Phil Coulter (born 19 February 1942) is an Irish songwriter, performer and music producer from Northern Ireland. With his writing partner Bill Martin he penned numerous hit songs for a variety of popular singers in the 1960s and 70s, and in the 1980s scored major successes performing his own material. He continues to be a popular performer in his native country and around the world.

Son of a policeman in a divided town

Coulter is from Derry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland. The two names attributed to the city have considerable significance in a divided region, and Coulter's family was acutely aware of this point of "difference", if only because his father was a policeman.

One of Phil 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.

Coulter's father, also called Phil, encouraged music in the house. He played the fiddle while the younger Coulter's mother played the upright piano — a Challen piano, which the son recalls was "the most important piece of furniture in the house".

Education

Coulter spent his secondary school years at St. Columb's College, whose other past pupils include playwright Brian Friel, Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, writer and literature professor Seamus Deane, author and military historian Richard Doherty, and Nobel Peace Laureate John Hume.

Beginnings of a career in music

He later studied music at the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB), but did not complete his degree. He started his first band there, playing early rock and roll music and recording two songs for a 'Rag Day' release. Coulter and a group of friends also started a Glee Club, and Coulter was playing the piano for eight hundred students on one memorable evening when the Beatles were performing in a nearby Belfast cinema, the Ritz. Two students were sent to talk to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, to invite them to join the Glee Club. But in the end they sent the headline performer on the tour, Helen Shapiro, one of whose songs was No. 1 in the United Kingdom at that time.

By 1964, his final year at university, Coulter had already written a couple of hit songs in Ireland and he moved to London, where his first job was as an arranger/songwriter with a music publisher in Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley. This lasted a few years but was not entirely satisfying.

Songwriting partnership with Bill Martin

In the late 1960s, he formed a writing partnership with Bill Martin and from this union several memorable songs would emerge. They wrote Sandie Shaw's Eurovision Song Contest winning entry, "Puppet on a String" (1967), which went on to become an international hit with more than 100 cover versions. They had another hit in 1968 in a song for Cliff Richard called "Congratulations". The Coulter-Martin partnership lasted more than fifteen years. During this time the team wrote for Dana, Richard Harris, Elvis Presley ("My Boy"), and the Bay City Rollers, for whom the team wrote nearly all of the band's hits. Coulter and Martin were also among several British musicians who contributed incidental music to the famous 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, the others including Syd Dale, Johnny Pearson and Johnny Hawksworth.

Sideman and producer

Coulter also moonlighted as a piano player and worked with such artists as Van Morrison (who gave him the 'Cool Filter' nickname), Tom Jones, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Rolling Stones. He became friends with Billy Connolly, the Scottish performer, and in the 1970s became deeply interested in Irish music, the music of his youth.

He produced three ground-breaking albums with Planxty, which had a seminal influence on modern Irish music, though the albums did not earn the artists much money. Christy Moore wrote: "He gave us a shite contract and we signed everything away. All that said, thirty years on, this album sounds good. He produced it well and ... he did have the foresight and wherewithal to record the band at a time when no one else was listening".

He also wrote most of the big hits for not only the Bay City Rollers, but Kenny and Slik among others during the teenybop boom of the 1970s and even appeared as a production credit on "Automatic lover" by Dee D. Jackson.

Going solo

In 1984 he released a solo instrumental album called Classic Tranquility that featured beloved Irish tunes. It was a national sensation. His follow-up, Sea of Tranquility, did even better, becoming the second-best selling album of all time in Ireland. He moved from London back to Ireland, where he set up a music room and office in his house in Bray, south of Dublin. He continued to record and perform around the world, notably at the White House on Saint Patrick's Day.

In 1995 the Irish Rugby Football Union asked Coulter to write a politically neutral anthem for the Ireland national rugby union team, which represents both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The result was "Ireland's Call". At matches played in the Republic, both "Amhrán na bhFiann" (as the anthem of the host nation) and "Ireland's Call" (as the anthem of the home team) are sung. Elsewhere, "Ireland's Call" is the only anthem used.

Coulter's official website notes that he has some 23 platinum records, thirty-nine gold and fifty-two silver albums. He also keeps one of the walls of his office blank, "to remind me that there’s still room for a lot more."

Sport

Coulter is a former president of Derry City F.C. and is known to be a supporter of the club, having attempted to help the club with its financial problems in the early 2000s. He has also helped Derry City's local rivals, Finn Harps, in their time of need.