Getting Your Hands On A Man Of No Importance Lyrics
I ran into this a few months ago when I was trying to track down the exact words to a track for a church youth group performance. You'd think this would be straightforward, but with older Irish stage musicals, the lyric sheets are nowhere near as centralized as they are for Broadway stuff. Let me walk through what I actually did. The show A Man of No Importance premiered in 2001 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with book and lyrics by Dónal McLernon and music also by McLernon. It won an Evening Standard Award for Best Musical. So the material is legit, but it's not the kind of thing you'll find neatly indexed on Genius or AZLyrics the way you would for a pop single.
A Man Of No Importance Lyrics
Here's the main thing I learned: the most reliable source for the complete lyrics is actually the official sheet music published by Concord Theatricals. I ended up buying the vocal selection book because standalone lyric PDFs floating around the internet turned out to be either incomplete or riddled with errors from fan transcriptions. One site had "Somethin' Nice" wrong in at least three places — the melody doesn't match what they typed. I also checked the Musical Playwrights Index and the MTI (Music Theatre International) catalog. MTI holds the licensing rights, and their published libretto includes the full lyrics. If you're producing this show, you have to go through them anyway, so you get the authoritative text that way. For just reading the lyrics, their digital libretto service sometimes makes them available if you license the show. The track listing runs something like this — "It Was Almost Like a Song," "Somethin' Nice," "He's Just a Man of No Importance," "You Will Never Walk Alone" (the covers version), "I'm Not Alone," and "Tomorrow." The lyrics for the title song especially get butchered on crowdsourced sites because people guess at dialect spellings rather than checking the published script.
My workaround for the bad transcriptions was to order the Concord vocal book and then cross-reference anything that looked off against the original cast recording from 2001. The lyrics on the recording match the published text exactly, and once I had that reference point, I stopped trusting random websites. If you need it cheap, the library route works too — the Abbey Theatre archive has the script on file, and interlibrary loan will pull it if your local branch can find it. One thing I should note that isn't obvious: the 2002 film version starring Albert Finney actually changes some of the lyrics between the stage and screen versions. So if you're comparing lyrics across sources and they don't match, it might not be a typo — it might be a different adaptation entirely. I found that out the hard way when I spent twenty minutes arguing with myself over a line that turned out to simply be written differently in the movie.
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