Phil Coulter - Early Years

Early Years

Coulter is from Derry in Northern Ireland, where his father was a Royal Ulster Constabulary police officer, one of the 10% Catholic constables in the force. He grew up with his two brothers and two sisters.

Coulter's father, also called Phil, encouraged music in the house. He played the fiddle whilst his wife played the upright piano. The younger Coulter recalls this piano, made by Challen, as "the most important piece of furniture in the house". “I always stayed away from the fiddle, having inflicted enough pain on my family with the piano,” he laughed. Coulter confesses that he came close to abandoning the piano at an early age. “The truth is I hated the piano at first. I’d love to say I was a natural but I wasn’t. I hated playing it and I hated my music teacher. My father, who was a canny man, told me, ‘We have to scrimp and save to pay for these lessons, you might as well give them up.’ “It wasn’t long before I gravitated back to the piano, trying to play the songs that I was listening to on the radio. I always wondered what my left hand was supposed to be doing though. But after two or three years at St. Columb’s College I began thinking of the piano as an extension of myself.”

One of Coulter's most popular songs, "The Town I Loved So Well", deals with the embattled city of his youth, filled with "that damned barbed wire" during the Troubles. 'It is the one I anguished most over, the one which had to earn respect and perhaps the most auto-biographical tune I have ever written’ “The roots of that song go very, very deep, it took time for it to win respect and integrity. That song defines an era and a place that is very dear to my heart.”