Victoria Mary Clarke

Tommy Fleming interview

Tommy Fleming interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2002

Tommy Fleming is putting four packets of sugar in his tea. This is supposed to be a health interview, so I have to point out how unhealthy this is.
‘Well, it’s not fattening,’ he says, defiantly.
‘What do you mean it’s not fattening?” I’m incensed.
“ Sugar has zero percent fat,” he insists, quite correctly. ‘Would you call me fat?”
No, I say. He’s not fat.
Tommy laughs uncontrollably, delightedly. And well he might, for not only is the ex De Danaan singer and now multi-platinum solo artist getting away with all that sugar, he’s also about to launch a new album and tour and he’s feeling fantastic. But a few years ago, something happened to Tommy which could have changed this picture most dramatically. In November 1998, he fell asleep at the wheel, and drove his car into a tree. He broke his neck and is tremendously lucky to not only be alive, but to have made a full and complete recovery. He was back on tour in May 1999, less than a year later.
Wow! I say, impressed. I ask him how he managed it. Tommy says he ignored the advice of his doctors, who told him to give up smoking, and to rest.
‘I suppose I’m typical, being the youngest of six. I just do not do anything that I am told to do. If somebody says “Tommy, you have to do that,” I will go and do the opposite.’
So, if I said he had to eat sugar?
“I’d say I’m not eating sugar! I do what I want to do. I’m a bull-headed Taurean. I went go to the pub every night and played cards. It was the only way I could get some sleep. It was either that or take sleeping tablets. Which is worse, getting addicted to sleeping pills, or having the normal four or five pints?”
I have to admit that I can’t answer that one, but Tommy looks fabulous, whatever he’s been doing.
‘I enjoy a pint,” he says. “I’m sure if I went to an AA meeting, they’d tell me I have a drink problem!’ Tommy giggles, infectiously. He does this a lot. ‘Can you imagine having to walk into a pub and say I can only have one unit?’
On a more serious note, I ask if he’d been drinking the night of the accident.
‘Absolutely not,” he says. ‘It was tiredness, pure and simple. I’d just released my album “Restless Spirit’ and I was doing what I do all the time, running from radio station to radio station. In one day I had driven from Cork to Carlow, from there to Limerick and from there to Galway, then to Sligo and then home to Ballina. I was knackered, it happened in a split second, I fell asleep and ploughed straight into a tree.”
Tommy was knocked out and when he came round, the car was on fire.
“ I’ll never forget it. I didn’t know I’d broken my neck, I thought I had whiplash. I got up and started walking. The car blew up twenty minutes after I got out of it. It all seems surreal, when I look back on it because so many things happened in that one hour that could have killed me. Walking with a broken neck, for a start and then possibly being trapped in the car when it blew up. And then I got into my sister’s car and she drove me to a hospital, twenty three miles away, bumping along the road, all the way, with the broken neck. I ended up going to Castlebar General Hospital, complaining of a pain in my neck. They saw a small fracture, but they sent me to Dublin for a Catscan and they confirmed that I had broken the vertebrae right at the back, but it was a stable fracture and that was what saved me. I was brought into theatre and put into a metal frame, a halo brace and that was it.”
Tommy was in the brace for four months.
‘Which was a nightmare. I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t have a shower and I love my shower, I’m a two showers a day man! I couldn’t drive a car, couldn’t sleep on my side. People don’t believe me, when I tell them this, but I came out of hospital on the Tuesday and on Friday night, I went out to the pub.”
Was he worried about what they would say, down the pub?
“Oh, yes. I looked ridiculous. I had bolts going into my skull, I looked like Frankenstein. And it was embarrassing, not being able to wear the clothes I wanted to, I love clothes! I had to wear my father’s big cardigans and huge shirts. And I had a scarf, to wrap around the bars. So I looked absolutely huge. And my hair was growing underneath the whole thing, so I couldn’t put gel or wax on my hair.”
I have to laugh at this. Oh my God! I say. How terrible. He’s indignant.
“It was all over the place! That sounds very shallow, doesn’t it? But my hair’s very fuzzy, normally.”
He’s quite vain, then?
‘I am. I worry about my appearance.”
You have wonderful skin, I say. Do you use cosmetics? He’s pleased.
‘Do you think so? That’s all down to Clinique moisturiser! I’ve looked after it since I was nineteen. I’m a big sissy, I’ll admit it. But we’ve all got good skin, in my family, from my mother’s side.”
Maybe he’s born with it…
“Maybe it’s Maybelline! But if I don’t look after myself, I’ll end up looking like an old handbag!”
We agree that Tommy doesn’t come from the Keith Richards school of performer.
After the accident, Tommy changed his lifestyle and learned a thing or two about what to value, in life.
‘I don’t want to say that I’m such a great person now, that’s bullshit. But it calmed me down, because I had nearly five months of convalescence. I couldn’t do the party thing, and I suddenly discovered who my real friends are. The friends who turned out to be the real friends were people who genuinely knew me. At twenty seven, that’s a great thing to find out. Now, at thirty, I can say that I’ve got eight very close friends, and that’s a lot of friends.”
The other thing that happened was that he volunteered to help out with the charity Goal, in the Sudan.
“I was never so scared in my life!’ he admits.
“The people live in mud huts, they have no amenities and little or no food. It’s so primitive, it’s unbelieveable.’
There were rats in the store-room and a mud hut to sleep in and a cold shower was filled daily, from a well.
‘When they pointed to the toilet, I nearly died,” he says. “I didn’t go for three days!’
But despite all this, he was heart-broken when he left.
“I absolutely loved it and I would go back in the morning!” And he swears he would recommend it to anyone. I believe him. Millions wouldn’t.