Christine is 'back home' after a long voyage in pursuit of her art
Celebrated jazz artist Christine Tobin will pay tribute to Leonard Cohen when she appears at Ballina Arts Centre on Saturday, January 20th.
Revered jazz artist Christine Tobin will be celebrating Leonard Cohen at Ballina Arts Centre on Saturday, January 20th, singing her beautiful arrangements of his songs from , the album which won her the Herald Angel award when she performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Now living in rural Roscommon, which inspired her latest album , Christine’s life journey so far has been multi-faceted and fascinating.
She was born in Walkinstown, Dublin in the 1960s. Her father was a barman in various pubs – the Old County Bar, The Submarine, The Traders – and her mother, forced to leave her job in the Civil Service when she got married, brought up Christine and her three sisters.
When Christine was eight years old, she and two of her older sisters formed a band – the Tobin Sisters, they called themselves – and Fidelma and Sylvia would play piano accordion, and Christine was the singer. They performed in old folks’ homes and hospitals, and anywhere a bit of entertainment was needed.
The oldest sister, 18-year-old Deirdre, didn’t join them but she contributed to Christine’s musical journey by introducing her to the likes of Carole King and Leonard Cohen. (People might have heard of Deirdre – she became a famous campaigner for women’s rights when as a civil servant in the '70s she fell foul of the same marriage ban that had forced her mother to resign.)
By the time Christine was 11, teenagers Fidelma and Sylvia were finding other things more interesting than the accordion, but Christine had been noticed and was invited to join Irish comedian Cecil Sheridan for a 12-week run of his variety show, staged in the Eblana Theatre.
“I’d go to school, then get the bus into town. There were dancers with ostrich feathers, and I wore a sort of Bo-Peep outfit and sang and and also , for which my mother made me a flamenco-style dress. All the different costumes were great fun.”
Two seasons in Butlins followed, in Mosney, Meath; the first, when Christine was 12, was a reprise of her role in the variety show. When she was 13 she graduated to the cabaret lounge, singing “stuff in the charts, like .”
And then she stopped singing. Like that part of her life was done; she was a teenager now; time to move on. Gabriel Byrne disagreed; he thought she needed to be a singer. He was her Spanish teacher at Ardscoil Eanna in Crumlin; he was doing drama classes at night and would put on little plays and series of sketches with the students.
“He heard me sing, and was very encouraging,” remembers Christine. “‘You should do that,’ he said. ‘This is what you should do.’ But I was a teenager and didn’t see how singing could be a job.”
For himself, Gabriel Byrne dropped out of teaching and went into acting as a full-time career.
“And my headmistress said, ‘Oh, Mr Byrne’s very foolish, giving up a secure job for that’.”
Christine followed her sisters into the Civil Service, but then she started reading novels by DH Lawrence and decided she had to go off traveling and find herself. Her parents were not impressed.
“I wanted to do something I felt had a purpose and a meaning for me. I thought if I just threw myself up in the air I would land somewhere and all would be revealed.”
So she threw herself up in the air and came down in Greece, picking oranges and serving old men coffee and ouzo in the early morning. Eight months later, she came back to Ireland to work at a bar in a nightclub – shades of her father – and took a flat in Parnell Square (a rundown place back then), and across the hallway her neighbours played Billie Holiday.
“It was more like a sound than a voice; it stopped me in my tracks.”
Realising that she needed to go back to singing, she started gigging in wine bars and then at the International Bar where the drummer Peter Ainscough helped her build her repertoire, and she added a new song every week. Then she was introduced to Pogues manager Frank Murray.
"We realised we came from the same street in Walkinstown, and he said, ‘Come to London and I’ll help you get gigs’.”
In fact, he suggested her for the female voice in but “to be honest, I wasn’t that keen, it was such a different type of music from what I was singing and listening to". Instead, she applied for a place on the new jazz course at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and won a scholarship, and then started a band of her own… And then decided to throw herself up in the air again.
“I started to feel I needed a new direction, I wasn’t really enjoying the gigs, and I thought, well, that can’t be right, I’ll just stop what I’m doing and start over.”
She’d been reading books again, not novels but anthropology this time.
"It was about human psychology and communication, what makes us tick on a deep subterranean level – that’s like making music. And I thought it would give me a greater understanding of humanity.”
Two years into her degree at Goldsmiths, she threw herself into the air again and came back down as a singer-songwriter. And reconnected with guitarist Phil Robson, whom she’d first met at the Guildhall; they’ve been together ever since.
Over the next two decades, she recorded 11 albums, including , which sets 12 of Yeats’ poems to music and led to her being the only Irish woman to get a British Composer award. The special guest on the album who lent his voice to three of the poems was Gabriel Byrne.
Then she threw herself up in the air again, and she and Phil moved to New York and entered the jazz scene there, which welcomed Christine as enthusiastically as the London scene had done.
Somehow, strangely, it was in New York that she began to feel the homing pull of Ireland.
The lyrics and poems of Irish poet Paul Muldoon had inspired her album, and it was Muldoon who gave Christine her first New York gig, at the Irish Arts Center “which was to prove an important place for me”.
“All the time I’d lived in England, I hadn’t considered going home. But there is more in common with Irish culture in New York than there is in London… Subliminally that started working on me.”
The Covid-19 pandemic created a hard turning point. Once more – and who says this will be for the last time – Christine threw herself up in the air and this time she came down in rural Roscommon, in an old stone cottage on half an acre, still with Phil and their cat from New York and now a local stray who has moved in. And hares bouncing past the front door. And the Callow bog on her doorstep, which was “a landscape I’d never been in before, wide open skies, strong changes of colour, blonde in winter, russet in autumn, luminous in the low sun, dotted with bog cotton in the spring – I felt like I’d fallen in love. I am back home. And it feels right”.
* Christine Tobin brings her show, , to Ballina Arts Centre on Saturday, January 20th, at 8pm. Tickets: €18/€16.
