We tracked down Eric Gudmunsen, who you may have seen recently in his viral video about Donald Trump, above. If you’ve not watched it, and only have three minutes to spare, stop reading this and press play. It’s hilarious.
The following comes from an online interview at 4:00 a.m., so if you spot a typo…
Without wanting to sound like your therapist, where did it all begin?
My name is Eric Gudmunsen and I’m a 55 year old Scottish busker. I started playing guitar at age 18, and thought that if I could learn to play something simple like Yesterday, that would be enough. Fast forward 37 years and to this day Yesterday is the hardest song I ever learned. My very first experience of busking was in Italy, five years later, hitchhiking around Europe.
Do you remember your first song?
The very first song I busked with was Country Roads, and I distinctly remember an American couple in Italy giving me some money and telling me that they were a long way from home too.
So, at the time you’re young, you’re playing the guitar, you’re hitchhiking … do you have any good travel stories?
Yes, that was a great trip. I was with my girlfriend and in Greece we hooked up with a gang of wandering minstrels from all over the world. As was to happen regularly, I clicked with the Irish guys, as I always had a love of Irish folk ballads. I teamed up with one guy from Cork and we started busking together on the trains in Athens.
We played and travelled together for a few weeks and at one point found ourselves busking in the subway in Rome. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. People were throwing in notes big style as the currency was mainly devalued lira notes at the time. The trouble was that every time a train came through, the notes would blow away with the gust of air. This led me to introduce one of the first bits of comedy to my act. Every time it happened, the Irish guy ran around retrieving the money while I would sing Blowing In The Wind.
You didn’t decide to stay in Italy then?
Well, the cops came and told us to stop. We did, but started again when we thought they’d gone. Of course they were waiting for that, and came straight back and threatened us with arrest. And being from the UK I’d never seen guns before so we packed up for real! I realised the reason we were making so much money was because busking wasn’t allowed there and the locals were obviously starved of live music. After that, I went back to my home town.
And continued busking until now?
No, I started playing in bars and hotels in my hometown, then pubs in Spain and Tenerife until 1999, when I moved to Ireland. All this time I was introducing a lot of comedy into my act and I loved the thrill of hearing laughter, especially the belly laughs that rude adult comedy brings.
Then in 2003, my wife to be and I took a two week holiday to Lanzarote and stayed for 7 years! We bought a bar which I ran as a comedy club. This gave me four hours a night of playing to tourists without any boss. I could sing and say what I liked and if people didn’t like it they could fuck off. Fortunately, most of them did like it.
Sounds like the street…
Yes! We had four great years and I decided to get a bigger bar. Mistake! I spent a lot of money, then in 2008 the world’s finances went into free fall, and took mine with them. So, in 2010, back to Ireland. We lived in Dublin for two years. I couldn’t seem to settle into playing in pubs and clubs, so I went back to busking.
I bought a little scooter and made my way downtown. I started by playing the roughest street in inner city Dublin during the day until a happy accident took me to Temple Bar one night around 9 p.m. I played for an hour and made more than I would in three or four daytime hours.
Busking became my main job and I worked every night. This is a huge tourist area and soon I learned to sing a little bit in German, Spanish, Italian and French. This has proven invaluable. In 2012 I moved back to where I live now. I spend my summers busking here and I’ve started traveling in the winter to warmer climes.
It’s a good life!
What’s your philosophy for the street? Do you have one? What’s the drive?
My philosophy for the street is “if you don’t like it…don’t do it.” I love it, and it loves me. When you think about it, whenever buskers play they work….and when they work they play.
Do you ever feel like you don’t get respect for being professional?
People come up to me nightly and tell me that I should be playing in pubs. I take great pleasure in telling them that I have no desire whatsoever to play in pubs. Pub owners/managers have to justify themselves and it always ends up with me being told, you’re really good, why don’t you try this? Or, that joke was a bit too rude for this place.
Busking takes all that bullshit out of the equation. I censor myself in the street and I haven’t got into trouble yet. The fact that I’m doing music and comedy means that I often draw a big crowd and if there a lot of children I tend to mouth the cuss words rather than say them. I always tell people that I love kids and that I have two of them at home….in the freezer!
Okay, onto the Trump song. Is it your first big hit?
I have always been someone who enjoys a good parody song so I tried my hand at writing a few.
I’d love some examples..
One early one was a piss take of Ryanair which ended up getting over 100,000 hits on Facebook around 2009 and I was delighted. I did a song about the unholy number of cover versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, set to; you guessed it, the tune of Hallelujah. I did songs about homelessness and the Irish recession. One of the songs that I am proudest of is a song that I actually refer to as a protest song rather than a comedy song. It’s called Hush Little Boys, and it concerns the endemic covering up of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Ironically I used the tune from Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris, but as it was written in 2009 it wasn’t actually ironic at the time!
