I said, ‘Who’s this? Bugger off, I’m watching Star Trek.’” The caller was Pierce Brosnan. He wanted to tell her father’s story.Doyle visited the film set in Dublin and watched with some trepidation as Pierce Brosnan played the part of her Dad. He’d only kept one newspaper cutting, the one that said ‘Evelyn comes home tomorrow’.”"The only thing I’d written before was police reports,” Doyle says, but she wrote down a few notes and then returned to Dublin to trace old press cuttings and court papers. She handed an outline to a drama editor at the BBC since she hoped it would be made into a television play For years nothing happened.

Before Desmond died he became very upset, saying he wished he’d done more with his life. She knew the battles he’d fought to have her and her brothers released from children’s homes, how he’d changed the law and how he’d brought them up whatever the hardships. “I knew he’d touched thousands of lives so I decided to write his story down, but I had nothing to go on. He had a bad temper, but I have a bit of a bad temper too”.Whatever faults her father may havehad, Doyle can never forget one thing “He never left us I’ll bang that drum forever My father never left us until the day he died My mother left us that day in 1953 My baby brother was in hospital getting skin grafts. He’d been badly burned when she was away from the house and had left us on our own.”Years after her mother left home, Doyle decided to seek her out, but the eventual reunion with her real “Mammy” was not the joyful occasion she’d hoped for. “When I came to see her she introduced me to her four children as someone she used to look after when their mammy was in hospital.

She didn’t acknowledge me as her daughter, or their half-sister I was 21 then. “It was like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen since school days The bond had gone completely. I realised then that I’d done my grieving for her when I was a child”.What drives someone to relive such painful memories? In Doyle’s case it was a desire to set down her father’s achievements. Fast alternates with slow, loud with soft, yearning lyricism in the piano and clarinet or flute develops into motor-driven sections with the strings and percussion, whose rising urgency is only halted by the snap of wood blocks. It is continuous, comprising seven sections that return, as its title suggests, to a revisiting of the opening.

She gathered awards – Guggenheim fellowships, Fulbright grants – like other people do blackberries, and in 1962, in Frankfurt, had the distinction of being the first American woman to have an opera performed in Europe.Full Circle is a concentrated 13-minutes, scored for small ensemble, with piano prominent. Not only is this to restore a hidden thread of musical life, but to help future female composers to realise that they are not the lonely pioneers/freaks of nature that their isolation forces them to believe that they must be.Splendidly laudable aims, but was Louise Talma (1906-96) – who looks, from her photograph in Grove’s, a bit like Nancy Banks-Smith – worth it? French-born, but quickly moved back to America by her mother after her father’s death, Talma studied music in America and at Fontainebleau, where she was taught piano by Isidor Philipp and composition by Nadia Boulanger. There’s time for one more instrumental session before they slope off stage, young men waving shyly to the crowd, with a couple of belting tunes in their pockets, and hopefully more to come.. It was a perfectly appetising bill of fare at St John’s, Smith Square: the Ambache Chamber Orchestra with a Haydn symphony – no 83, nicknamed “The Hen”; and one of Mozart’s most buoyant piano concertos, no 19 in F major (K495); flanking the European premiere of Louise Talma’s Full Circle…

This concert was fourth in her two-year project to present works by seven American women of the last century who, with the exception of Amy Beach, never registered with the English public. Much of this music has never been heard in Europe, but by bookending these unknowns with familiar classics, Ambache hopes at least to gain them a hearing. They then launch into the set’s high point, “Getaway”, that begins with Harvey asking rather tenderly, “What’s it like up there/ Do you worry any more/ How’s it feel up there/ So much left to say…” which for the first time offers some form of lyrical depth before turning into a roaring psychedelic jam.There’s a brief and slightly incongruous acoustic interlude with “Jigsaw”, but we’re quickly back on more familiar ground with “Take the Long Road and Walk”, the most rapturously received song of the evening that plays to The Music’s strengths. The first few tracks pass without distinction, the generic guitar sound and the lyrical babble about “freedom” alleviated only by the drumming of Phil Jordan, whose rhythms manage to carry the band through some pretty uninspiring stuff.But when they’re good, as they are on a handful of tracks here, The Music are very good indeed. The single releases from their eponymous album are undoubtedly The Music’s strongest material and make up a rousing middle section of the show.