eurovision Song Contest until the mid-1960s; kind of cutesy songs like ‘Sing Little Birdie’. This was music which didn’t really appeal to me. In my formative years as a teenager, I much rather listened to the likes of Fats Domino and The Everly Brothers. I often consider myself very fortunate to be born when I was born, because it allowed me to imbibe the birth of serious popular music.”
While continuing his piano studies, Phil did well at school – so well, in fact, that he won a scholarship for Queen’s University in Belfast, where he chose three initial subjects in his first year; Music, French, and Celtic Studies. “When I went up to university to study Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, at the back of my mind was always Buddy Holly. Within the first term, I had started my little four-piece band with a kind of energy and arrogance of youth. That was hastened by the fact that within the university, at the various dances, the ensembles that were playing were either playing Dixieland jazz or orchestrations of standards like ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’. All fine, but I didn’t hear any of those bands playing what I was into. So I started a little band with the sole intention of being able to play Buddy Holly and Fats Domino.”
“Although music was a passion, it was instilled in me that the reason to go to university was to get a degree, so that you could become employable. The general consensus was, ‘You’ll never make a living out of music; you will make a living out of teaching French’ – and at one stage I even harboured ambitions to be in the diplomatic service, fashioning myself in a Panama hat and a linen suit, ‘our man in Havana’, speaking in French with the natives. Long story short, I chose French instead of Music for my second year. Spending much of that year trying to get intense about Abélard and Héloïse, I came to the conclusion that subjects like Medieval French were not for me. So I went back to studying Music as my main subject. By that stage, my involvement with pop music had amplified as well. I had spent two summer seasons playing the piano in summer resorts in Kent. I also joined an Irish band, The Gay McIntyre Showband, as a guitarist, having taught myself how to play the guitar. We performed at rural dances in Donegal and Mayo.”
“In my last year at college, some genius came up with the idea of doing a recording, a student record, for a charity event called The Rag Week. By that time, I had become to go-to guy to do with music. ‘Phil, couldn’t you help us out?’ Of course, I was all for that! So the next thing was; we need a song. There had never been a burning ambition in me to be a songwriter. I had never fantasised about it – but when there’s a gap in the hedge, you have to go through it. Here was an opportunity, so I’d better take it! The tune I wrote was ‘Foolin’ Time’. I sat down at the piano, inventing a song in the mould of Bobby Darin, an American singer I was a big fan of. Looking back, when I join all the dots in my career, that student record was the first dot, because, happenstance, I got to play that tune for The Capitol Showband during my summer stint. They were the number one Irish showband at the time. I met them with my band in a jam session in some rural pub in Donegal. I had the good sense of pressing a copy of ‘Foolin’ Time’ into each of their hands. That would prove to be one of the smartest moves in my young life.”
Duly impressed with the single, The Capitol Showband, featuring lead singer Butch Moore, recorded ‘Foolin’ Time’ as their first single, released in January 1964. The song climbed to number three in the Irish charts. Accompanying the band to a new recording session at Pye Studios in London, Phil was approached by manager Phil Solomon, who decided to sign him as a contract songwriter to his publishing company. Quitting his studies, Phil moved to London. It all sounded very glamorous, but the actual situation proved a little different.
Phil as a Queen’s University student sitting at the piano in the recording session of ‘Foolin’ Time’ (1963)
“The reality was that I became a sort of musical dogsbody about the office. In my fantasies, I had imagined that in no time at all I’d be arranging scores for the recording sessions. In fact, for the first few months I was more likely to be arranging sandwiches for the office girls. I soon discovered that in this musical hierarchy, I was the small boy, the greenhorn, the newly arrived apprentice.”
“Before I even got time to do any songwriting, I was busy pulling my weight with the more mundane stuff, like delivering tapes or filing music. I didn’t mind. I was still trying to prove my worth. What really excited me, though, was working on actual music projects. One of the big earners for publishers in those days was the sale of sheet music. I learned from an older, part-time arranger how to prepare music for print. It was pretty painstaking work, but I lapped it up. Solomon had quite a large back catalogue of songs, some already recorded, the majority still in demo form on tape. It became my job to transcribe those titles, music and words, onto what are known as lead sheets or toplines. This involved listening to the tapes, which were often in a pretty rough state, and figuring out first the melody, then the chords, and finally the lyrics.”
One of the new bands in Solomon’s catalogue was Them, a teenage group from Belfast featuring lead singer Van Morrison. “Not so much as a musical director, more as an interpreter,” Phil was seconded to the band, working as the assistant of seasoned American producer Bert Berns on their new single.
“As I walked into the studio, Bert had already got the band underway. They were playing a new song he’d written and there he was, walking amongst them, laying down the rhythm with his little guitar. I stopped dead in my tracks. I could feel the goosebumps. It was a road to Damascus moment. It was my very first time to hear a hit before it was even recorded. I knew, even with the rough edges, that this was a smash. The combination of Bert’s song, the infectious rhythm, a Latino verse and a driving chorus, plus Van’s vocal, was just irresistible. Even before I got to put in my organ parts! I was no expert, but every fibre of my musical being told me that ‘Here Comes The Night’ was headed for the charts. It was such a heady feeling, being a part of all this. When we moved into the studio to record Bert’s tracks, I was like a sponge, soaking it all up. I waited, I watched and I wondered. It was an education, observing an alchemist creating magic.”
Towards the end of 1964, Phil had his first experience as an arranger with ‘Terry’ by Twinkle, which was the nom de plume of singer-songwriter Lynn Rypley. “With the Bert Berns experience fresh in my ears, I went to work. We had booked a small demo studio called Regent Sound, in Denmark Street, for a day to record two tracks. We couldn’t afford to waste any time, so we booked some hot session players who could really deliver, including a young Jimmy Page on guitar. This was going to be my Phil Spector moment. I couldn’t believe that I was directing legendary players like Big Jim Sullivan on twelve-string and Bobby Graham on drums, while I added the all-important organ solo. We were delighted with the end product, and even Solomon was amazed that we had managed to create something this good. ‘Terry’ by Twinkle was released on Decca and went nowhere.”
Phil (on the right) with two members of The Capitol Showband, Eamonn Monaghan and front singer Butch Moore, and their manager Jim Doherty at the launch of their version of ‘Foolin’ Time’ (1964)
“The big pop TV show of the time, Ready Steady Go!, reviewed it among the week’s new releases and the presenter declared that this was a record you would definitely not be hearing on the show. Bingo! Solomon’s press machine went into overdrive. The following morning on the front page of one of the national dailies, a picture of a very teary-eyed Twinkle appeared, with the headline ‘Record banned by TV’. That was it. The record began to fly off the shelves and by Christmas it had climbed to number four. That was the first time I got my name as an arranger on the label of a UK hit. Happy Christmas!”
In 1965, Phil met Bill Martin, a travelling salesman and aspiring songwriter from Glasgow, at an improvised songwriting masterclass by American lyricist Buddy Kaye, who was on a visit in London. “While no hit songs emerged from those writing sessions, what did emerge was far more important,” Phil comments, “the songwriting team of Martin and Coulter. Buddy was quick to realise the chemistry between us and our potential as hit writers. He gave us a lot of encouragement and some fatherly advice. He reckoned that if we were to thrive as a writing duo, we would need a serious music publisher with the clout and connections to help get our songs out there. Among Buddy’s other business connections in London was one Jimmy Phillips, the boss man at KPM, Keith Prowse Music, one of the real big boys. Buddy recommended us to Jimmy as a team he should sign up. And Jimmy agreed.”
Chuffed by the interest from Phillips, who had co-written ‘Smile’ with Charlie Chaplin, Phil left his job with Phil Solomon and joined Bill Martin at KPM’s office at Denmark Street, often referred to as the British Tin Pan Alley, as it housed so many music publishers’ offices and recording studios.
Thinking back to his early days with Bill Martin at the building which housed the KPM offices, Phil recalls, “Right at the back of the ground-floor offices, behind the post department, there was a small demo studio (…). Every second Friday, Martin and Coulter were booked in to record demonstration tapes or demos of six newly completed songs. And I mean completed. Music, words, and arrangement. (…) The next part of the process was to take the new demos into Jimmy’s office the following Monday morning, where he would analyse them, critique them, and, as often as not, throw them in the bin. To begin with, this was a pretty daunting prospect and a steep learning curve. It certainly taught me some critical lessons about being a professional songwriter that have stayed with me until this day. With that kind of schedule, it was obvious that we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike. In our situation, the deadline became the inspiration.”
“The job was tough, but looking back on the whole arc of my career, I come to the conclusion that this was the favourite part of my professional life – in terms of my growth, development, and sheer enjoyment. It was like being an aspiring soccer player being called up to play for Manchester United. All the other writers were on the same boat. Everything was happening at Denmark Street. We were all from the provinces, we were all talented, hungry, and keen, but there was no envy. We all subscribed to the theory that a rising tide flows to all boats. If Greenaway & Cook (successful writing duo at Dick James Music – BT) could get a hit, we could get one as well.”
Phil as the pianist and musical director of Irish band The Bachelors on their 1965 UK tour
“We had our first commercial success the following year with ‘Hi! Hi! Hazel’ for Geno Washington & The Ram Jam Band. Jimmy Phillips then put aside a little budget to allow me to do my first piano recording as a solo artist. I wrote two instrumental tunes, ‘The Londonderry Air’ and ‘Runaway Bunion’, which were released as a single by what was dubbed the Phil Coulter Orchestra. It received quite a lot of radio airplay. I wrote an arrangement for rhythm group and a full string section. It must have been one of my first experiences conducting a real orchestra.”
“I had learnt the basics of conducting at the uni, but in my first three-hour session on the floor of a professional recording studio in London, I learnt more about conducting than in three years at the academy. It’s a big difference to conduct a real orchestra. Theory is one thing, putting it into practice is quite something else. Working with a bunch of musicians who are all first-call session players, you have to be prepared for the second trombone to put his hand up and say, ‘Excuse me, in bar 137, is that a B natural or a B flat?’ If you start panicking, you’re showing your weakness to the orchestra, which they will exploit. Orchestras are fine people, but they are a herd.”
“Some years later, I briefly got to know Marvin Hamlisch. I had a chat with him about working with orchestras. He told me that he also found there was always somebody who was going to try to catch you out in every orchestra – even him, a brilliant arranger, one of the best in the business! When I found myself in such a situation, I could rely on the theoretical background I had picked up at university. It helps to have a grounding in subjects like harmonies, counterpoint, and voicings. If nothing else, it helps your confidence to find that you’re able to answer those questions. Of course, you need a basic technique; and what you don’t know, you’ll learn very fast. In the early days, I was just beating four in a bar. As things became a bit more complicated, you had to smarten up your technique and knowhow along the way.”
The big break for the Martin-Coulter songwriting team came in 1967, when their song ‘Puppet On A String’, recorded by Sandie Shaw, won the Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom. After the contest, Phil received a hero’s welcome in his hometown of Derry, where he was driven around in the mayor’s limousine with his parents at his side.
“My parents were delighted, proud and more than a little relieved. Bear in mind that their original hope for me was that I’d get a steady job, preferably teaching music back in St Columb’s. When I’d announced that, rather than following that particular career path, I was going to London to try my luck in the music business, they were horrified. I remember my father, ever the steady hand, just shook his head and said ruefully, ‘Mark my words, boy, this will all end in tears.’ My poor mother was saying rosaries, offering up novenas and lighting candles, bombarding heaven with heartfelt prayers that her son would not end up living on the streets, homeless in the big city. (…) Seeing the look on my mother’s face was priceless. After all of the worry about her headstrong and deluded son ending up destitute, she could finally relax and begin to believe that there might be a real career in this ‘jazz music’. I was so glad that she had lived long enough to see it.”
