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Irish singer Brian Kennedy is on his way for yet another Australian tour, having just received a lifetime achievement award at The Meteors (Ireland’s premiere music awards).

The 43-year-old Kennedy moved to London from Belfast at the age of 18 to pursue music and just a few years later released his debut album The Great War Of Words, which caught the attention of Van Morrison who invited him to join his Blues & Soul Revue. This 6-year association certainly set Kennedy on his way and also taught him a lot about the craft of performance.

Kennedy has now released 8 solo albums, the latest being Interpretations, an album whose title is self-explanatory. Released in 2008, the album contains versions of classics such as ‘Let’s Stay Together,’ ‘You Are So Beautiful,’ ‘Night And Day’ and Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’

But Brian Kennedy’s talents extend beyond music; he is also an acclaimed author. His first novel, The Arrival Of Fergal Flynn , was published in 2002, while the follow-up, Roman Song, came a year later. Towards the end of this year Kennedy also hopes to have a memoir published.

The year should be one of the biggest in Kennedy’s career. With a new book, 20th anniversary world tour and an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival.

I caught up with him by telephone as he prepared to accept his award at The Meteors and ready himself for his Australian tour

You’ve just celebrated you’re 20th year in music but it couldn’t possibly seem that long.

It’s weird, I’m about to get a lifetime achievement award here at our big music awards and it’s actually twenty years this month that I recorded that first album and twenty or so since we put it out. It’s a strange moment to pause and reflect to yourself, ‘Has it really been that long?’ It seems like it’s been maybe 10 years or so…it certainly doesn’t feel like a double decade!

Tell us about the lifetime achievement award. For most people when they get a lifetime achievement award it indicates the end of their career, doesn’t it?

Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it! It’s another way to just see the industry that you’re in and your peers are so aware of you they just want to say, ‘Congratulations on the journey so far.’

I always see it as a ‘journey so far’ kind of thing because I’m still young. It’s not like I’m 65 or 70 and going, ‘Oh, right here we go!’ I really think of it as a way to pause and look back on the 20 years. I’m writing my autobiography and that comes out in October so I’m really in reflection mode of late. It’s very funny – it’s great though.

Tell us about The Meteor awards.

They’re our biggest awards of the year. U2 will be playing and Snow Patrol and The Script and Sinead O’Conner and those kinds of people. It’s the biggest awards that we have, so amongst my peers and amongst those sorts of people, to be awarded is extraordinary. And it’s an industry with very few awards so it’s away for the industry to say; we’ve been watching and listening and we just want to celebrate this moment.

You’ll also be performing won’t you?

Yes, I’m performing with a gospel choir – it’s going to be great! It’s just one song, one of my biggest hits in this country - and it’s called ‘Life, Love and Happiness’ - and it’s from an album called The Better Man that was a particular piece – a number one album for a year.

I’m kind of more known for ballads and things but I do occasionally have these big up-tempo tunes and that’s one of them.

And you mentioned some of those famous Irish artists and it must be very satisfying for you to be included in that group?

I feel really honoured. I feel really, really positive about it. It’s going to be interesting to see how the year pans out.

You must be due for a new album shortly, surely?

We’ve started already. We’ve started kind of demo-ing and collecting ideas, so that’s going on. I just had a record out, less than 3 years ago here, and so really looking forward to getting back into the studio and making another record.

Have you written any songs for it yet?

Yes, we have. We’ve been downloading and recording away but …the gigs usually end up in the centre of it. It’s very funny what happens. I’m just kind of in the middle of doing it, then I’ll go off and do some touring and then I’ll be a bit exhausted from that and I’ll come back and I’ll be dying to be in the studio. Then of course the studio will exhaust me eventually and I’ll be dying to go out on the road again. So it’s circular.

Are you doing any at Windmill? [Van Morrison’s studio]

We did the last one at Windmill, this one I’m doing at my friends’ studio. The technology’s so amazing these days the demo’s turn out to be masters in the end really.

You were involved in a fund raising dinner for The Lyric Theatre. You’ve done some interesting things over the last 6 months or so haven’t you?

Yes, absolutely. I literally just got back from New York where I was singing for a fund raising dinner that Liam Neeson hosts for a Belfast theatre called The Lyric Theatre. Meryl Streep came and I ended up having a little bit of a sing with her. Just incredible! A wonderful start to the year - to be involved in those types of things!

