Eamon Friel

I had the privilege on Monday of this week of officiating at the Requiem Mass of my friend, Eamon. I first met him when I was a priest in Strabane and he played for our local ballad club. We have been friends ever since and I never missed an opportunity to listen to him, for his style is local, intimate, witty and unique.

He was born in London. His father was a tracklayer on the railway. ‘I look more like a Mayo man than a Derry man. My mother was from county Mayo’.

They met and married after the war and he was born in 1949. She was very religious and saw England as a ‘godless country’ he joked. That's probably why she moved home. Derry in the 50s and 60s was poverty stricken- unemployment a festering sore- and economically starved. His father found just 18 months work here. He had to move back to London to support his family . It still angered him that political bigotry made him a second class citizen in his own city.

Mayo 

He went to Bridge Street School and then St Columb's College, “a terrifying place which I survived by keeping my head down and working hard. ’’ he recalled sadly . John Hume was his history teacher who inspired him to study it for his degree at Queen’s. Better memories of his youth came from summers spent in County Mayo among his mother's people on a farm. Like James Joyce in Paris murmuring the names of Dublin streets, he still would walk those fields of childhood in his mind “For a townie like me it was like living in the Garden of Eden .’’ he said. Eamon was a great raconteur and I loved this story about Patrick who had his own poitin still set up in the barn and one day the sow got in. She tumbled the still and drank the lot. “She was unconscious for two days and I would guess woke up with a massive hangover. No hair of the dog available, I'm afraid’’ he joked for Eamon had a great sense of humour with a broad beaming smile that could light up a room.

Don’t get me wrong- he loved Derry too ‘with its great city walls and the big winding river and its hills and valleys that create the most beautiful vistas. ‘’

Music

His father was very musical, a fine singer and had been in a pipe band . He introduced Eamon to artists like Louis Armstrong. Growing up in the 60s he loved the Beatles . In 1967 he bought a Spanish guitar for £3 in Molly's pawn shop. A school friend, Paul Elder, taught him some basic chords and suddenly he was strumming Clancy Brothers ballads, Beatles songs and many of the acoustic anthems of the young Bob Dylan. By the 70s he was singing and playing Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Williams and many others.

Teaching

While at Queen's he met a beautiful young girl from the Waterside, Caitlin Tracey; three years later in1974 they married. He began teaching English at St William of York School, London This was the later 1970s.
During the time he was there one of his most famous past pupils was to become football legend Ray Houghton, who has Buncrana roots. Also Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

Composing

One day the drama teacher said she needed original songs for the Christmas show. Eamon got the position of composer. He had never written a song before but went on to write eight songs. To his surprise he discovered that he had some compositional talent. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote of his own experience, “A man dabbles in verse and finds it is his life". “So it was with me’’ he said. “A Christmas show in a tough London school changed the direction of my life. I became a songwriter’’. He came home and together with his time in London taught in total for a solid 15 years in various local colleges such as St. Peters and Carnhill High School where he also put on school musicals.

‘’The jailbreak happened in 1987! I reckoned by then I had paid my full debt to society so I organised my escape from teaching,’ he would joke. As a songwriter he found most fulfilment, his true calling in life. He became involved in radio and wrote topical, comic and satirical songs for the BBC mostly for BBC’s Talkback, but also for RTE and a song a week for nearly 4 years for BBC Radio 5 in Manchester. [By the way, he was a passionate Man. Utd. supporter-God help him!- and went over to see them play Chelsea a month ago with his son Colm.] “At one stage I was writing three topical songs a week. I would get up around 6.30am and listen to the news. I was always hoping that something weird and wonderful with comic possibilities had happened overnight. Then I would have to start and would be in my local radio station at 10.30 that morning to record whatever came to me. Down the line it would go to Belfast or Dublin or Manchester. I became a song factory because I needed the money’’. But it led to full employment by the BBC as a radio presenter- a two hour show called “Friel’s Fancy” which won the 1993 Sony Award for best music programme- an Oscar in the radio world. It was followed by ‘The Saturday Club’, then 'Songbook' -his final broadcasts was last Thursday, the night before he left us so suddenly and, as we prayed on Monday ,was welcome Home by our Heavenly Father. Let us pray that up there somewhere in the angelic choir, this humble, gifted, generous friend that we loved so much is now smiling and singing with the saints.

‘Lord ,we ask you, have mercy on his soul, console his grieving family and reward Eamon for all the joy he brought us . Amen’