Promo photo of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter shortly after their 1967 Eurovision win. “The white leather trench coat was one of my first purchases after the success”
“Later in 1967, Bill and I were invited to represent the UK at the song festival in Rio de Janeiro. That was one of the exotic music festivals which you had in those days. After securing Georgie Fame as our singer, we wrote him a song called ‘Celebration’. It was the polar opposite of ‘Puppet On A String’; sophisticated and even a little jazzy. Nobody in Europe was really too aware of what was going on in Brazil, but who would turn down a chance to go to Rio? That was just a junket, a week away from the office – and I got to conduct a sixty-piece orchestra! Who would turn down a chance to be in the conductors’ room with Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, and Henry Mancini? Mancini was the chairman of the jury and he also did a guest performance with Andy Williams. We had a great time; so much so that we went back two years later representing Ireland with Danny Doyle.”
In 1968, Coulter and Martin came close to winning Eurovision again for the UK, eventually having to settle for the runner-up position with ‘Congratulations’, which they wrote for Cliff Richard. To shed off the image of Eurovision songwriter, the duo were looking for a regular chart hit, which eluded them for some time. Their follow-up to ‘Puppet On A String’ for Sandie Shaw, a song called ‘Tonight In Tokyo’, flopped, but finally, in 1969, their perseverance paid off.
“One day in our little attic office, something unusual happened. Bill arrived up the stairs with an almost completed song. He was going through a rocky period in his home life and had been a bit down in the dumps. He had come up with a song called ‘Surround Yourself With Sorrow’. I loved the title and when he sang as much of the song as he’d finished, I thought we could definitely turn it into a hit. We polished it off and slotted it in for our next demo sessions. I pulled out all the stops on a very big and very hooky arrangement (…). We could tell this song had something. So, the KPM promotion team got the demo out to some of the top producers, trying to get a cover. We were ecstatic when we heard the news a few weeks later that the great George Martin was going to record the song with Cilla Black, currently one of the hottest acts around. (…) I got the best possible birthday present on 19 February when Cilla’s ‘Surround Yourself With Sorrow’ broke into the UK Top 20 at number eighteen. When it made it to number three a few weeks later, we were chuffed and felt that we’d proved a point and given two fingers to the cynics. Happy days!”
“While ‘Surround Yourself With Sorrow’ was to remain one of the rare songs which were predominantly Bill’s brainchild, he was someone with really great ideas. A potential song title, a phrase of a lyric, or a singer he felt we should write a song for. So we would start on a song, and, as often as not, he would go out for a walk, while I tried to work on our initial idea. He’d come back to listen to what I had done. ‘No, no, that’s too complicated,’ he would say – and he was off again. Bill hadn’t been to university like me, but he had a street education, a common touch which was very important, especially in the early days.”
“Bill also was the best salesman that I ever encountered. That became especially important when we walked out of our three-year deal with Jimmy Phillips in 1969 to establish our own publishing company. Now we had to sell our own songs. One of our first successful attempts was a song called ‘Thanks’, a gospel track which was a hit for J. Vincent Edwards. Nobody was better than Bill when it came to convincing companies to record our songs. For a number of years, Bill and I were what you could call a good cop-bad cop act. When we were sitting with an A&R man and the guy wasn’t too convinced by our demo, Bill would start swearing, ‘You f***er, what? You f***ing idiot!’, and then he would storm out – and then I would sit there, saying with a quiet voice, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that, that’s just how he is.’ Somehow, Bill’s direct approach worked wonders. There wasn’t a door that he wouldn’t have gone through.”
“The French representative of our publishing company knew that I could speak French. It wasn’t long before this man invited me over to Paris to discuss which acts were happening over there. Through him, my song ‘Julietta’ was recorded by a French singer called Sheila – and it was a hit. I had a foot in the door in Paris! One thing led to the other; and one day, I was introduced to Johnny Stark, who famously managed Mireille Mathieu and Johnny Hallyday. We got on really well. Johnny invited me for a few days to his villa in La Bidoul on the French Riviera, which is where I first met Mireille. Back in Paris, I got to do some sessions with her (in 1971, recording the Martin-Coulter composition ‘Nobody’ – BT). Working in Paris was very different from recording in a London studio. First of all, she was a superstar and you had a full orchestra. Now, after a day of recording in London, you would go into a pub around the corner for a hamburger. With Johnny Stark, you were taken to some very smart seafood restaurant, where he had a private room. Johnny had chosen the menu, the wines, and champagnes. I loved it, absolutely loved it. My adventures in the French market were most enjoyable. If I hadn’t been born Irish, I would have chosen to be born French.”
Coulter also had a lasting involvement with the legendary Irish folk group The Dubliners. It all started with him writing a song for them, ‘The Molly Maguires’, which was intended as the title melody for the eponymous film with Sean Connery. “[The Dubliners had recently] acquired a new manager, Noel Pearson, who I’d already met through the showband world. Noel loved the song and agreed that it would be perfect for the lads. (…) He asked if I’d be interested in producing not only ‘The Molly Maguires’, but a whole album. Well, I’d been a fan of The Dubs for years, long before ‘Seven Drunken Nights’, and thought they were a force of nature. Five huge talents and larger-than-life characters. I jumped at the chance. I have to say that project was a bit of an education. The hardest part of my job was getting the buggers into the studio at ten o’clock in the morning, especially when I had Ronnie Drew telling me that the morning pint of Guinness was the most important of the day. ‘Why would that be, Ronnie?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘it gets the taste of the f***ing toothpaste out of your mouth.’”
In the end, ‘The Molly Maguires’ was not picked for the film, but it featured on ‘At Home’, released in late 1969, and the first of five of the band’s albums to be produced by Phil. His association with the Irish band led him to write a song about his son Paul, who suffered from Down Syndrome. The initial idea had been given to him by one of the group members, Luke Kelly, who was adamant that he should try his hand at writing songs with more substance than his Eurovision hits. The result was ‘Scorn Not His Simplicity’, which has become one of the most recognised in the repertoire of The Dubliners.
“Working on the song after the initial shock of discovering Paul had the genetic disorder was like some sort of therapy that helped me to process the experience,” Phil comments. “Nonetheless, the difference between writing a pop song like ‘Puppet On A String’ and such a deeply personal, almost confessional piece, was stark. The whole idea of opening myself up, peeling off layers and letting folks into my innermost feeling was kind of anathema to me. I am basically a private sort of person, not given to public displays of emotion. This was a hurdle I had to get over, and I did. I was still wary about unveiling the song to Luke. I waited until the lunch break, when the others had left the studio. I needn’t have worried about it. Luke (…) loved it, understood the significance and totally embraced the whole thing. What we recorded the following day is, without any doubt in my mind, the definitive version of that song.”
Phil would go on to write a bunch of other songs for The Dubliners, including ‘Donegal Danny’ and ‘The Town I Loved So Well’, the latter being about the sectarian violence going on in his hometown of Derry at the time.
In 1970, apart from being the arranger and publisher of Ireland’s Eurovision winner ‘All Kinds Of Everything’, Phil Coulter had a huge hit in the UK with his songwriting partner Bill Martin with a World Cup single called ‘Back Home’, performed by the England national team.
Ticket stub of one of the performances on the 1972 Richard Harris tour in the USA, for which Phil Coulter conducted the orchestra
The following year, Phil took a recent French chart success which he loved, ‘Parce que je t’aime, mon enfant’ by Claude François, and gave it a new lyric in English, ‘My Boy’. The song was recorded by actor Richard Harris. Subsequently, Coulter accompanied Harris as his musical director on a tour in America and the UK, closed off with a performance at the Royal Gala, broadcast by London Weekend Television (LWT) to celebrate the opening of their new studios. In the concert, Phil got to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, led by André Previn at the time, for a miniconcert by Harris.
“The LSO was one of the leading orchestras in the world. This was going to be a big step up for me and I was quite intimidated by the prospect, also because Richard Harris was a loose cannon, to put it mildly; a great actor, but his sense of timing left a lot to be desired – and then there were his drinking escapades. For the rehearsal with the LSO, we were assembled outside the studio. I was having a coffee, going through my notes tyring to remind myself of every question the third trombone player could ask. Then, the TV director came up to me, asking quite casually, ‘Phil, look, Harry Rabinowitz [the MD of the show] has been delayed. Could you do me a favour? Will you conduct the national anthem?’ I had never conducted the anthem in my life, but I didn’t have the heart to say no. In fact, while I was moving towards that orchestra, my brain was trying to give signals to my feet not to do it! Every fibre in me said, ‘Please don’t go there, Phil!’. In my head I’m singing, ‘God save our gracious queen…’ – is that a 3/2? Fortunately, I scraped through the rehearsal without messing up.”
“I had orchestrated a dramatic finish to one of the songs for Harris, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, but in the concert, Harris made a hash of it. He didn’t hit the high note in the line ‘I will ease your mind’. To my horror, I heard him shouting behind me, ‘Hold it, hold it, hold it.’ I tried to ignore him, but he kept roaring and then started pulling at my conducting arm. Bewildered looks from the orchestra. They stopped playing. ‘I got that note in rehearsals,’ said Harris. ‘And by God, I’m going to get it now.’ Cheers from the audience. ‘Okay,’ he says to me. ‘Again.’ Again, again, but what again? He wasn’t the sort of singer that I could have told to take it from the last twelve bars. I mean, twelve bars for him was an itinerary for a pub crawl. What to do? Where to start? I could see a hundred pairs of eyes looking at me for direction and felt the heat of the audience on the back of my neck. Every second seemed like an hour. Eventually I cued the orchestra, dragged Harris over to me and sang into his ear, ‘Like a bridge over…’ He picked it up, sang to the end and delivered the last solo note like Pavarotti. The audience loved it, he got a standing ovation, I came very close to getting a heart attack. But I did get recognition from the orchestra, with the string players bouncing their bows off the music stands in appreciation. They’d certainly never experienced anything like what had just happened with André Previn.”
“A few years went by, and one night I was wakened in the early hours by a phone call. Those middle-of-the-night calls usually meant bad news. Not this time. It was my old friend and ace songwriter Albert Hammond, calling me from Las Vegas. ‘Phil,’ says he, ‘you are one lucky bastard.’ He went on to tell me he’d just been to see Elvis in concert and that the great man sang ‘My Boy’. I could not believe my luck. There was not a songwriter in the world who wouldn’t have sold his granny into slavery to get his song recorded by the King. (…) We had never even tried to pitch him the song. But it turned out that he was going through a rocky period in his marriage and when he heard the Harris version, he could relate to the story. In simple terms, Elvis recorded the song because he wanted to. We watched the record climb up the charts, giving Elvis one of the biggest hits of his later years. Even today, after a few too many wines, I’m inclined to bore my friends by reminding them that I’m one of the very few non-American songwriters to have given Elvis Presley a hit single.”
In 1973, at the instigation of Dubliners’ manager Noel Pearson, Phil Coulter was commissioned to conduct the thirty-piece orchestra for the Irish staging of rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. It was an exhilarating experience. “In all of my fifty-plus years of showbusiness, I have seldom experienced the excitement of that opening night: the buzz in the theatre, and the relief and euphoria of soaking up the standing ovation at the end. It remains, to this day, one of the most rewarding projects of my entire career. Why? Maybe because of the camaraderie on the team and the lifelong friendships that were forged. Maybe because it changed some people’s lives, notably Colm Wilkinson, who went on to star in Les Misérables on Broadway. Maybe because, against all the odds, we pulled off a huge success and a sold-out run. Maybe because we made a little bit of history in Irish theatre. Maybe it was for all those reasons, but primarily, for me, it was because I proved to myself that I could do it.”
During rehearsals for the Irish staging of rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar at the Gaiety Theatre (1973)
In the mid-1970s, Phil Coulter had a number 1 hit in the UK with Scottish comedian Billy Connolly and the song ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’, while also producing three albums with Irish folk band Planxty. However, his main successes in those years were as a producer with two so-called teeny bopper bands, Bay City Rollers and Slik. Compositions like ‘Shang-A-Lang’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘Forever And Ever’ proved hugely popular with young audiences, but Phil did not really find creative fulfilment in writing such songs.
“I read the reviews of ‘Forever and Ever’, which pretty much all said, here’s yet another talentless teenybopper band from the Martin-Coulter stable. Of course, I should have ignored all of that and kept turning out teenybopper hits. Instead, I became determined to show first, that the band were serious and talented players and second, that Martin-Coulter were capable of producing more sophisticated records. For the follow-up, I crafted a quite complex song called ‘Requiem’, with clever lyrics and changing rhythm. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by Queen, a six-minute pop masterpiece, had raised the game, and I figured we could rise to the challenge.”