So, when did you turn to politics?
I had been stirred by the Scottish Referendum in September 2014 and I was a bit sad that the Yes voters lost out by such a narrow margin. The result was declared on a Friday and the very next day a large Caledonian Society visited my town from the US, complete with pipers and little girls dancing in full Highland regalia. I got a lump in my throat as I realised that my country had become no more than a shortbread tin cover.
And the song about Trump?
Of course, I was aware of the name Donald Trump. He was someone who always seemed to be the butt of some joke or other. I never watched The Apprentice.
Now here he was, throwing his hat into the ring for the highest office in the land. I watched a Hell of a lot of the presidential coverage between January and April. So by the time the American visitors started their yearly migration to my home town, I was acutely aware that something was in the air. Or should that be hair?
So I thought about a possible parody song lampooning The Donald. My first idea was to use the tune of an old children’s song called Nellie the Elephant which has a beautiful strident refrain of Trump! Trump! Trump!
I wrote one verse and tried it out in the street that night. My modus operandi is to stop US tourists and ask them to judge a new song. After three tries, I realised that Americans did not have a clue who Nellie the Elephant was and care even less. So it was back to the drawing board.
One of the very first songs that I played and sang while learning the guitar was Paul Simon’s The Boxer. It is universally known with a particularly memorable wordless chorus. For a few years I had always introduced this song as being a song for politicians, due to the Lie La Lie refrain. This usually got a bit of a laugh so I thought about using this tune for the Trump song. The lyrics took about 20-30 minutes to write. It actually wrote itself. And the tacking on of a snippet of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land seemed strangely sweet too.
From there it was light the blue touch paper and stand well back. Recognition was instant, belly laughs were instant, and requests to sing it again and again were instant.
Your prop toupee is fantastic. When did you get that?
After a couple of brave but futile attempts to fashion a Trump wig out of latex rubber Elvis wigs that I had and gold spray paint (my hands and all my busking gear were constantly gold flecked!), I managed to locate a Drumpf wig from the States off EBay…..and we were off to the races!!
So, do you have a Hillary song as well, or just the Trump song?
I’d been singing the Trump song for about a week when a Golfer from Florida asked me where my Hillary song was. He said he’d tip me handsomely if I had one for him by the next night. I thought I’d never see him again but I’d already been thinking that a bi-partisan approach would suit my purposes from a financial point of view, so I wrote a song that night to the tune of Ghost Riders in the Sky and called it Crooked Hillary.
I took the lyrics into town that night, laminated of course, and tried it out. Sure enough the guy who had commissioned the song showed up. He enjoyed the song although he had hoped for something even more savage, and true to his word, he gave me the second biggest tip of my season thus far.
So, I’ve pretty much been singing these two songs on a loop for two months now, mostly by request. Someone filmed me singing them and put them onto social media. The Trump song has now gone a bit viral, which is nice.
Have you noticed any change in how people have responded to the song, since a Trump presidency has become more of a possibility?
As the year has progressed I have seen the mood of Trump supporters change from one of embarrassment to one of defiance and I feel that the election is going to be very tense. I diffuse potential problems for myself by telling people that when I wrote these two songs, I intended for them to be funny and not offensive, so if anyone is offended….tough shit!
As a comedian, it is my genuine belief that offense is something that can only be taken, never given.
A funny footnote is that while all this was brewing, the Brexit issue was also underway and people weren’t sure if I was meant to be Trump or Boris Johnston. A few people asked me why a Brit had written a song about US politics rather than one about Brexit and I jokingly told them….Yanks tip, Brits don’t! (Not true by the way.)
For the first time, I am selling these songs online via CDBaby and iTunes.
http://cdbaby.com/cd/ericgudmunsen – Trump
http://cdbaby.com/cd/ericgudmunsen2 – Hillary
I’m repeatedly being asked my own opinion on these matters and I diplomatically reply with the following.
Donald is for Donald and no one else. Hillary is for THEM, and I’ve no idea who THEY are. But I do know that they’re not me!!!
What’s your main tactic – what’s the base of your success?
Since busking became my main business, the most important thing to me is to try to make people happy. I consider myself an entertainer first and foremost. The biggest satisfaction that I get from busking is when a total stranger tells me that I’ve made their night by giving them a good laugh from a joke and a good cry from a song.
The second biggest is when I’ve spent ten minutes checking out a beautiful woman’s arse, then her husband/boyfriend comes over and gives me €5!
I’ve said too much now. I was thinking of writing a busking memoir called King Of The Gutter and this is in danger of becoming that book.
You ever feel like it’s for the money?
Money! Too vulgar to talk about. Whenever someone asks me how much I make, I just say twice as much as you.
Any advice for other buskers?
This year, after six years of professional busking I invested in a large fishing umbrella. Best move ever. Rainy damp nights can be great.
Thanks!
Know someone we should interview? Let us know!