A former punk, a Frank and Walter and a Ford factory musical – The Irish Times

One of Kevin Fitzsimons’s favourite ways to relax is to put his feet up and watch music videos on YouTube. But last year, after quietly rocking out to a track by the evergreen Irish indie band The Frank and Walters, he sat forward and pressed pause.

“I was thinking, ‘I’d loved to have worked with Paul Linehan from The Frank and Walters, but I have no way of contacting him.’ When the song finished it was like magic: at the top of the screen was a flashing sign for the Frank and Walters website. I thought, ‘If I went on that, would there be a contact for Paul?’ There was a contact tab. I wrote, ‘Look, I’ve got this musical I’m making – would Paul have any interest in producing the music for the show?’ He rang me three days later.”

Fitzsimons had been toiling on his musical, Twin Flames, for the best part of a decade. Paying homage to classics such as Grease and The Sound of Music, it is set in his native Cork and centred around the old Ford factory at the Marina and the long-shuttered Majorca ballroom in Crosshaven.

He was proud of its Beatles-style songs and the emotive story, drawing on his experiences as the son of a gambling-addicted father. Still, he felt the music needed polish. Who better to apply that magical final touch than a fellow Corkonian and composer of such indie gems as This Is Not a Song and After All?

“The music was written. I did a few subtle changes to make it a bit better. I did arrangements – brass and string arrangements,” Linehan says. “It was all new to me. But I’d been doing our own songs for years – the arrangements, the production, everything. They’re still songs at the end of the day.”

The story is intriguing. The songs are very good. Kevin and I are both Beatles fans. We used a lot of shuffle beats

—  Paul Linehan

Twin Flames is finally set for its grand debut at the Palace Theatre in Fermoy this weekend. As anyone following RTÉ’s Toy Show the Musical disaster will know, staging an original musical is not cheap. The stakes are even higher for Fitzsimons, whose day job is in the pensions industry and who is footing the entire production cost with his savings.

“I won’t get into specific figures. It’s pretty much my life savings,” he says. “I’m hoping to recoup most or all of the costs through selling it out for eight nights. There’s no guarantee that’s going to be the case. I often say this is just one big experiment for me. It’s an experiment that might go on to bigger and better things. Even if it starts and stops in Fermoy, that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with that. It’s an experiment to see how far an ordinary bloke with no particular background in music or theatre can bring an original musical.”

Twin Flames is directed by Valerie O’Leary, a well-known figure in Cork theatre. Set in Cork city in the 1960s, it tells the story of Phil and Fiona, whose relationship founders when Phil’s gambling spirals out of control. The toxic impact of gambling is a subject with which Fitzsimons is painfully familiar, having witnessed his father’s addiction battle.

I’ve had every worry and bad thought come into my head, to the point where I’ve been finding it difficult to sleep because of the pressures I’m under

—  Kevin Fitzsimons

“I came from a very working-class family. My father worked in Irish Steel all his life on low wages,” he says. “You can imagine the trouble, between low earnings and trying to boost those earnings by gambling. That was never a good plan of action.”

He continues: “I drew on my own recollections of the unfortunate gambling addiction my father had. A lot of people said, ‘That must have been terrible.’ I’m always quick to say it wasn’t terrible for us as children. It had no effect on us. We could probably see the effect it had on my mother. I know all the traits of what a gambler was. My father was a very secretive man. A very superstitious man. I was very familiar with the make-up of someone with a gambling addiction.”

Musical theatre was a new frontier for Paul Linehan. He has written all sorts of songs in his career, from wistful ballads to chilly electronica, but helping to tell the story of two lovers in 1960s Cork ripped apart by gambling was something else. “The story is intriguing. The songs are very good. Kevin and I are both Beatles fans. We used a lot of shuffle beats. It’s very 1960s.”

[ The Frank and Walters’ After All voted Cork’s favourite song ]

The Palace Theatre has a capacity of 230; Fitzsimons estimates he has already sold more than 300 tickets. The production has a core cast of nine, plus backing performers and backstage technicians. For Fitzsimons, it will have been worthwhile even if he doesn’t recoup his money. He has dreamed all his life of seeing his songs performed in public. Music has been his passion since the 1980s, when he and his friends formed a punk band, Blunt.

“We were in Mandy’s having a chit-chat,” he says, referring to a fast-food restaurant on St Patrick’s Street that is now a McDonald’s. “We decided over a burger and a Coke that we were going to start our own band. None of us could play an instrument; none of us had an instrument. Nonetheless, we ploughed ahead. Nobody was as surprised as myself when I discovered I could write original music. It’s not in the family. You hear the expression, ‘You didn’t lick that off a stone.’ Well, I did lick it off a stone.”

[ ‘We just stuck our heads in to say hello’: The night Frank and Walters met Paul McCartney ]

All these decades on, he remains obsessed. But, at 55, he is no longer a carefree young man with the world at his feet. As the premiere of Twin Flames approaches, each day has been a rollercoaster of stress and strain.

“I’ve had every worry and bad thought come into my head, to the point where I’ve been finding it difficult to sleep because of the pressures I’m under. It’s not normal pressure. Not only are you setting up a project that may or may not be successful – to make it successful you’re doing it in front of every family member, friend, relation, colleague and former colleague you’ve ever known. It does enter your head: if this is a failure, it won’t be an ordinary failure. It will be a spectacular one.”

Twin Flames opens at the Palace Theatre in Fermoy, Co Cork, on Saturday, October 21st, and runs until Saturday, October 28th