“[The band] were delighted to be playing on the track, which had a very moody, Gothic feel. When it was recorded and mixed, I really thought it was magnificent. One of the best tracks I’d ever recorded. The record surprised everybody. The reviewers loved it and the critics thought it heralded the arrival of a new, important band. The radio stations loved the atmospheric track. The label loved the new direction. Only one problem; the teenyboppers hated it. They wanted more of ‘Forever And Ever’. They weren’t impressed by the sophistication, nor by the musicality. They just didn’t get it. ‘Requiem’, following up on a number one hit, stalled outside the Top 20. I was more disappointed by that flop than by any other chart failure in my career.”
In 1976, Phil was entrusted with writing the soundtrack for the live action-animated film The Water Babies by producer Peter Shaw. He was expected to write twelve original songs as well as all the incidental music. “Now, I was a pretty experienced and adept arranger, but I’d never undertaken anything on this scale before. The movee was to be a mix of forty per cent live action and sixty per cent animation. If you think of any cartoon, any animated movie, you’ll realise that it’s wall-to-wall music. This was a massive undertaking. I needed help. I needed to learn. There was only one place to get advice from the best: Los Angeles. (…) In London I’d built up a network of studio engineers, musicians, record people, which had taken years. Here in LA, I had to start all over again. The first thing I learned was that I didn’t have much clout. My track record of chart success meant little or nothing. They’re not interested in how talented you are or the hits you made last year; in LA it’s all about current success. How hot are you today?”
“In the end, I stayed in California for the best part of three years. While working on the film, I tried to take on other jobs. I did a project with an American crooner called Bobby Vinton. I subdivided the arranging work between myself and Johnny Harris, a British arranger who had moved to Los Angeles a couple of years before. We had already worked jointly on a Richard Harris album in London several years earlier. Johnny was a bit mad, a diamond geezer really, but I had a lot of regard for him. He was a great arranger.”
In the studio with Scottish comedian Billy Connolly (1976)
“Scoring The Water Babies proved a tough job. It was a skill which took me a lot of time to acquire. I was expected to write pieces of music of, let’s say, 41 and 2/3rds of a second, in which you had to hit the mark at 29 and 1/3rd of a second. It was all very mathematical, which wasn’t my strongpoint. Still, conducting the orchestra in front of a huge screen in the studio, striving to make every cue and fine-tune every entry and exit was exhilarating. But also exhausting. I can do this, I’d tell myself at the end of the day. I thought it all came together beautifully in the end and I was proud of myself for what I’d learned and what I’d achieved. The movie was released in 1978 and was very well received and found its place in the circuit of family movies. But it didn’t set the woods on fire. I’ve often thought that had it been made by Disney, with all of their might behind it, it could have been huge.”
Coming back from America, Phil briefly settled in Buncrana, Donegal, becoming the co-owner of the Rialto Cinema in his hometown of Derry. However, after a bomb attack largely destroyed the place, he decided to retrace his steps to London. In the early 1980s, he wrote several singles for his new girlfriend, Irish singer Geraldine, which were big hits in South Africa. In that same period, he had the opportunity to work with French songstress Mireille Mathieu for a second time – not in Paris, but in West Germany.
“German producer Ralph Siegel got in touch with me. I had known him for years. We were both survivors on the European market with a strong pedigree in the Eurovision Song Contest. I got word from him that he had managed to secure Mireille and Patrick Duffy, one of the main characters in the soap opera Dallas. ‘This is a great opportunity, we can sell a lot of records,’ he said. Ralph had a very commercial ear. I knew that if I was able to deliver a couple of songs for him, he would get maximum mileage out of them. They weren’t going to sit in a drawer somewhere. Ralph picked me up himself from the airport in Munich – and we didn’t go to the hotel or sit down to have a coffee; no, we went straight to the piano! That suited me, because I wasn’t there as a tourist. In the end, we wrote a song together called ‘Something Going On’, which was recorded by Mireille and Patrick (and released as the B side of ‘Together We’re Strong’, a hit in 1983 – BT). I liked Ralph’s can-do attitude. He’s a very straight shooter. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t give up easily, as his trick has proven.”
In 1983, Phil decided to break away from his languishing songwriting partnership with Bill Martin, founding his own production company. That same year, a visit to a Richard Clayderman piano concert at the Royal Albert Hall gave him the idea of recording a set of Irish evergreens in easy-listening orchestral versions, recorded with synths and a rhythm group of seasoned London session players. It led to the album Classic Tranquillity, which was a huge success in Ireland. Phil became a star in his home country overnight. The concept caught on with Irish Americans as well, which gave him the idea to do a USA tour. In 1984, the Classic Tranquillity concert tour took Coulter and his orchestra across 79 venues across the United States, the apex being a sold out auditorium at Carnegie Hall, New York City.
“My management had first asked me about perhaps mounting a tour in England, but I didn’t really look forward to doing concerts in Leeds, Bradford, or Wolverhampton. Boston, Philadelphia, and New York seemed more exciting prospects. Moreover, there was the catchment of Irish American audiences. Once I thought about putting the ‘Tranquillity’ concept on stage, it was always going to be with an orchestra; mainly strings, no brass. Although I’ve done my fair share of brass arrangements, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a great brass arranger – but the main thing was that these melodies worked best with rhythm and a string section put together. So I formed an orchestra of young Irish musicians, the Irish Pops Orchestra. The idea was never to put myself at the centre of attention as a piano player. I’m no Lang Lang, you know. The real stars of the show were the melodies. My job as a piano player and arranger was to lay a carpet for these melodies. The orchestral textures gave them just that little bit of extra depth.”
“It was a gamble to take twenty musicians around larger and smaller venues in America, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Walla Walla, Washington, but it paid off, because audiences loved it. All through that tour, my mind was always fixed on Carnegie Hall. In the diary that I kept, I would write, ‘79 days to go to Carnegie Hall’, ‘fifty days to go’, etcetera. I couldn’t wait for the challenge, for the thrill of walking on to one of the most famous stages in the world. Oh, and to play a nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano. We got the word a week or so beforehand that the show was sold out. No pressure there, then.”
“Before taking the stage, tension was running high and nerves were a bit frayed. I assembled the musicians, most of whom were in their mid-twenties, and gave them a bit of a pep talk. ‘Only one of two things is going to happen tonight. Either the myth and the history of Carnegie Hall is going to take over, or we take over and show Carnegie Hall what we can do. Now, go out there and enjoy yourselves.’ Even as I was saying these calming words, my heart was thumping and my stomach was heaving. It was one of the most memorable nights of my entire life, and I’ve rerun it in my head a thousand times. Three standing ovations, flowers thrown on the stage, it just could not get any better. As I came off the stage, my long-suffering tour manager Roy Dixon asked me how I felt. ‘Roy,’ says I, ‘they will never invent an illegal substance to get me this high ever again!’”
In the following decades, dozens more ‘Tranquillity’ albums saw the daylight. One of them, Highland Cathedral, was even nominated for a Grammy in 1999. A special album in the series was Words & Music in 1989, for which Coulter invited famous interpreters like the Dubliners and Ralph McTell to play their part. One of the other artists who joined was Rory Gallagher, who played the guitar solo on ‘Will Ye Go Lassie Go’.
“When Rory arrives, I play him the orchestral track. A big smile spreads over his face as he concentrates on where he is going to fit around what is already there. (…) He took his seat, tuned up and checked all his settings. Tony, my engineer, asked him to play a bit just to check levels. Then we sent him out the orchestral track so he could play along and get familiar with the shape. ‘Record everything,’ I said to Tony. Rory’s licks and melody lines, even on this supposed run-through, were just brilliant. I was glad we hadn’t missed a single note. Then came the first proper take, which was equally inspired but different.”
“When the take was over, I asked Rory to come into the control room. He looked confused and seemed a little reluctant, but as he was slowly making his way across, Tony and I did a composite, taking the best bits from the two versions. It was powerful. It was sensitive. It was musical. It was imaginative. It was Rory. ‘Are you sure you don’t need another few takes, Phil?’ he asked modestly. This was not the demeanour you would expect from a guitar hero. ‘Rory,’ I said, ‘it is f***ing brilliant.’ We cranked up the volume on the big studio monitors and played it back at full throttle. To see the look of almost childish delight on his face as he listened to the interplay of his lines and the orchestra was priceless.”
With members of his Irish Pops Orchestra (1989)
Having settled in Bray, Co. Wicklow in 1991, Phil Coulter became ever more involved in the Irish music scene. In 1993, he joined Van Morrison and his band as a stand-in pianist on a tour which took him to America as well as concert venues in the UK, including the Glastonbury Festival. Phil went on to produce albums for Van Morrison and Sinéad O’Connor, who personally asked him for the job.
“During the process of song selection, we [Sinéad and I] were at the piano one day, going through some of her new songs and looking at others that would fit the theme of the album, Universal Mother. We played through snatches of songs that we felt might work when she said, ‘There’s a great song by Luke Kelly, about a handicapped child, I can’t remember the title.’ ‘“Scorn Not His Simplicity”,’ I volunteered. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Do you know it?’ ‘I think I do… I wrote it.’ It was a lovely moment. She genuinely was not aware that it was my song.”
“The night we got around to recording it some weeks later, in Lombard Studios in Dublin, was one of the high points of the whole enterprise for me. It was quite late in the evening. We’d finished the last song and I had sent the band home. (…) Sinéad went into the vocal booth, across from where I was sitting at the piano, so that we had eye contact. We ran just a couple of verses so that Tony could check microphone levels and all the rest. Then we decided to give it a try. When the last note of that first take died away, I sat still. Sinéad stood at the microphone and didn’t move. We stayed silent for several minutes and there was no comment from the control room. It was a glorious afterglow and one that happens all too rarely in the recording studio. Each one of us realised that something very special had just happened and we kept silent to savour the moment. That song is deeply personal and means such a lot to me. It has been recorded by a number of singers, but I consider myself so very fortunate that there are two definitive versions by two of our finest singers, Luke and Sinéad.”
In 1994, Phil Coulter got to do a piano performance for President Bill Clinton at the White House on St Patrick’s Day following an invitation by Clinton’s Director of Communications Mark Guerin, who turned out to be a fan of Phil’s ‘Tranquillity’ albums. “The whole evening had the feeling of a fantasy. I kept pinching myself. Was I really walking through the corridors of the White House? Did I really just get introduced to Paul Newman? Have I just had a nice chat with the president of the United States? The East Room, where the music was to happen, was very elegant but surprisingly small. I was in a holding area backstage when two marines in full dress uniform came to escort me to the stage. Looking out at the expensively dressed crowd, I was a bit relieved to see a few familiar faces, including Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and my friend, John Hume (leader of the SDLP party in Northern Ireland – BT). But even the piano was intimidating. It had been presented to the White House by Steinway themselves. It was a beautifully crafted instrument, a grand piano that, instead of legs, rested on three gold, carved American eagles. To lighten the mood, I told the audience that it was the very first time I’d ever played on a national monument.”
Later on, Phil got to do a second concert in the White House, this time appearing with flautist James Galway. In 1998, following the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the duo was invited to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony in Oslo, when the award went to David Trimble and John Hume.
In 1995, the Irish Rugby Football Union commissioned Phil Coulter to write an alternative national anthem for the Rugby World Cup, in which a team of Irish players from north and south of the border formed one team. The anthem of the Republic, ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’, was considered inappropriate given the reference to the Irish fight for independence against the British.
With President Bill Clinton (1995)
“I understood the brief perfectly. The melody came first: it had to be in march time, robust and stirring, and simple enough for the fans to learn, first of all, and then to sing. That all came readily enough. Now the hard part, the lyric. It was only when I got stuck into this that I discovered how careful I had to be in terms of words and images. I began to appreciate that the IRFU had made a smart choice in picking a writer from the North. Why? Because I could understand the sensibilities involved. I couldn’t, for example, use a phrase like ‘united we’ll go forward’, because some touchy folks might suspect a hidden meaning. I struggled with the challenge of celebrating an all-Ireland game without using expressions like ‘the thirty-two counties’ or ‘one whole country’. The key that finally unlocked it was when I came up with the phrase ‘the four proud provinces of Ireland’. Rugby is a provincial game, so no one could take exception to that.”
