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What is it about tenors, f’revensakes? Real tenors, I mean.
They just stand there, open their mouths, and out pours a "Che gelida manina" or "Una furtiva lacrima" or "Labbra di foco! Labbra di fiore!" and their work is done and dusted. Nothing's left to prove.
Like blackbirds at twilight they just sing. And we are seduced, lost.
Wrote Nietszche: “Nothing is more dangerous than a beautiful melody. Nothing corrupts taste more surely. We are lost, my friends, simply lost once beautiful melodies are loved again!” But he also said “without music, life would be a mistake”. Torn, wouldn’t you say?
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When we were kids, we dreaded walking with my dad – but not that often, since he bored of fatherhood easily.
He preferred strolling alone, because he was a stupendous, world-class champion flirt.
His feeling was that the only fun to be had in this world was flirting, and he had a point. Three or four kids dragging along behind you, tugging your pocket and muttering “Stop it Daddy, people are staring!” has a way of pooping the party.
Whoever was in a skirt he considered fair game for exhausting badinage. He just wanted to love and be loved. In his mind he was on an opera stage and forever up for seduction.
His weapon of choice was opera and he was out to beat Mario Lanza and Count McCormack!
Opera Al Fresco: as we trailed behind him en route to the post office for mum’s allowance on Tuesdays, we passed young, old, fat, thin, happy, sad, blondes and brunettes.
If they wore a skirt and sported twin Xs they were in. Two X chromosomes qualified for free performances from the Irish tenor stupendissimo of Paddington.
"Ah! dolci baci, baci!" he sang to elderly parties in housecoats and "Labbra de foco, labra de fiori!" to giggling au pairs; "Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola!" he tried on a meter maid. It worked, because his was a fine voice – a "tenor di grazia" with top Cs – and he knew it. Like Lanza he kept that C going – no tippytoeing high notes, José Carreras-style. He soared straight up and smacked them amidships.
He sang all day: Wild Colonial Boy, I'm A Rambler, I'm A Gambler, We'll Take Manhattan vaccinating us against musical passion for years. It was decades before we understood what he sang, and still more until we understood why.
And he’s lucky there wasn’t a “Me too” movement around then. That’s all I’m saying.
Hey no, that's not all I'm saying. As a teenager he'd won a Golden Voice contest in the Falls Road with a song called Catari Catari! that sparked his passion for Latin music from Amapola to Zaragoza. During the war he acquired a Jewish refugee teacher (cue McLaverty's My Dear Palestrina) who pushed him into Dublin Grand Opera Society auditions. He understudied Rudolfo in La Bohème.
Like the desire to sing that never deserted, he had a writer’s compulsion. His widowed mother raised him in Distillery Street and worked in a mill as a duffer. A stay with Armagh cousins and a move to the Titanic quarter followed, with Sullivan Upper.
So he longed to be read and be heard. “I was always desperate to be heard.” Timing is everything. He wasn’t.
At Queen's during the war, he went to a history lecture and sat next to future poet Robert Greacen. "What's your view on the Balkans?" he hissed. "Fuck the Balkans!" Greacen hissed back, making a lifelong friend, even writing the valediction for dad's hilarious funeral 65 years on, entitled "Leslie In Valhalla" as "the young blond Viking of my youth". On my 80th birthday you flew Across the Irish Sea to drink Champagne with me in Dublin.
They did too, in the Gresham no less, octegenarians singing Shenandoah among teacups.
Things went swiftly downhill later. Soon he was a white face on a hospital pillow. Paralysed from the neck down, he flirted and sang with all the nurses like Errol Flynn. Whenever I visited, he shouted Star of the County Down or Mountains of Mourne as nurses congregated for singsongs. "Still an entertainer with that Old Black Magic" remarked his granddaughter Ricky.
Have we inherited this gene, and if so why can’t we sing?
At the end of one particularly nasty break-up, I heard the dreaded words: “And another thing!” Uh-oh. Nothing nice follows that. “You’re always trying to sing and you can’t.”
I burst into laughter because it’s true. I love singing and choirs but can’t sing and know I can’t. It’s a terrible fate, to hear beauty in your head all day yet fail to let it out. But he did.