Mary Black: Passing on the song's spirit

TIM WATKIN talks to one of Ireland's most loved voices about the wave of popularity her home country is enjoying.

Mary Black is not the type to be a swimmer or a rebel popstar, so it's a surprise when she says she's been knocking back steroids. She's speaking on the phone from Melbourne and, given the fuss over certain drugs and coaches there, I feel like telling her to keep her voice down.

"I feel great," she laughs, hamming up the drugs story. But the drug use is innocent enough. Anyone who has seen the Irish singer live - she is in New Zealand next week - knows she doesn't need any performance enhancement.

As critics have said, she's one of the great interpretive singers. The steroids were just a way to get her through a United States tour last month when she got "a very bad dose" of laryngitis, forcing her to cancel a concert.

"It was scary because I've never had to cancel a concert, ever. So it was a first and I've been kicking around a long time."

Since the early 1980s, in fact, when she appeared as a singer on the Dublin folk scene. Through the mid-80s she was Irish top-10 material and by the later 80s and early 90s - with albums such as No Frontier, which spent 56 weeks in the Irish top 30, and the superb Babes in the Wood - arguably Ireland's finest female vocalist. A second "best of" album, due to be released this winter, will include a bonus album called Hidden Harvest that includes duets with Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Black is an interpreter of songs, rather than a writer, spinning gold with the words of many Irish lyricists. She's won a worldwide audience for the likes of Jimmy MacCarthy, Noel Brazil, and Mick Hanly. "I feel, in a way, what I'm doing is still passing on songs, which is the traditional way."

But with the fame comes the mail. She gets thousands of tapes and CDs of proffered songs each year. How does she choose?

"I need to relate to what the sentiment of the song is, unless I'm moved in some way and I really feel 'God, I'd really love to sing that, I know I won't be able to do a job on it."'

On her more recent work, Speaking with the Angel, she's her more melodic self again, with a songlist that includes Neil Finn's Fall at your Feet.

"I'll have to sing that in New Zealand, won't I? You should be proud of him. He's a fantastic songwriter. When Weather With You came on the radio I remember exactly where I was driving in Dublin. Exactly. I thought what is that, it sounds fantastic and I've been a fan ever since."

Black is one of many Irish performers who have won over millions of fans to Irish song and dance. But she suspects the country's cultural renaissance is running out of steam.

"The Irish, we've had a great run for our money. Between Riverdance and even in pop music, The Corrs and U2, for such a small country it's amazing, like. But ... that'll dry up a bit and that general feeling that all things Irish are cool will go. Everybody has to take their turn. You can have overkill, you know?"

Might it have something to do with the economic success in Ireland, that as a country becomes more prosperous it becomes less creative. Black doesn't think so. A few years of prosperity won't change the Irish commitment to song and sentence.

"We relied strongly on our music because, particularly in the bad times, the famine and being under British rule for the last 800 years when we were being battered, music was one of the things that kept us going and we regard it as very precious."

Which raises politics. Since including some politics on an early family album, Black has sung more about the heart than the cause.

"I don't like to incite violence and, in a way, up until two years ago, there was always that danger that people would misunderstand what you were trying to say. I would be a nationalist and I wouldn't be behind the door about saying it.

"But when people are listening to you and they might be influenced because they're a fan, then I have a little bit of a conscience about that."

* Mary Black plays Monday at the Aotea Centre.