“When I look back over twenty years of ‘Ireland’s Call’, I feel that it finally connected with all sides on that historic day in 2007 when Ireland played England at Croke Park. There was a respectful silence from the Irish fans during ‘God Save the Queen’. The decibel level went up several notches for ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’, and then went through the roof for ‘Ireland’s Call’. At last, I thought, that should silence the begrudgers. There are still people who hate the song, who think it’s a fudge, a concession to pushy Northerners, or simply that it’s a piece of shit. They’re fully entitled to their opinion, but it doesn’t really worry me. When I hear a packed Aviva Stadium singing their hearts out and raising the roof, that’s good enough for me.”
In 2003-05, Phil tried his hand at TV hosting, when he was asked to be the summer season replacement for Gay Byrne and his Late Late Show. For Coulter & Company, which featured many guests from the world of music, he had to seriously leave his comfort zone. “The one big lesson I learned over that series was that interviewing is not as easy as it looks. It is not just like having a chat, it is completely different. Apart from being able to engage with your guest in a relaxed way, with the right tone of voice, with the right questions and the right body language, the one essential ingredient is homework. As the man said, there is no such thing as too much information. For weeks beforehand, I would have been sent biogs and bullet points on every guest to digest and memorise. In the main, the interviews went pretty well, and I certainly got better at it.”
While allowing his working tempo to slow down a bit, Phil released an impressive number of ten more ‘Tranquillity’ albums after the turn of the century. In 2019, at the instigation of his publisher, he went on to write his memoirs, entitled Bruised, Never Broken.
“The original idea had been to do a Phil Coulter Irish Songbook, with me choosing my favourite Irish songs and telling the background stories, but that became a bit unwieldy. Then there was this energetic young editor who said, ‘Have you ever thought of doing a memoir?’ I set myself a period to do it. I didn’t want to dash off a chapter in between meetings. Every morning, I went across to the library in our neighbouring town, Greystones, which looks over the sea. I sat there two to three hours, writing it all by longhand – continuing to work into the afternoon when I was back home. The process was laborious, but I wanted to take the craft of writing seriously. Like fashioning a lyric, it’s all about economy. What’s the most effective way of saying what you want? Can you do it in three words rather than in thirteen? If I hadn’t abided by that principle, the book would have been a lot heftier than 280 pages.”
Having a laugh with Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, and Ian Paisley Snr., First Minister of Northern Ireland (2007)
“I’ve continued working until the present day. For the past twenty years, Geraldine and I have done an annual ten-day cruise in the Caribbean, which we call the Tranquillity Cruise. I bring out some of my colleagues, Irish performers, to be part of my guests. I have got some 300 to 400 dedicated fans who come every year to listen to what I do. Only they get access to our performances, while they can enjoy the rest of the entertainment on the ship. It’s a kind of once-a-year club, a wonderful get-together. The work is enjoyable and not very hard.”
“In Ireland, I still do quite a lot of touring for solo performances on the piano, especially in the winter season. Venues vary from a 400-seater theatre in County Mayo to the National Concert Hall in Dublin, with a capacity of over 1,000. In the summer, I’m doing some festivals here and there. The great thing is that I’ve got to the stage where I can get the gigs to work for me. One of my favourite places in Ireland is a little seaside town called Westport in County Mayo. They’ve got a small theatre. So I do two performances at the local venue on Friday and Saturday, which allows Geraldine and me to enjoy a weekend away on the coast. I intend to continue working on gigs like this for as long as I can. Luckily my health is good. I’m a survivor and perhaps that’s my biggest achievement!”
“Looking back on my career, of course I have some regrets. What if The Water Babies had caught on… could I have built a career as a soundtrack composer? Earlier on, in my Denmark Street period, Bill Martin and I spent the best part of one year working on a musical on the Scottish poet Rabbie Burns. We put in a lot of effort, we wrote a lot of good songs, but it never saw the light of day. I’d have loved to have written a musical. Sitting at the back of an audience in Broadway listening to my music; that would have been wonderful, but that’s an ambition which will forever remain unfulfilled. Still, I’m pretty happy with the career I’ve had, although I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it… but it’s been a hell of a journey and I’ve got a lot to be grateful for.”
“One of the best things is that quite a lot of my songs are still being played today. Some of them are nearly sixty years old now. I was once asked by an American reporter to give a short definition of a great song. ‘I don’t want you to analyse the melody and lyrics, just give me a short definition,’ he said. I replied, ‘I’ll do better than that; I’ll give you a one-word definition of a great song; longevity.’ If a song has been around for forty, fifty years, it’s de facto a great song. I’m pretty sure that very little of the music which comes out today will be played in forty years’ time. All of this TikTok stuff is here today, gone tomorrow. Longevity, that’s what it is about.”
“Having said that, I’m very much aware I am not the most talented man in the country. As Luke Kelly once said, ‘Coulter is not a genius, he’s a craftsman, and a very good craftsman.’ Well, I’ll settle for that. I think I’ve survived because I have a realistic attitude. I regard my career as my job. It’s a good job, I work hard at it and I think, over the years, I’ve become pretty good at it. Obviously, without the talent, you can’t get into the game, but the talent per se is not going to take you any further. It’s all the other stuff, it’s the hard work, it’s the resilience, it’s the vision, it’s the courage, all of those things that get you to stay in the game for sixty years. Unfortunately, some talented people of the young generation think they can bypass the process of learning a craft. They are somehow given the notion that, because they’re talented, the world owes them a living. Let me tell them: nothing could be further from the truth.”
Phil with his wife Geraldine in October 2022, after being made a Freeman of the City of Derry
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
Prior to being involved in Eurovision as a songwriter, arranger, publisher, and conductor, Phil Coulter had a first, very minor connection with the contest, when he was one of the session players in the studio recording of ‘I’m Walking The Streets In The Rain’ by Butch Moore, the lush ballad with which Ireland made its debut in the contest in Naples in 1965.
“Butch was the singer of one of the big acts in Ireland called The Capitol Showband,” Phil explains. “They recorded my first song, ‘Foolin’ Time’, which I had written as a student at the university in Belfast. The song was a hit in Ireland. Through that connection, they were off to London to record some more songs for the label Pye Records. I was asked to come along with them to help them in the studio. They also wondered if I had any new songs for them to record. My answers were, ‘Yes, I will definitely come to the studio’ and ‘No, I don’t have any new songs, but I will do by the time I get to the studio.’ They recorded one of my songs, ‘Far, Far Away’, which got me noticed by publisher Phil Solomon, who offered me my first job as a sort of general musical dogsbody. As you’ll understand, from then on, Butch Moore was a kind of hero for me. He gave me the start of my career – and he was a terrific guy to work with.”
“About eighteen months later, Butch was chosen to represent Ireland in the Eurovision. I didn’t have any involvement in writing or arranging the song. In fact, the three writers were total amateurs; two soldiers who played in an army band and a housewife. They were never heard of afterwards. The studio recording was done in London. I was at the piano. The musical director and arranger was Johnny Spence. Solomon had determined that there ought to be a proper, full-on, big-budget recording. It was done in Studio One at Decca and it was the biggest session I’d ever seen. I relished every moment of it. Major studio, fifty-piece orchestra, and Johnny conducting. I was intrigued by the scale of the operation and the glamour of the occasion.”
“While I was sitting at the piano, I was watching Johnny Spence conduct the orchestra. He was an established arranger and someone who I was looking up to at that point. I had been studying the scores by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms at university, but now I was studying pop orchestrations. That is another language, with different shortcuts and different approach. Whenever I could lay my hands on them, I would study the scores of Spence and also Ivor Raymonde, another very good arranger. I was eager to learn from them, waiting for an opportunity to try my hand at writing a full-orchestral arrangement.”
In the contest in Naples, the orchestra for Butch Moore’s performance was conducted by the Italian chief conductor, Gianni Ferrio. Was there no budget to send Johnny Spence or an Irish conductor along with the singer? “Yes, I suspect it must have been a budget thing,” Phil comments. “The original arrangement for the National Song Contest in Ireland would probably have been done by Noel Kelehan, a world-class pianist and a very competent arranger, but that wasn’t the version which was recorded. The record company had decided to hire Johnny Spence to give the song a makeover.”’
Phil with Butch Moore, leafing through Johnny Spence’s score of ‘Walking The Streets In The Rain’ (1965)
“Before my involvement with the recording session for this Irish entry, I hadn’t taken a lot of notice of Eurovision. ‘Sing Little Birdie’ by Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson or ‘Ring-A-Ding Girl’ by Ronnie Carroll; they were cutesy songs, no contemporary pop music. With ‘Walking The Streets’, I felt the excitement of Eurovision for the first time. It had a kind of magic about it which I found very intoxicating. Even the small part that I played at the piano was enough to set some kind of lightbulb off in me. Having said that, I wouldn’t have been tempted to write a song for Kenneth McKellar, who represented the UK the following year. He sang a kind of repertoire which wasn’t high on my agenda or KPM Music, the publishing company of Jimmy Phillips, who I was working for by that time. It would take another year before all strands would come together for me.”
Jimmy Phillips had signed Phil Coulter and his newly found songwriting partner, the straight-talking travelling salesman from Glasgow, Bill Martin, to his company in late 1965. They had had a minor hit with ‘Hi! Hi! Hazel’ for Geno Washington & The Ram Jam Band the following year, but the duo had their eyes set on something more glamorous.
“Towards the end of the year [1966], we got the word from Jimmy that the BBC was accepting entries for A Song For Europe, to choose the UK entry for the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest. Sandie Shaw, who’d had a bunch of hit records, was the nominated singer. Demos were to be submitted anonymously by a certain date. Bill and I locked ourselves in the attic office and went to work. Seriously. The obvious approach would have been to write something similar to Sandie’s recent hits, most of which had been composed by Chris Andrews. It was tempting to come up something in that vein, but we figured that the smart thing to do was to write a song not for Sandie Shaw, but for Eurovision.”
“Researching previous Eurovision winners, we concluded that they fell into two categories; big lyrical ballads, in the style of ‘Merci chérie’ by Udo Jürgens, or cute songs, like ‘Poupée de cire, poupée de son’ by Serge Gainsbourg. I figured that nobody does those sweeping melodies better than the Italians and the French, so the best way for us to go was to do something which was a bit of a novelty. That’s how we came up with the idea of ‘Puppet On A String’. I’m pretty sure that our idea for the title came from ‘Poupée de cire’. Serge Gainsbourg would have been very much on my mind when thinking of how to go about when trying to create something cute.”
“Once we had settled on the title ‘Puppet On A String’, the hardest part of the job was done. I liked the fact that our theme allowed for a bouncy melody and a sort of fairground feel. While fine-tuning the melody, we remembered how one of the biggest songs to come out of Eurovision, ‘Volare’, started with a long note: Vooooooooooooo-lare. Bingo. We played the song to Jimmy and he got it immediately. He encouraged us to do a bang-up job on the demo and even okayed a bigger budget.”
Phil Coulter and Bill Martin sporting their Song For Europe winners’ medals, flanked by Sandie Shaw and host Rolf Harris
“That was a rare display of extravagance on Jimmy’s part, so Bill immediately said, ‘That means we can put in trumpets, trombones, a whole orchestra!’ However, when I went home to work on the arrangement, I was very conscious of the first four bars. When you’re training as a pop arranger, one of the main lessons you learn is that the first four bars set the scene; they are a critical part of any song – but especially in Eurovision, where you have only three minutes to do your business. Your job is to create an atmosphere immediately.”
“‘Puppet’ was crying out for that fairground vibe. I wanted to create the feel of a calliope, so harking back to my classical academy background, I decided to use a bassoon, an instrument not found on too many pop records. This intro, bop-bop-bop, brings you to the fairground right at the start of the song. I like to think that was a moment of inspiration; it’s a combination of being a smart arranger and tailoring your arrangement to a specific audience and a specific purpose. When I was finished, I was happy with the score and couldn’t wait to hear it in the studio. When I met Bill the next morning, he was so excited and all ears to hear about the arrangement, the size of the orchestra, how many brass players, horns, trumpets … When I told him we were going to feature a bassoon, he was dumbstruck: ‘A bassoon? What’s a f***ing bassoon?’”
