Acclaimed Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader has opened up about the pain of losing the love of her life, John Douglas, to oesophageal cancer last month.
The musician spoke about the comfort performing is bringing her as she returned to the late guitarist and songwriter’s ancestral home in Connemara to scatter his ashes.
The frontwoman of British band Fairground Attraction was in Co Galway this week to perform at Clifden Arts Festival.
It was part of an Irish tour with The Alan Kelly Gang that Reader described as “healing” in the wake of her husband’s death on August 3rd at the age of 63.
Reader was accompanied by friends and several of Douglas’s Connemara relatives on Monday as she scattered ashes of the former member of the Scottish band The Trashcan Sinatras in the cottage ruins of his great-grandfather’s home in Glynsk near Carna.
Douglas was born in Govan, Glasgow, to Scottish-Irish parents, but Reader said that “Connemara became a vital component of his human experience”.
Speaking on Tuesday in advance of her gig in Clifden, she said her husband’s “energy of song and creativity … probably came directly out of the rocks of Connemara”.
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She recited lyrics of a song Douglas wrote called “Connemara” – “the glint in the eye and a fresh scallop moon” – as she recalled how proud he was of his Connemara roots, his maternal great-grandfather Séan Keane and the broader Keane or Ó Cadhain family.
The ruins where Reader scattered her husband’s ashes were exactly where Douglas had gone down on one knee in the summer of 2011 to propose to her with a “€5 glittering ring” she had admired hours earlier in a local craft shop.
“I was overjoyed,” she said.
Reader said the couple’s love song was “Dindi”, a duet by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Frank Sinatra. They listened to it together on his deathbed and “his heart stopped just after the last refrain”, she said.
Since his death, she has been “navigating something that is shocking for all of us”, but she also experienced profound grief before when her grandmother died in 1988.
“I’d just had a number one record with Fairground Attraction and ‘Perfect’, and my grandmother passed away that year, and nothing else mattered; everything else was irrelevant. I realised we had a temporary existence,” she said.
“It’s only when they go, all the messy bits that you’ve been tying together, like a tapestry, you tie together all the knots, and you sew them up and see all this messy life tapestry underside.
“And then they pass away or when their body is over and they make the transition to where they go, then the tapestry turns over and you see the beauty of what you have created, and that’s what I’m dealing with now,” said Reader.
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When Douglas died, her initial reaction was to cancel all bookings, but she said she “felt this roaring voice saying: ‘No, you’ve got to sing these songs’”.
Reader recalled how, in the last week of his life, Douglas, who wrote many of the songs she performs on stage, insisted she fulfil a commitment to perform at Warwick Folk Festival.
She felt she was going to “fall to bits” but “I forced myself on stage”.
“Something happened to me like a muscle memory. I was determined to have joy between me and the audience,” she said.
“I decided I was going to go with the flow, and it was amazingly healing. At the end, the band were shocked, I was shocked – I couldn’t believe how powerful it felt.”
She has channelled that memory during The Alan Kelly Gang Ireland tour, during which Kelly and his wife Steph Geremia have a photograph of Douglas on stage during performances.
“I realised he was with me. I’m not anybody. I’m nobody. I’m this vessel, and John is with me, and John would want to play. That’s all we ever did throughout our lives. When we felt low, we would play,” she said.
A photograph of John Douglas, guitarist with The Trashcan Sinatras and the late husband of Eddi Reader, displayed on stage during performances by Reader and The Alan Kelly Gang on their current tour of Ireland this week.
“Alan [Kelly] said to the audience: ‘It’s very brave that Eddi is here’, but I said: ‘I’m not brave; this is me running away into the place that makes us feel beautiful, that makes us feel joyous, makes us feel connected to source, which is music’,” she said.
“It’s the only place I feel that I am healed or can be healed. I’m not brave. There is no Eddi any more; there is this person who is new in the world with John by my side.”
Eddi Reader continues her tour with The Alan Kelly Gang at Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo, on Thursday and The Mandela Hall Belfast on Friday. She’s also on tour nationwide from February 11th to 21st, 2027.