MARGARET KEYS
THE OLD MAN
RELEASE DATE: 22ND JUNE, 2018 (Tadlow Classics)
‘The Gift Of Music’ is the highly acclaimed new album from Margaret Keys and features a whole host of songs, arranged for her by the man behind Sarah Brightman's music. Among the songs there is one in particular which Margaret says is still very hard to perform in public. Phil Coulter's ‘The Old Man’, which she dedicated to her dad Bill, who died suddenly in 2014, aged 67.
"My daddy died very suddenly," she says. "I was on my way home. I had just flown into Belfast and was just outside Derry when I got a phone call to say that Daddy had gone to the shop for a pint of milk and that he had collapsed. My sister is a doctor and she was working on him there in the shop. So I got there and it was very, very hard to watch.”
"I think that since this has happened, I look at life differently. We are all going to die, no one is getting out of here alive, and I know other friends who have watched people they love suffer. I don't know how good I would be at coping with watching someone I love suffer and become a different person. I know my dad was so full of life and so jolly, that he wouldn't have liked to suffer with illness.”
"His death was terrible. It was such a shock. We'll never get over it and we miss him every day. But I think sometimes that's how I deal with it, knowing that he had a great life and he died as he lived, and he didn't suffer. We definitely suffered, but you have to turn it around and get a bit more positive, because I think that's sometimes the only way you can cope with loss."
Margaret says she will always be proud of the fact that she was able to sing one final time for her father, who was a constant support to her as she progressed in her career.
"I sang at Daddy's funeral," she says. "At the wake we were discussing the music and I knew that I was going to do that for him. I thought to myself, Daddy would want me to do it. I kept thinking about what he would want, what songs he would want, which ones he loved and that was basically what held me together. I sang throughout the Mass for him. It was very hard. And at the very last note, on the very last song I totally fell apart. But I am only human."
‘The Gift of Music’ by Margaret Key
Available from 22nd June 2018
www.margaretkeys.co.uk
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