“I soon calmed him down and explained the whole fairground approach and told him he’d have to trust me. We cut the demo with a super girl we’d used often called Stevie Lewis. She did a perfect job on the vocals, and the novelty sound of the bassoon took everyone’s fancy. Job done. Now we were off to the races.”
“It was what Alex Ferguson famously described as ‘squeaky bum time’ as we waited for news from the BBC. The story was that they would announce the five chosen songs, which would then be sung by Sandie on successive Saturday nights on the The Rolf Harris Show on BBC TV. There would be a grand final, featuring all five songs, after which the public would vote on postcards. Bill and I realised what a huge breakthrough it would be if we made the last five. It would get our names out there and help get us recognised as a proper songwriting team. Our nerves were getting more and more frayed and our patience wearing more and more thin. Finally, the five songs were announced. We were in.”
“Our elation was dampened slightly when we saw the calibre of the opposition. There were some real heavy-hitters in the mix, including Mitch Murray, who’d had a string of hits with Gerry & The Pacemakers and Freddie & The Dreamers, and Chris Andrews, who’d written pretty much all of Sandie’s hits.”
“As we had tailored the song not so much for Sandie but more for the European audience, my fear was that we might not make it out of the UK. Strangely enough, I was quietly confident that the song and the arrangement would connect with the Eurovision voters. Saturdays became an ordeal as we counted down the hours to The Rolf Harris Show, to hear the competing songs for the first time. Sandie sang our song on the fourth week. We were having palpitations as she stepped up to the mic. Then, disaster. She missed her cue and screwed up her entry. It was so obvious that they had to stop and start over. We were speechless. What a dozy cow. She’s blown our shot. In fairness, when she hit her stride she did a great job on the song, which lightened our mood somewhat.”
Coulter and Martin with Sandie Shaw
“I was thrilled to hear that Kenny Woodman, her arranger, had recreated my orchestration note for note – that is to say, he had retained all the ingredients that I had put in without inserting anything that I was uncomfortable with. He was smart enough to recognise the elements in the demo that were going to work. My demo wasn’t a blank page. Kenny’s contribution was that he had orchestrated the whole thing upwards by adding strings, which hadn’t featured in my demo version. The combination of woodwind and strings worked really well. Kenny had done a good job at fluently putting everything together. I was quite happy to sign the arrangement off to him. I didn’t discuss anything with him. If he had wanted to, he could have laid my demo arrangement aside, completely changing the approach. I wouldn’t have had any strength to tell him not to do that. This was all up to Sandie and her production team, which I wasn’t a part of.”
“Having said that, I trusted Kenny completely. He was a lovely guy, completely different in character than television conductors, towering figures like Alyn Ainsworth and Harry Rabinowitz, who you never got close to. Kenny was a colleague, a very modest, convivial guy, the type you would have a few pints with in the pub. He was the staff arranger in Mills Music, one of the main music publishers in Denmark Street, where Bill and I worked at Keith Prowse Music, just across the street. Kenny did the arrangements for all the artists under contract at Mills; Chris Andrews, Sandie Shaw, and Adam Faith. Curiously, working as a post boy at Mills Music was Reg Dwight, soon to become Elton John. Denmark Street was like that. It was full of aspiring talent. It was an exciting time to be there.”
“When the night of the final arrived, with all five songs being sung one after another, ‘Puppet’ definitely stood out as being different from the others, and surely just a bit more catchy. Then it was down to the postal vote and a joint Scots-Irish PR campaign swung into action. We lobbied family, friends, neighbours, schoolmates, acquaintances, and pretty much anybody we’d ever met. I heard brilliant stories in later years of college pals, now schoolteachers, who brought a pile of postcards into class and instructed every pupil to fill out a vote for our song. In shirt factories and department stores in Derry there was the same co-ordinated effort to support their local boy.”
“The day before the result was to be announced, we were told to report to the BBC Television centre in Shepherd’s Bush, West London. We assumed that all the other writers would be there and were quite surprised not to bump into any of them at reception. Instead, one of the show’s production team emerged to greet us, introducing himself as a brother of Stevie Lewis, our demo singer. Was this a good omen? ‘Well done,’ says he. ‘Did we win it?’ we asked, slightly puzzled. ‘You pissed it,’ says he. We hugged each other and shed a few tears, overwhelmed by the news. We knew that whatever happened, this break could not only launch our careers, it could potentially change our lives.”
“The results show on that Saturday night was a dream. The pressure off, we could now relax and savour the occasion, lapping up the congratulations. This was the real deal. We were going to represent the United Kingdom in the Eurovision final in Vienna. We were a real proper songwriting team. The after-show reception was a bit of a blur, to be honest. When the BBC hospitality ran out, not wanting the night to end, Bill and I decamped to an Irish bar in Shepherd’s Bush where we enjoyed a lock-in until the very early hours.”
Sandie Shaw on the Eurovision stage in Vienna
“Back in Denmark Street on Monday, we tried to make ourselves as visible as possible, to enjoy our lap of honour and milk the whole thing for all it was worth. Not too many songs were written that week. The next few days were a bit of a whirlwind and we basked in all the attention. In midweek, we spotted Jimmy returning from a music publishers’ meeting. He was walking down Denmark Street with a huge grin on his face and his two thumbs high in the air. He had just heard from Pye Records that they were shipping 75,000 records per day. Savouring our new-found status as hit-songwriters, we were delighted to accept Jimmy’s invitation to join him for lunch in one of Soho’s finest restaurants, La Braganza. Now, this was the life.”
“During the four weeks leading up to our departure to Vienna, excitement was mounting, and it was hard to keep our feet on the ground. The record went straight to number one and stayed there. Sandie was busy recording the song in a bunch of different languages, and every week we heard of another release in another country. This was heady stuff.”
“Bill and I were determined we should look the part at the final, so we decided to push the boat out and buy ourselves new tuxedos. The extravagance was intoxicating! The next buzz was when Jimmy’s PA, Eileen, started making the travel arrangements. We would be flying from Heathrow a few days beforehand and staying at a five-star hotel close to the Hofburg palace, where the event was taking place in the Groβer Festsaal der Wiener Hofburg. We got an unexpected bonus when she told us to go and see Joe Makepiece, the company accountant. Joe explained that he was issuing us with per diems for the trips. Per diems? We had never heard of them. Bill reckoned that it sounded like something medical. To our great delight, Joe handed us two envelopes full of cash. Our daily allowance for the trip. Things were getting better and better.”
“The Hofburg palace was, without doubt, one of the most impressive places I’d ever seen in my twenty-five years on the planet. The official residence of the president of Austria, it was a national treasure and an architect’s dream. It was also pretty intimidating as I walked through the main gate, a far cry from St Columb’s Hall in Derry. But I calmed my nerves by telling myself I’d earned the right to be there. Meanwhile, Kenny Woodman did a good job on the orchestra. I let him do his business. With his experience, he didn’t need my help or advice.”
“The event was a fantasy come true: the most glorious location, a cast of glamorous people in all their finery, movers and shakers from the European music business and a palpable sense of anticipation. Seated amongst the other writers, my pulse began racing as soon as I heard the live orchestra launch into the Eurovision theme music. Although composed in 1688, as a part of Te Deum by French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, it still has the power to excite and demand your attention for what’s to follow. What followed were seventeen songs of mixed quality. Mind you, the second, ‘L’amour est bleu’ for Luxembourg, made me worry. ‘Oh shit,’ I thought, ‘this is a real contender.’ Nothing amongst the rest really frightened me, but I felt a little twinge of pride when Seán Dunphy sang last and did a great job of selling the Irish entry, ‘If I Could Choose’.”
Udo Jürgens handing Sandie Shaw the winners’ medal, flanked by Kenny Woodman (with glasses) and Phil Coulter
“The interval act was the Vienna Boys’ Choir. I’m sure they sang beautifully, but I didn’t hear a note. My focus was elsewhere, on the voting. After the first three or four countries, we actually had a sizeable lead and it just got bigger as the votes came in. In the end, to our delight we ran out one of the biggest winners ever, with more than twice the number of votes as the runner-up, Ireland. It was what one reporter called a ‘real Celtic one-two’. The next half hour was pure magic. We were ushered on stage where I gave Sandie a bear hug that lifted her right off her feet and we received our gold medals from Udo Jürgens, a major Austrian star and the previous year’s winner. Pics, pics, and more pics. I could get used to this.”
“As we were being photographed, journalists were swarming around us. One of the reporters congratulated Kenny Woodman on the great arrangement that he had done. But Kenny, ever gracious, pointed to me and said, ‘No, that wasn’t my arrangement – he did it!’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a guy with a big heart!’ It was very unusual, because in the music industry lots of people like to claim credit for what they didn’t do. Kenny was different. He was very likeable and didn’t have a big ego. Yes, I have a lot of time for Kenny!”
“At the post-show party, each of the delegations found their own table in the vast reception hall. I remember Bill and I trying to be sophisticated and buying a bottle of champagne to bring over to the BBC table. The delegation was led by Tom Sloan, head of light entertainment, a large, imposing figure with a wax moustache and a posh accent. ‘Ah,’ he says to me when we bombed up, ‘sure you’re a broth of a boy.’ Then, he eyed the champagne and said, ‘What? Only one bottle?’ That was enough for me. I buggered off and joined the Irish delegation for a few celebratory drinks and some great company.”
“The craic was ninety and the few drinks turned into a bit of an all-nighter. The next day, Bill and I had prize-winning hangovers and were feeling pretty diseased. We decided we’d exploit our new-found position as winners and indulge ourselves by postponing our flight home until the following day. We spent that Sunday nursing our deteriorating conditions and trying every hangover cure we could lay our hands on. It was a bit of an anti-climax, moping about the hotel which overnight had become virtually deserted. When the circus is over, the tents get rolled up and the wagons pull out of town. Pronto.”
“We landed at Heathrow the next afternoon and it was in a cab on my way back into town that it happened. We pulled up at a set of traffic lights, alongside a lorry. It was a mild spring day and both vehicles had their windows open. Then I heard it. The lorry driver was whistling ‘Puppet On A String’. Wow. I could have kissed him. It was the very first time I’d ever experienced such a thing.”
Sandie Shaw with Cliff Richard (1968)
“Having won Eurovision and having seen our record climb up the charts, with hundreds of cover versions being recorded across the world, Bill and I more or less stopped working as songwriters and started acting as songwriters. We were now convinced that we were VIP members in the various clubs in London. We were the new Lennon & McCartney; we were celebrities! Honestly, we took our eye off the ball, because now we were big time; we had just won the Eurovision. Meanwhile, our follow-up for Sandie, a song called ‘Midnight In Tokyo’, didn’t do well in the charts at all – and there was very little other success to make up for that in the remainder of the year 1967.”
“Our boss Jimmy Phillips didn’t like that. We were supposed to present six new songs to him every second Friday – and instead we were taking it easy. So he invited us to a critical meeting at his office. Jimmy knew what he was talking about, being a successful songwriter himself. He told us, ‘Hey, boys, have you ever heard the expression: “one swallow never made a summer”? Let me tell you: one song never made a songwriter. It’s time you get back to work, because in this business people are thinking of you guys as a flash in the pan.’ I can quote him word for word now, because these words really hurt! They were meant to. This was a wakeup call and it worked. Bill was particularly annoyed, swearing when we went for a beer afterwards, but I said, ‘You know what Bill? The only way to prove that we’re not a flash in the pan is to win the bloody Eurovision again.’ So that became our target.”
“The BBC had just invited entries and named Cliff Richard as the singer. Once again, we battened down the hatches and retreated to our bolthole at the top of the stairs. We analysed, reviewed, researched backwards and forwards, and put all of our conclusions into our writing efforts. The result was another cutesy song called ‘My Magic Music Box’. I had done a little arrangement with a celeste and a twinkly music box to back up the simple melody, which I thought was really catchy. We were really enamoured with our idea. This was the next Eurovision winner!”
