New album inspired by 300 love letters between Collins and Kitty

HE has gone from trading in gold bullion and commodities on Wall Street to working in the tech industry during the boom in the Middle East.

Now Sri Lankan-born Mustafa Khetty has released a concept album that charts the love affair between the Irish rebel leader, Michael Collins, and his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan.

Mustafa has close ties to Ireland. It was as a boarder at Wesley College in Dublin that he first learned about Collins.

“My fascination with him started in history classes at school, where an iconoclastic teacher would describe the characters who made history,” says Mustafa.

“The teacher, Michael Halliday, would go into the strengths and weaknesses of these people. Michael Collins was magnetic, daring and exceptionally gifted. The teacher talked about his escapades and his Houdini tactics that meant never getting caught. He discussed the Treaty of which Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith were the principal personalities.”

About two years ago, Mustafa spotted ads for the Michael Collins’s historical societies in Dublin and Laois on his facebook page. He became a member of them. This gave him access to “tonnes of material on Michael and his life. Experts and historians piqued my curiosity and then I guess I had a Eureka moment. He was a guy who took on the British Empire with his band of merry men and won.”

Mustafa always wanted a career in music. With his four brothers, he was sent to Wesley College at the age of 11.

“It was a case of the normal route of sending children from Sri Lanka for education, usually to the UK,” he says.

Wesley College was recommended to Mustafa’s father. Mustafa says he found it easy to integrate.

“I think the Irish weather was the principal change for me. We were sports mad and Ireland is sports mad. I mostly played rugby and cricket.”

But Mustafa, now a composer, couldn’t follow his dream to pursue music after leaving school.

“Unfortunately, in our culture in those days most of us followed the line of our parents and mentors. My father was in business in Dubai. I went to the Dublin Institute of Technology and did a degree in finance and management, conferred by Trinity College. Getting work on Wall Street was a fluke. All the elite schools are a conduit for Wall Street careers. I think my Middle East connection got me on Wall Street.”

However, the would-be composer found the competition and the high-powered environment “nauseating at times”.

“It was my boss who was instrumental in my decision to leave Wall Street after two years. One day he asked me what I saw at work. I said that I saw a lot of people in front of screens looking anxious and angry. He said to look again. I gave up. He said ‘Don’t you think we may have evolved from the apes?’ He advised me to get out.”

Mustafa’s friends and family thought he was mad to give up such a lucrative (but dispiriting) career.

“I had been using a lot of tech on Wall Street. It was at the cusp of the tech boom. After detoxing from the Wall Street electric environment, I got into the tech business mostly in Dubai and then the Far East up to 2017.”

Mustafa’s ‘Eureka moment’ was to make an album about the Big Fella and his true love.

“I wanted to stay out of politics and write a love story that makes him amenable to all sides. A lot of it is based around the 300 letters that Michael and Kitty wrote before and during the peace talks in London.”

He cites historian FSL Lyons who said that history is really written after 100 years when the emotions are out.

“Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, Michael Collins, is hugely responsible for bringing his persona towards what it should be. He is the most written about man of the era.”

Mustafa hopes that his album on Cork’s most famous son will attract worldwide interest.

The album has 22 tracks in total filled with music and narration.

Mustafa points out that Michael Collins inspired the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi and Che Guevara.

“MI5 studied his guerrilla tactics. They couldn’t believe that one man could take on British intelligence.”

Mustafa was intrigued by the love affair between Michael and Kitty.

“She was a socialite and a fashionista. She enjoyed the admiration of men. She was attractive, although Michael first fell for her sister, Helen, who was considered a beauty. But she was already committed to a solicitor. Initially, Kitty was dating Harry Boland, Michael’s bosom friend. When Harry went to the U.S, Michael and Kitty got engaged.”

It was, Mustafa reckons, a relationship of equals. They were both educated and well read. Michael had faith in women.

“Many of his spies were women. Some of them took on exceptionally high risk, dangerous work. The names of the British intelligence spies in Dublin that Michael took out on Bloody Sunday were given by a woman spy. Imagine if the British had found out, she’d have been sushi. They would have eaten her alive.”

Towards the end, before Michael was ambushed and killed at Béal na Bláth in August, 1922, the relationship with Kitty “became amorous and got deeper. As soon as he got back from the Treaty negotiations in December, 1921, he announced his engagement to Kitty. She never got over him.”

She got married in 1925 to General Felix Cronin. The couple had two children.

Mustafa got a lot of help for his album from descendants of Michael Collins, including Neil Collins-Powell from Cork and Aengus O’Malley, who lives in London.

“Both men are really erudite when it comes to Michael. There’s a ton of information which was generously shared with me. The family continues to keep the torch lighting despite, post his death, there was an element of trying to brush Michael out of history.”

When Mustafa went about making the album, entitled Torn in Love, Torn Apart, he had “a small army of assistants to help me.” He describes the music as neoclassical.

“For instance, in Overture, there’s Irish folk instrumentation; the flute, the harp and the bodhrán. There’s a Vivaldi-like dance with elements of traditional music reflecting Kitty Kiernan’s pre-Collins life as a dance-loving socialite. There’s a funk/rap track to highlight the hide and seek mischief of Collins’ escapades with British intelligence.”

There is also prog-rock, a genre that Mustafa loves.

“My approach is in the style of the ’70s epics, most of all by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the way he mixed neoclassical and prog.”

The vocalists on the album are young tenor Emmet Cahill and Celtic soprano Emer De Barra. The Irish actress Claire O’Donovan is the narrator. The Dublin Gospel Choir have added their voices to the album.

“The track set the day before Michael is shot is a requiem. The next track to capture the tragic day of August 22 begins with simple chords that open into prog-rock heavy metal and ends with machine gun fire and a single bullet. It returns to the original theme with Kitty’s worst nightmare – no more Michael.”

Mustafa regards Collins as a world hero. Certainly, the Big Fella’s short but impactful life has given the composer plenty of material for his concept album that he hopes will have international appeal.

See mustafakhetty.com