The singer-songwriter is delighted to be back touring in Ireland at the moment and has a huge number of friends to catch up with when he’s here,
he tells Karen Doyle.
“I was beginning to think that nothing was going to happen for me and after years of saying to the Almighty ‘Listen Lord, wouldn’t it be good if you’d give me that chance’, still nothing happened. Then in 1995 I was saying my prayers and I said ‘Lord I really don’t know why you gave me these gifts because everywhere I turn I get rejected. Ok, your will will be done, if you want me to be a teacher in Merseyside you’ll have to help me out because I don’t like it very much.’ And it’s as if from that, everything happened. His hand was upon what happened to me and where I am now.”
A very spiritual and grateful Charlie Landsborough is in reflective mode as we look back on his musical career and the break that propelled him to great success and fame in the mid-nineties.
Born in 1941 in Wales, but raised in Birkenhead in England, Charlie Landsborough is as famous for his many hit songs as he is for his distinct look – the long white beard and hair with that gentle charming Liverpudlian accent. He is the youngest of eleven children, named after his father, Charles Alexander Landsborough.
The ‘break’ he talks about was a chance phone call to the RTÉ offices of the Kenny Live show in 1995. Charlie had just written a song What Colour Is The Wind about a young blind child asking his father to describe the world to him. It was receiving some airplay in the North and Charlie was due to begin a spring tour as support to his good friends Foster and Allen. Unfortunately the support act had to be cancelled, and feeling quite despondent, Charlie picked up the phone to Montrose and the rest is history.