“Before we could get to the demo stage, we had to play it for Jimmy, who had already emphasised the importance of doing a perfect job on the demo. He had even okayed us to use Pye Studios to record it. We played the song and Jimmy could hear what we were getting at; ‘Yeah, that’s pretty, pretty good… I quite like that, but what else have you got, boys?’ ‘Nothing else, Jimmy, this is the one!’, I replied. He didn’t look too impressed. ‘Listen, I’ve booked you a proper studio and a bunch of musicians. Recording only one song in that session is squandering money.’ I was a bit taken aback, convinced that ‘My Magic Music Box’ would do the business. Now we needed another song. We reluctantly agreed to write a second tune, but we had to hurry. We were due to record in a day or so.”
“As we left the meeting in Jimmy’s office in the late afternoon, we noticed that straight across the reception area, the office of Jimmy’s brother, Bill, the professional manager, was lying empty. Bill had obviously left for the day, and we knew he had a grand piano in there. In we went and set ourselves up. I sat at the piano and in pretty short order came up with a chord sequence and the bones of a melody. It was now closing time in the office, so we decided to sleep on it and reconvene the following morning.”
Back-to-back winners of A Song For Europe – Phil and Bill flanking Cliff Richard and host Cilla Black
Later on, Phil’s writing partner Bill Martin often claimed that he came up with the lyrics to what would become ‘Congratulations’. In his version of events, after the melody had been created, Phil suggested the line, ‘I think I love you, I think I love you, I think the world is fine if you will say you’re mine’, which Martin disliked on the basis that “you either love someone or you don’t”, and then came up with ‘Congratulations and celebrations, when I tell everyone that you’re in love with me.’
“Bill had a great ability to fantasise,” Phil comments. “The detail of stories wasn’t his strongpoint. Without any musical background, he was keen to project the image that I was the composer and he the lyricist. In reality that’s not how we worked. I don’t want to detract anything from Bill, because he was great at what he did, but let me tell you the real story.”
“I went home that evening with this freshly written tune in my head. After dinner, I took out a little book that Bill and I had in our possession. It was a tiny rhyming dictionary with a black cover. We called it Blackie. With this simple little tune in my head, that five-note opening phrase, I was fingering through Blackie. Bill Martin is right to an extent – if you had called the song ‘I Always Love You’, ‘Do You Remember’, or ‘I Can’t Forget You’, it would have been forgotten. I wanted a five-syllable word, so I was looking through Blackie to see if I could find one which suited our song.”
“After a little while, still leafing through our well-thumbed booklet, I found one five-syllable word – con-grat-u-la-tions. I was thinking to myself, ‘There has to be a song called ‘Congratulations’. It’s such an obvious thing. Well, let’s do it anyway.’ That was it, the rest of the song more or less wrote itself, with Blackie throwing up ‘celebrations’ and ‘jubilations’. The next day Bill and I sat together to polish it off. We were surprised and relieved that, as far as we could see, that song title hadn’t been used before. Again, in the arrangement, I wanted to set the mood in the first four bars. Remember, in Eurovision, the meter starts running from the downbeat of the intro! I came up with a brassy fanfare, rhythmic-type figure followed by the all-important four on the big bass drum. Ba-da-da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da. Boom-boom-boom-boom. Now we were talking.”
“Unusually for a Eurovision song, I included a short instrumental break in ‘Congratulations’. Normally I would have big reservations about such a break. I mean, you only have three minutes to do your business. Can you really afford for your singer to be standing there while an eight-bar instrumental is happening? But the way I rationalised it, the song had to come to a standstill and take off again in a slower marching beat. It’s more than an instrumental break; the slowdown was part of the fibre of the song. Do you know where I got that? ‘Milord’, the Edith Piaf song! That’s right, I stole that idea from ‘Milord’! I wasn’t consciously including elements from French songs in my songwriting, but, having studied French at university, I was inevitably more aware of what was going on in France than most of my colleagues. I knew Charles Trenet and the other great French performers. I would have been exposed to French music through the radio.”
Cliff Richard and his backing group rehearsing their Eurovision performance in the Royal Albert Hall, with Norrie Paramor conducting the orchestra
“At this time the playing and singing on our demos was provided by a newly arrived Scots band, Dean Ford & The Gaylords, who would subsequently enjoy huge success as Marmalade. On the session I was still pretty sure that ‘My Magic Music Box’ was the stronger contender. It had a more complicated arrangement and took up the bulk of the studio time. The lads did a bang-up job on that song and when it came to voicing ‘Congratulations’, they started taking the piss, doing funny little dance moves and jazz hands. Finally, we got the job done. Now, we’d be getting two bites at the cherry.”
“When it came to the BBC selection process, we thought that as last year’s winners, we’d have a good shot at getting a free pass and going straight through to the final five. After all, Chris Andrews, Sandie Shaw’s songwriter, had been given that privilege the previous year. The answer to that request was a big fat no. So, as before, our songs were submitted anonymously. Imagine our delight and our sense of justification when ‘Congratulations’ made the cut. We were back in the game. ‘My Magic Music Box’ disappeared without trace, never to be heard again. Once more, we eyed the competition with a deep trepidation. We’d be up against some serious and successful teams, like Greenaway & Cook, and Fletcher & Flett. The fact that they were also our pals didn’t help the situation one bit.”
“Cliff sang all of the songs on the same night during Cilla, the Saturday night TV show hosted by Cilla Black. I was delighted that Cliff’s producer Norrie Paramor had kept my arrangement as it was. Again, it was all there in the demo, melody and arrangement; he didn’t have to think hard about how to orchestrate it. It was a package and Norrie was smart enough to know, ‘If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!’ The drums, the brass, it was all mine. What happened afterwards was pretty straightforward, with strings added and an expanded lineup of musicians being employed. I was grateful and flattered with the fact that my arrangement stood up, because Norrie Paramor was a bit of an icon. I wouldn’t have had much discussion with him as to how he would deliver the song. In fact, he wouldn’t have known who I was. If I had walked up to him and said, ‘Hello, I’m Phil Coulter,’ he would have replied, ‘Who are you?’ He wasn’t a guy like Kenny Woodman. Kenny was approachable, one of the boys almost, whereas I would describe Norrie Paramor as an establishment figure. He was a bit of an icon, an A&R man for some of the biggest records out of EMI; a man with a big name in the music industry!”
“Bill and I were more than happy with Cliff’s performance. As you would have expected from him, he really did a brilliant job. For the stage version, Cliff had chosen to sing over the instrumental break. That was his idea; he didn’t want to be just standing there doing nothing, while the music was playing, so he just joined in vocally. That was fine with me. In the record which was released subsequently, he stuck to the original concept of not singing in that part of the song.”
“When it was over to the postal vote, we were very nervous again. Could we possibly hope to pull it off a second time? What were the odds? Would lightning strike twice? When the votes were tallied, Greenaway & Cook came in second place with their song ‘High And Dry’, totalling 30,500 votes. ‘Congratulations’ romped home with a mouthwatering 171,300 votes. Thank you, God.”
Cliff Richard during his Eurovision performance
“The grand [international Eurovision] final was to be held in the Royal Albert Hall, one of London’s historic landmarks. The downside of missing out on flying to some other European capital and living it up in the local five-star hotel was outweighed, we thought, by playing a home game. During rehearsals, I had no interchange at all with Norrie Paramor. I was more than happy to leave the conducting job in his capable hands.”
“Meanwhile, in the concert, Cliff, resplendent in a blue Edwardian-cut tuxedo and a white ruff collar, played a blinder and the audience went crazy. So far, so good. During the voting, the tension was unbearable. The maximum points each country could award was ten. We got off to a good start and by the halfway mark were seven points clear of our nearest rival, Spain. Things were looking good. Too good, it seemed, for the BBC floor manager who got a little carried away and came to get us out of our seats to go backstage to be ready to accept the trophy. Bill, who was always very superstitious, wasn’t pleased and tried to refuse to get up, but the guy was insistent.”
“Voting continued as we were led up the side of the hall and into the wings. With just two countries left to vote, we were still three points ahead. Germany was next up, second last on the batting order. Cliff’s big in Germany, I tried to reassure myself, he’s bound to do well. Austria, two points. Okay, that’s a neighbourly gesture. United Kingdom, two points. Deadly. We were now five points clear. Spain, six points. Six fucking points. Nobody was getting six points. Now, we were a point behind. The last country to vote, Yugoslavia, gave votes to neither of us, and that is how we lost the Eurovision and lost our place in the history books.”
“We were unceremoniously bundled away from the stage and out of the winners’ enclosure. Devastation would not even begin to describe our mood. I felt catatonic. We genuinely felt we’d been robbed. In later years, a Spanish investigative journalist claimed in a TV documentary that he had proof that the German jury had been nobbled. Well, whatever about that, it was a reflection of the relative quality of the two songs and some consolation to us that while ‘Congratulations’ became a worldwide hit and matured into a pop standard, ‘La, La, La’ by Massiel rocketed into obscurity.”
“‘Congratulations’ became an instant anthem of celebration. A songwriter’s income is derived from two main sources: the mechanical royalties paid on the actual sales of the records; and the performance royalties earned every time the song is performed on TV, on radio or at live gigs. With ‘Congratulations’, the performances were huge. It became a sort of successor to ‘Happy Birthday’, and Cliff’s version sold in the millions. It was covered in practically every language known to man. For us, that meant it was an even bigger copyright earner than ‘Puppet On A String’. Martin & Coulter were hitting their stride.”
Cliff Richard with Spanish Eurovision winner Massiel and her songwriter Ramón Arcusa
“At the time, in spite of its commercial success, ‘Congratulations’ proved a double-edged sword for us. The word among cynics on Denmark Street was, ‘Yeah, really impressive, but it’s just another Eurovision tune, not a real pop song.’ So, yet again, we felt we had something to prove; we had to prove that we were proper pop songwriters. When our first big regular hit happened about half a year later with ‘Surround Yourself With Sorrow’ for Cilla Black, we were elated. It rates very highly in my memory, because this was our first big pop hit – a song which had nothing to do with Eurovision.”
Looking back on his first two Eurovision entries, does Phil Coulter feel that ‘Puppet On A String’ and ‘Congratulations’, stylistically speaking, were the precursors of the UK efforts in subsequent years, songs with a distinct teenage flavour to them, ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’ (1969), ‘Knock Knock (Who’s There)?’ (1970), and ‘Jack In The Box’ (1971)?
“Obviously, yeah, although I would rather use the term cutesy than teenager. Again, given the choice between the big romantic ballad and the novelty song, UK writers tended to lurch towards the latter. They would doggedly follow the path which, for better or for worse, had been set by ‘Puppet On A String’ and ‘Congratulations’. For Christ’s sake, ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’ is an amalgamation of them both, isn’t it? So I guess we have to take part of the blame for that!”
By early 1970, Phil Coulter and Bill Martin were no longer contract writers at KPM, but an independent songwriting and music publishing team. One of their first successes after going independent was the song which gave Ireland its first-ever Eurovision victory, ‘All Kinds Of Everything’. They did not write the song, but Phil took care of the arrangement and it was released on the Martin-Coulter label. Listening to Phil’s memories of Eurovision 1970, though, it was by no means a carefully planned move on their part.
“On 1 March [1970], I am in Dublin, there for a few days on business. I have just emerged from a particularly boring lunchtime meeting with lawyers and, as I’m in Dublin until tomorrow, I’m just in the mood to go on the lash in Scruffy Murphy’s pub, off Mount Street. One of my pals who was always game for such pursuits was an RTÉ producer from Scotland, Johnny Murphy. I got him on the phone. ‘No can do, Phil,’ came the stern reply. ‘I’m directing A Song For Europe (the event was actually called National Song Contest – BT) tonight. Why don’t you come on out? You might enjoy it and we’ll have a few jars after.’”