It’s interesting that they’d have a fund raising dinner in New York for an Irish theatre?

Well, you see, it’s the New York Irish and also part of the Ireland fund that exists in New York. Liam, of course, lives in Manhattan. We fund-raised in Dublin and London and Belfast and now it was New York’s turn to see if we could raise the final one million dollars and it looks like we’re on course.

You were mixing with - from the look of some of the photos on your website - some big names there, Brian, weren’t you?

It was very funny, it was a little bit surreal, but of course, as always you also get reminded that these people are just people. A very privileged night. I sat with Aidan Quinn and Kieran Haynes and ended up hanging out a little bit with Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, of course. So, yeah, I was in very esteemed company and I felt very comfortable and very honoured to be there.

The other exciting news is that you’re going to be performing at Glastonbury this year?

Yeah! It’s kind of like Port Fairy Festival, isn’t it? It’s such a famous festival that the minute you say; ‘I’m playing at Glastonbury this year.’ It’s kind of unbelievable!

It’s slightly bigger than Port Fairy, I think!

Exactly - but no less exciting, I have to say. It’s a privilege. I’ve played it before with Van Morrison a couple of years ago so it’ll be nice to come back and do it by myself. I’m looking forward to that.

You’ll be interested to know I saw Van last year doing the Astral Weeks album in Los Angeles. I saw him smile on stage and he told a joke. That’s pretty incredible isn’t it?

Well… it’s not unheard of…

Now, you mentioned you’re writing some memoirs which are due out later in the year. You kind of balance your life between your singing and song writing and your writing. How do you achieve that balance?

You’ve just kind of go for it. I mean we call it crop rotation in a way, it’s the same. Like going on tour and making records, writing is a very solitary existence and so you really need to go into yourself to bring that kind of writing out of yourself.

There comes a natural point when I really crave company again and I really crave the stage again and all that touring brings. Then when I get to the end of that, I crave solitary kind of stuff again. So it’s kind of like crop rotation: one field gets a rest, the other field gets cultivated and so on so forth.

Do they help each other? When you’re writing, say prose, do you think about lyric writing as well?

Whatever I’m working on at the time I try and give all of my energy to, so I don’t see them as separate at all; I just see them as extensions of each other. So I suppose in that sense then they must help each other out because I might have been thinking about a particular way that relationships are or something like that… absolutely.

There have been some great Irish writers, of course…

There’s one or two – no pressure!

A few! So one’s tempted to think that some of them might have influenced you. Who are the writers who you’ve been influenced by - or perhaps looked up to rather than influenced by is probably a better way of putting it.

There’s quite a lot but I’d say off the top of my head; John McGahern is an amazing writer, Colm Toíbín, Colum McCann and then there are contemporary writers, Joe O’Connor.

Those kind of people would be people I’d really look forward to hearing they’ve got new books coming out. I’d be excited about that. I kind of get excited by those contemporary writers. But I try not to read anything when I’m writing and when I’m making music I don’t listen to that much other music as well, is the funny thing.

How did you originally get into writing? Was it the events of your life that inspired you to write a novel?

Yes, a bit of that and I’d be going to write poetry that wasn’t lyrics and I wrote short stories and I just got braver about it. I mean I think its something that just takes time to gain a kind of confidence about.

Were you nervous about it when you started?

Oh, of course – I’m nervous about everything! You know, I just got on with trying to challenge myself creatively. I don’t like things to be easy; I like things to be difficult and all that because they’re always worth it in the end. I just like challenges.

One of the other things I wanted to ask you about was you sang on a fundraising album - I think was it for George Best’s funeral – didn’t you?

I sang at his funeral and they released that live recording from the funeral as a single and we got to number 4 in the UK. I think I was here that year and it was just an extraordinary thing to be part of – absolutely.

He was an amazing character wasn’t he? For people like me, and maybe yourself, a bit of an idol when we were younger?

Definitely. I mean, I’ve never been a football fan but that’s how incredible he was: he even touched someone like me who doesn’t even know anything about football.

A real incredible icon of our age certainly and, to think that I was part of his sending off, I just felt so honoured.