Phil congratulating Dana and songwriters Jackie Smith and Derry Lindsay on their win in the National Song Contest
“I wasn’t aware that this was the night they were choosing Ireland’s Eurovision entry. Given my track record, I was obviously curious and headed out to Montrose, to the RTÉ studios. My presence there was completely unplanned. At rehearsals, in the midst of all the mediocrity, all the ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’ style of songwriting, I found there was only one song that stood a glimpse of a chance at doing well internationally. A little sixteen-year old girl from my hometown of Derry singing a folksy little thing. It was simple, uncomplicated, but the tune somehow had a freshness about it. I would lie if I told you I knew it was a Eurovision winner, but I was sure it would win the Irish selection.”
“During the tea break I introduced myself to the two writers, Jackie Smith and Derry Lindsay, a couple of nice Dublin lads who were printers by profession. I complimented them on their song and told them I thought that it had a great chance of winning. But, I said, if it did make the final, it would need a new arrangement and a sprinkling of Eurovision fairy dust. This was where I could help. If they were happy to sign the song to Martin-Coulter Publishing. They were chuffed at the connection and readily agreed.”
“Dana’s song, ‘All Kinds of Everything’, romped home that night. Now we had some serious work to do before heading for Amsterdam for the final in three weeks’ time. I don’t know who did the original arrangement – surely one of the staff arrangers at RTÉ. It was pretty, but the approach was a bit too drawing-room. There was nothing memorable in it. It needed something attractive and music-boxy in the intro – I keep coming back to the intro, the critical part of any Eurovision song.”
“So I set about inserting some new tricks. The intro became like a minuet, with a percussion marking the last beat of each bar with the odd, ratchet sound of a vibraslap, the newer version of the jawbone of an ass. Seriously. The jawbone was an instrument common in Latin America, where the dried-out jawbone of a donkey or horse was pressed into use as a percussion instrument. The vibraslap was built on the same idea, but made of stiff wire, a wood ball and a wooden hollow box equipped with metal ‘teeth’, to mimic the rattling sound of the teeth in the original jawbone. It sounds a bit mad, but it was a useful little piece of kit when you wanted a slap and a rattle.”
At the international Eurovision final in Amsterdam, ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ was not conducted by the regular Irish conductor, also the man who had led the orchestra in the National Song Contest, Noel Kelehan, but the Dutch musical director of the show, Dolf van der Linden. Kelehan himself later claimed he had pulled out after RTÉ refused to pay him little more than the costs involved for the flight and the hotel.
Dana performing ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ in the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest in Amsterdam
“I’m not familiar with the story, but it sounds very credible,” Phil comments. “RTÉ were never too generously funded or given to extra expenses. Of course, if I had been asked by broadcasting officials to conduct the orchestra for them in Eurovision, I would gladly have stepped up to the plate. I guess I was a bit frustrated that nobody asked me. I came along to Amsterdam in the vest of publisher and arranger. Somebody at RTÉ could have thought, ‘Coulter, he’s the guy – let’s get him!’ After all, by that stage, I had a bit of a record in Eurovision.”
“However, to be honest, I didn’t give the matter much thought at the time. There was a little bit of a shuffle that had to happen to change the arrangement between it being chosen to represent Ireland and the contest in Amsterdam. Because the song had been submitted to the international final very late, they weren’t sure if it was allowed to change the arrangement after the submission date. So I was more worried about the Eurovision rule book than about conducting. I knew we were safe with Dolf van der Linden. He was a stalwart in Eurovision and a bit of a legendary figure.”
“At the orchestra rehearsals in Amsterdam three weeks later, I discovered to my horror that the percussionist (Gerard Middendorp – BT) did not have a vibraslap and he’d never even heard of using an ass’s jawbone. I had a bit of a panic because this particular sound was an integral part of that all-important four-bar intro. I knew that a journalist pal of mine, Michael Hand, was flying out the next day to cover the event for the Sunday Press. I placed an urgent phone call and pleaded with Michael to go to McCullough Pigots or Waltons or one of the other music shops in Dublin to pick up a vibraslap. I didn’t even mention the bit about the ass’s jawbone.”
“The draw for the running order could not have been better. Dana was drawn last. Coming after a series of ‘Boom Bang-A-Bang’ songs, she was like a breath of fresh air. She was a picture of innocence, dressed in a simple cream dress with an embroidered Celtic motif. She delivered the song perfectly, as if she was sitting on a country stile. The votes were tallied and to the surprise of a lot of commentators, Ireland had its first ever Eurovision winner. What made it feel all the sweeter was that not only had we beaten the favourite, nineteen-year-old Mary Hopkin from the UK singing ‘Knock, Knock, Who’s There?’, but languishing down in fourth place for Spain was a certain Julio Iglesias with his song, ‘Gwendolyne’.”
“We knew that BBC Radio was covering the event live from an outside broadcast studio in a truck near the stage door. The presenter was a friend of ours, Tony Brandon, and we figured it would be a great boost to record sales if we could get Dana on air before the end of the programme. When the presentations were over and the photographers had captured the winning moment, Bill and I grabbed Dana, one on either side, and ran her down the corridor and out to the BBC truck, pursued by her manager, Tony Johnston. Tony taught in a small country school outside Derry. He was a decent sort of chap, but he didn’t have a lot of experience of international media.”
Dana and her manager Tony Brandon with Mary Hopkin, the UK contestant in Amsterdam
“‘Congratulations, Dana,’ says Tony Brandon on air. ‘What a great win for Ireland. The pints will be flowing in Dublin tonight.’ When he heard this outside the truck, Master Johnston starts waving his arms frantically at Tony behind the window. ‘Wrong image, wrong image, wrong image,’ he shouted. Interview over, Tony put a protective arm around the little girl and whisked her back to the hotel and out of harm’s way. Bill and I adjourned to the bar with our writers and got gloriously pissed.”
After Dana’s win, Phil Coulter and Bill Martin stayed away from Eurovision for several years, focusing on other projects, but a fourth involvement duly followed in 1975, when they represented not the UK, not Ireland, but Luxembourg with ‘Toi’, a romantic ballad in the French tradition. On stage, the entry was performed by a beautiful 20-year-old Irish songstress called Geraldine Branagan. As it happened, Geraldine would one day become Phil’s wife, but that was not on the horizon yet when the paths of the two crossed for the first time in 1973. Geraldine took part in the National Song Contest in Ireland with her family group The Branagans, performing a song in Gaelic, ‘Fadó fadó’, while Phil had been booked to perform ‘Puppet On A String’ at the piano with Colman Pearce’s orchestra as the interval act. “He [was] a bit of a diva as there were fingerprints on the white piano,” Geraldine once reminisced in a newspaper interview. Hard to believe, but Phil did not notice her at the time.
About a year and a half later, the Luxembourg Eurovision project got underway. Luxembourg, a country without much of an inbuilt music industry, made a habit of cherry-picking from their neighbours, inviting record companies and songwriters from abroad to represent them at Eurovision – and rather successfully so, bagging no fewer than four wins between 1961 and 1973, with Jean-Claude Pascal, France Gall, Vicky Leandros, and Anne-Marie David. In 1974, the country placed fourth with a song composed by German producer Ralph Siegel. One year later, the Grand Duchy’s broadcaster RTL had their mind set on songwriters from a different part of Europe, as Phil recalls.
“In 1974, Bill Martin and I were called to meeting in the office of Radio Luxembourg in Mayfair, London. We were told by the boss man, Alan Keane, that the powers that be in Head Office had looked at our history in the contest and figured we had the inside track. Would we like to write the song and find the singer to represent Luxembourg in 1975? Yes please. The first job was to find the singer. I listened to piles of demo tapes, checked out videos and held auditions, to no avail. Nothing jumped out, so far.”
“In the middle of all of this, I find myself in Dublin. I am in my hotel room, watching TV, when an ad comes on for Guinness. It is set in a club with a five-piece band on stage and a female singer who is striking. Great voice, great look, with long hair and blue eyes, and the camera just loves her. Now she could be a contender, I thought.”
Promotional photo of Geraldine in the leadup to her Eurovision participation in 1975
“I made it my business to find out who she was. Geraldine Branagan was her name. I managed to get her phone number and rang to introduce myself, asking if I could meet her early the following day before flying back to London. At 9am the following morning I arrived outside a stylish house in Castleknock in Dublin. The milkman had just been, so I picked up the two bottles of milk on the doorstep and rang the doorbell. What happened next was like being hit with a bolt of lightning. This gorgeous creature opened the door and flashed a million-dollar smile. ‘Ahhh, I think these are yours,’ I stammered, handing over the two milk bottles. What an opening line.”
“I found out that Geraldine’s disposition was every bit as sunny as her smile. Over a cup of coffee, I laid out the Eurovision opportunity and invited her to audition in London. She was full of enthusiasm and energy, but was very grounded. She explained that she had just got to bed at 5am having driven back with her band from a gig in Donegal. She knew the realities of the game. She wasn’t starry-eyed about showbusiness. But she agreed to come over and meet the people involved. When she did so, she breezed through the audition in London and blew everyone away. The Luxembourg executives were delighted with their new representative.”
“Now, time to get busy. We had to write a song. There had been very little point in even starting until we had firmed up the singer. The song needed to be tailored to her voice and her image. I set about writing a melody which was quite European in its construction. Again, because I have an obsession for those first four bars, I wanted something which would set the mood. My thoughts wandered to Bach’s Prelude – and I wrote a piano intro based on that piece, with strings underneath.”
“The main hurdle was that it had to be sung in French. It is true that Eurovision rules at the time allowed for songs to be performed in English, but RTL must have demanded that our song would be in French. I don’t exactly recall the discussions, but I certainly didn’t volunteer to do it in French. It would have made it a lot easier to sing in English, because Geraldine’s French was pretty basic. She had studied some French at school, but was far from fluent. This was going to add to the workload.”
“During my many trips to France, I had made a number of friends in the game over there. Songs of mine had been recorded by the likes of Sylvie Vartan and Mireille Mathieu. One of my acquaintances in Paris was a lyricist called Pierre Cour. Pierre had actually won the Eurovision for France in 1960 with a song called ‘Tom Pillibi’ and was also one of the writers of ‘L’amour est bleu’, which had featured alongside ‘Puppet’ in the 1967 Eurovision. Curiously enough, that song had been representing Luxembourg, and it went on to become a worldwide hit. I gave Cour a ring and made my pitch.”
“Pierre was very excited to come on board. It was the first time that we collaborated. It’s always a bit of a challenge to do a co-write with anybody. When you look back on my career, there are only a handful of people who I’ve actually co-written with – apart from Bill Martin of course. Bill is officially listed as co-composer of ‘Toi’, but that was purely because we were a songwriting partnership. All of our output was released with both of our names on it. Fortunately, working with Pierre Cour proved easy. We bonded well. After adding the lyrics to my melody, he volunteered to come to London at the rehearsal stage, to put Geraldine through her paces. Even though I speak good French, I thought it would be no harm to have Pierre on hand to ensure that we got every detail right.”
“Pierre was in his late fifties and a very serious operator. He had a great track record and a reputation for being meticulous. He didn’t have great English nor much patience. Poor Geraldine. I really felt sorry for her. Her schoolgirl French wasn’t of much use as Pierre badgered and bullied her into the correct pronunciations and every detail of inflections in his lyric. This was some baptism of fire. I figured there had to have been times when she was regretting the whole thing and hankering for the comfort of her band and the familiarity of gigging in the Hitching Post in Leixlip, County Kildare.”
“Because ABBA had won the previous year, the Eurovision final took place in Stockholm, Sweden. It was great to be back and involved once more in the final. I loved the buzz and lapped up the atmosphere, bumping into old friends from past contests and basking in all the attention. This was the first time I was going to conduct as well, and I loved playing an active part in our delivery rather than just sitting in the audience. Having become a Eurovision fan, I knew the names of the regular conductors. Back in the day when there was an orchestra, Eurovision was a really glamorous event. To be in the middle of all that, not only as a publisher, songwriter, and arranger, but also as a conductor – it ticked every box. I was delighted!”
“Of course, I’ve never been a career conductor, but in 1975 I would have been pretty experienced in that field. Apart from conducting my own arrangements in the studio, I was the musical director for a concert tour with Richard Harris across America. I also led an orchestra of thirty musicians for all performances of the Irish version of Jesus Christ Superstar in Dublin. Both of these experiences were in the early 1970s, a few years before the Eurovision with Geraldine. By that time I was pretty confident standing up in front of an orchestra. I would have liked to conduct ‘Puppet On A String’ and ‘Congratulations’ in the contest, but my experience at that time was a lot less. It probably wasn’t a bad thing that I had some mileage when I stood up to conduct in Sweden.”
“The Swedish orchestra were fine. I was very impressed by them. During rehearsals, I only had to step in with the Bach intro. It’s a part that is very legato. I had to do that a few times to make sure that the pianist played it in such a way that it flowed naturally. After that had been cleared, they were flawless – and so were Geraldine and her backing singers. They were an established set of three BVs, backing vocalists, in the London recording scene. I used them in many of my sessions. Curiously enough, one of them was Lavinia Rodgers, the sister of Clodagh Rodgers, who had represented the UK a few years before with ‘Jack In The Box’.”
Geraldine as a backing singer in a studio session in London with Phil and Billy Connolly
“Thinking back to the other entries in Stockholm, I particularly liked the Spanish entry, a song called ‘Tú volverás’. The guy who composed it (Juan Carlos Calderón – BT) also wrote ‘Eres tú’. He obviously was a great songwriter. I liked the whole musicality of his entry, a great melody. I thought that was a winner – and perhaps also the UK entry by The Shadows, just because they were The Shadows. Their song was not so interesting from a musical perspective, but very commercial. These were our two main competitors as far as I was concerned. I didn’t actually see the song which went on to win it, ‘Ding A Dong’, as a serious threat.”
“Geraldine looked every inch a star and turned every head in the building. She sang her heart out and she actually took the lead in the early stages of the voting. She finished a very credible fifth out of nineteen countries. A top five finish, behind some heavy-hitters, was a good night’s work in any man’s language. Everybody was pleased, except Pierre, who was disgusted that France only gave three points to our song, whereas all the other French-speaking countries didn’t give it a single vote. Could that be because the singer wasn’t French, he wondered. A good conspiracy theory, for sure. Looking back, jurors from these countries might have felt uncomfortable with the fact that Geraldine was not a native French speaker. I felt our entry had a lot of the right ingredients; the melody, Geraldine’s looks, and the pedigree of Pierre Cour and myself, two previous Eurovision winners. But you can never foretell the voting.”
“As said, I was happy with the result – and delighted for Geraldine, who was relieved to have received ten votes from Ireland. Far more important in the great scheme of things, there was a chemistry between us that was just not going to fade away. Little did I know right then that this budding relationship was to prove one of the most important in my whole life. Mind you, it took a few more years to blossom. You have to take into account that we were both married at the time.”
“Eurovision didn’t make Geraldine a superstar in Europe, but it certainly turned her into being a solo artiste. Two years later, we went to Tokyo to take part in the Yamaha World Popular Song Festival. She did very well there, finishing in second place behind Tina Charles, and the song, ‘Romano’ was her biggest hit in Ireland. Her biggest success was in South Africa, where she had a bunch of hits. She had some great adventures down there in the early 1980s, but she put her career on the backburner when we started a family.”
In 1978, Phil Coulter had a last go at Eurovision as a songwriter, but ‘Shine It On’ did not make it beyond the UK pre-selection, A Song For Europe. Digging deep into his memory, Phil comments, “That was a song which wasn’t specifically written either for Christian or for the Eurovision. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, working on the soundtrack of The Water Babies. Bill Martin came up with the idea to give that song to Christian, a Scottish singer he was aware of. ‘Shine It On’ was a song in our catalogue, which had been demoed, but no one had recorded it yet. My involvement in submitting it for A Song For Europe was zero. To be honest, I wasn’t too enthused about it. I didn’t see it as a serious contender, because it didn’t have any kind of Eurovision pedigree – it lacked that important four-bar intro, for a start! It was a case of just giving it a shot. I wasn’t crying in my beer when we didn’t get past the heats.”
Album release of ‘Shine It On’ by Christian (1978)
Following this, Phil never had a direct involvement in the contest again either as a songwriter, arranger, publisher, or producer. However, some time in the spring of 1996, his telephone suddenly rang. It was Fiachra Trench on the other end of the line. Trench, an Irish string arranger with an excellent reputation, had been commissioned to orchestrate the entry for France in the Eurovision Song Contest due to be held in Oslo; ‘Diwanit bugale’ was performed in Breton by guitarist and folk singer Dan Ar Braz. Having written the orchestration, Trench was asked to take care of the conducting job in Norway as well. “I didn’t know what to expect,” Trench explained. “[So] I rang my friend Phil Coulter and quizzed him about his Eurovision experiences. He encouraged me to go and was sure I would enjoy it – and so I decided to do it!” Even thirty years on, Phil remembers the phone call.
“Fiachra had his doubts. First of all, he would be representing another country; and secondly there was an element of credibility. He is a seriously good pop arranger, as his track record has proven. There is some wonderful stuff he did with Van Morrison. He may have been worried that going to Eurovision would tarnish his reputation. I told Fiachra that he shouldn’t be worrying. ‘Go for it, you’ll love it! There is no downside. Even if France only collects five votes, it’s a great experience to be in the middle of it. It’s unlike any other musical extravaganza you’ll ever be involved with.’ … and in those days it was! This would have been my response. I’ve never lost a lot of sleep about being credible, to be honest. Why bother about what others think of you?”
Taking Phil’s advice into account, Trench travelled to Oslo, helping Dan Ar Braz and his band L’Héritage des Celtes to give a brilliant performance of ‘Diwanit bugale’ – certainly one of the best songs on the night, although it never really took off in the voting, hampered perhaps by an Irish entry very much in the same vein, which stormed to victory, ‘The Voice’.
To end Phil Coulter’s Eurovision story, we take a short look at his involvement as a judge in ‘You’re A Star’, an audition show held by RTÉ to select Ireland’s Eurovision hopeful. The winners of these editions, Mickey Harte and Chris Dolan, went on to represent Ireland – with Harte having to settle for a place just outside the top ten and Dolan finishing near the bottom. By that time, Ireland seemed to have lost its Eurovision edge, with the new formula of ‘You’re A Star’ being thought up to break the mould.
“It was fun to be on the jury, but it was very different from my own Eurovision experience,” Phil opines. “Number one; you were choosing from a very limited pool. The contestants in ‘You’re A Star’ were amateurs. There was no Sandie Shaw, no Cliff Richard taking part. Some of them had zero experience as a performer. Secondly, none of the songs that were submitted came from proven track-record songwriters. We didn’t have the benefit of songs written by the likes of Brendan Graham. Maybe this whole thing of credibility played its part in that again. So we had to make our pick from songs written by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I didn’t really believe that either of those songs were going to win Eurovision, so I wasn’t gutted when the inevitable happened.”
Chris Doran performing ‘If My World Stopped Turning’ at Eurovision 2004 in Istanbul
“I’ve been asked several times if I wouldn’t want to try again doing Eurovision as a songwriter, but that’s a bit like asking Sean Connery if he would like to play James Bond again. That ship has sailed, I’m afraid. Would I consider myself capable? That’s another story. If I put my mind to it, I think I could come up with a strong melody. Looking back, the Irish songs which won Eurovision were all good songs; the Brendan Graham songs, the Johnny Logan songs – they didn’t depend upon pyrotechnics, staging, lighting, or dancing girls. We were never any good at competing with the Eastern European bloc, with all that kind of stuff going on on stage. We’ve always failed dismally when we’ve tried to do that. Our strength has always been in a song that’s musically and lyrically strong, with a capable singer who has a bit of charisma. Those are the ingredients. Without those, you are just one of a crowd, which is deadly in Eurovision. People just get immune to all that stuff. You’ve got to stand out, whatever it takes… and if it takes a four-bar bassoon intro, so be it.”
“Today Eurovision is more of a television spectacle, in which it’s all about the production values. It’s no longer about the song. A couple of things radically changed the flavour of Eurovision – and the first thing which started this transition was doing away with the orchestra. That was a big move. There may have been budgetary considerations behind it, the advance of technology, backing tracks – you can argue about that until the cows come home, but to me it was the beginning of the sheen going off. It was no longer the big glamourous event it had been for such a long time. There were other factors – Azerbaijan and all those other countries from Eastern Europe being admitted, text voting, and the relaxation of the language rule – but the orchestra was the main element, if you ask me. Younger audiences may not take notice, but for any songwriter of my vintage, for whom the Eurovision looms very large, it just doesn’t have the same appeal at all without it.”
“Even if Eurovision has changed, I wouldn’t miss it; I’m still curious, even if we cannot always make it through the semis, which can be more of a slog. Sometimes it’s like watching a train crash. Occasionally I’m proven wrong. Some years ago, there was the winning song from Portugal, ‘Amar pelois dois’ (in 2017 – BT); no bells and whistles, no pyrotechnics… just a quirky guy with a lovely melody, sweetly orchestrated, and a sincere delivery which brought it to life. That was one of the few times in recent years when I couldn’t wait to find the music so that I could play all those lovely chord sequences on the piano. That song restored my faith; I hoped that it was going to stem the tide. Maybe people were finally rediscovering the value of a great melody, I thought… but we didn’t. That’s the last time a truly good song won the Eurovision.”
“The ultimate verdict of the contest is that there has not been a global hit, the likes of ‘Volare’, which is a standard – well, arguably since ‘Waterloo’. That’s what Eurovision used to produce, but it hasn’t done for many years. There are all kinds of theories and reasons as to why that has happened. The glory days of Eurovision being a song contest with an orchestra and the concentration being the quality of the composition has now been diluted a lot. Nowadays, I don’t expect it to throw up any great copyrights or any great songs that I wish I had written.”
“In the old days, Eurovision was the best possible way to announce your arrival as a songwriter. I did it for the UK in 1967. Of course I had to prove later on that I was also good pop songwriter by writing big hits away from the contest, but Eurovision is what got my career underway. So it’s fair to say the Eurovision looms very large in my life, professionally and personally. It established me, it gave me my shot, it put me on the road, it didn’t answer all of my questions, and it didn’t guarantee me a career. But it certainly opened a lot of doors.”
Phil with Butch Moore (c. 1990)
OTHER ARTISTS ABOUT PHIL COULTER
So far, we have not gathered comments of other artists about Phil Coulter.
EUROVISION INVOLVEMENT YEAR BY YEAR
Country – United Kingdom
Song title – “Puppet On A String”
Rendition – Sandie Shaw
Lyrics – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Composition – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Studio arrangement – Phil Coulter / Kenny Woodman
Live orchestration – Kenny Woodman
Conductor – Kenny Woodman
Score – 1st place (47 votes)
Country – United Kingdom
Song title – “Congratulations”
Rendition – Cliff Richard feat. The Breakaways
Lyrics – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Composition – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Studio arrangement – Phil Coulter / Norrie Paramor
Live orchestration – Norrie Paramor
Conductor – Norrie Paramor (MD)
Score – 2nd place (28 votes)
Country – Ireland
Song title – “All Kinds Of Everything”
Rendition – Dana
Lyrics – Derry Lindsay / Jackie Smith
Composition – Derry Lindsay / Jackie Smith
Studio arrangement – Phil Coulter
Live orchestration – Phil Coulter
Conductor – Dolf van der Linden (MD)
Score – 1st place (32 votes)
Country – Luxembourg
Song title – “Toi”
Rendition – Geraldine Branagan
Lyrics – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Composition – Phil Coulter / Bill Martin
Studio arrangement – Phil Coulter
Live orchestration – Phil Coulter
Conductor – Phil Coulter
Score – 5th place (84 votes)
SOURCES & LINKS
- Bas Tukker did two interviews with Phil Coulter, March & July 2026
- Phil Coulter’s brilliant memoirs, “Bruised, Never Broken”, ed. Gill Books: Dublin 2019; thanks to Phil Coulter for allowing me to freely quote from his autobiography
- An interview with Phil Coulter and his wife Geraldine Branagan, “I think we’re meant to be”, by Andrea Smith, in: The Sunday Times (Ireland), November 6th, 2022
- A playlist of Phil Coulter’s music can be found by clicking this link
- Photos courtesy of Phil Coulter and Ferry van der Zant
- Thanks to Mark Coupar for proofreading the manuscript
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