And his life sort of veered from kind of great happiness and inspiration to tragedy didn’t it?

Oh completely. As we know alcoholism is serious addiction and, unfortunately, he succumbed to it and died from it. So [it’s a] very, very serious thing to be involved him and it got him in the end, as with a lot of cases.

I wanted to ask you about your last album - Interpretations - and, naturally enough, there’s a Van Morrison song there, although you do it…

It’s a very different reading of that song because…I think there’s no point in doing a famous song if you’re not going to bring your own sound.

Interpretations is a good title because they are interpretations. A lot of people tend to use the term ‘cover versions’ don’t they? But I think the word is kind of an erroneous title for these sorts of things.

Yes. I think you have to call it like it is and we really wanted to just interpret some of the most beautiful songs written in the last 100 years, starting as far back as 1930 with Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ - and then right up close with the new millennium with a song written by a new song writer called Declan O’Rourke and a song called “Galileo” – that’s a beautiful record.

I just wanted to make a record with full orchestra. Most of my contribution to that record was……I literally sang for three days then left to go off to Australia, then came back and the record was all mixed and finished and sounded beautiful.

How did you go about choosing the songs? I mean it was obvious you’d choose a Van song but…

It’s very funny that you say that because I didn’t choose that song! I chose ‘Galileo.’ I chose Michael McDonald’s ‘I Can Let Go Now’ and then I said to the producers, ‘Look, choose songs I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of myself because I want to be challenged, I want to make this difficult. I want to see if I can get inside these songs. When they said ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ I said, ‘Oh no, not a Van song!”

Then they said, ‘Listen to the way we’re going to do it, listen to how we’re going to treat it - like a lullaby or like a prayer where the words really connect with you.’ We brought a different temperature to that song I think than was there before.

Of course, in the days before The Beatles came along, a lot of singers were interpreters; there weren’t that many singers who wrote their own songs were there?

That’s right.

So a lot of singers feel like they have to write. It’s just become the norm?

Well it’s mad! I think it’s mad when people do that. I think it’s completely mad. Sure, do it if you feel compelled to but also there are great things to be learned from other people’s work, so why not investigate that publicly?

Tell us about some of the choice of songs you mentioned. You had a say in some of them and your producer suggested some.

Well, I wanted to have a whole list of songs from the last 100 years that would mean something to me and to see if I could challenge myself and get inside them and I really feel like we did. You know, like the Michael McDonald song ‘I Can Let Go Now.’ I just had great fun doing it.

We just wanted the best songs possible and to see if we could just make them all fit together and I think we were successful.

The response to the album obviously in Europe was terrific.

It was amazing. Oh my goodness, really amazing. And actually it’s the reason why we got Glastonbury because the people who were choosing the new music for Glastonbury, someone gave them a copy of it, and they got in touch and said, ‘Look, would you like to come and play?’ It was just amazing.

That’s certainly one of the great results from the album but it’s taken your career to a different audience as well, hasn’t it?

Well I suppose. The thing that I keep saying is it’s important to challenge yourself and in challenging yourself you’ve got to do different things and in doing different things, different people relate to it. It’s great!

You’re able to capture, I guess, the spirit of each song. Is that what you were aiming for?

First, you’ve got to really study the words. What’s the writer trying to say? What’s being said in the song and how you relate to that? And, of course, I can relate to it in my own way. So the main thing you look for in any song is [that] you want to believe something. And I’m hoping that when people put on my records they believe like that.

Now, are you bringing your band back out with you to Australia?

No, no – I’m going to be up close and personal. Very much an acoustic kind of evening: bringing it all back home in the sense that I’m going to be playing guitars. Sometimes I’m going to sing unaccompanied and I’m going to be telling stories. So it’s going to be very much a kind of up close and personal situation.

It will be a fascinating concert and I guess your sitting down working out a set list right now?

Well, yes and no. I already have a set list. I have all the songs in my head and I go out and see how the audience are and what they’re receptive to, what’s the feeling in the room and that dictates very much what I’m going to do.

Is it a difficult thing to do? How do you read the audience?

You feel how they are by looking at them and, with smaller shows in particular, you really can see in front of you. It’s kind of like an instinctive thing, you just feel it. I think it’s just a real musician’s kind of thing. I just trust my instinct and that’s all you can do, you know?