CPI - Clare People Interactive

In late 2006, Clare People Interactive (CPI), was born. It was one of Ireland's first dedicated podcasting sites, and the first Irish website to offer free audio and video content to accompany article written for the traditional print media.

Over the following four or five years, I recorded and edited well over 100 podcast interviews, mostly with Irish and international musicians and authors. When the site wound down in late 2010, I had accumulated nearly 48 hours worth of audio podcasts, not to mention a handful of video podcasts, scores of online album reviews and hosted Ireland's [and maybe the world's] first podcast festival, Podfest 2007.

CPI was shortlisted for a Golden Spider Award on three separate occasions, twice in conjunction with the main Clare People website and once in its own right. It was also shortlisted for a Digital Media Award and was even nominated for two radio awards [go figure].

This blog is a growing archive of the now defunct CPI site. I am slowly [painstakingly slowly] uploading all these podcast interview to various audio clouds and linking them all here - sometimes also including the text which featured in the original article.

This is slow going. Any of the interviews listed below with active links [that would be the ones with bold blue links] can be listened to right now for free. The rest will come in time. If you spot a particular interview that you are dying to listen to, please drop me a line to andrewhamiltonwork@gmail.com and I'll see can I get it online asap.

Also, if you spot any broken links, or anything that is not as it should be, please do let me know.

Also also, Virgin Records have taken issue with the sample of Air's Sexy Boy which I had been using as the shows intro. So I've recorded an a cappella version to use instead. It's a big goofy but I kinda like it...

Also, also, also, I'm since grown tired of the a cappella version and have gone instead for a little jingle myself and my daughter Claudia recorded - me on guitar and Claudia on the melodica.

Thanks, enjoy the podcasts and please forgive the occasionally dodgy sound quality,

Cheers,

Andy


A

Professor David Acheson

Adam and Darcie

B
Balcony TV

Clive Barnes 

Dave Geraghty of Bell X1

Ken Bruen

The Beautiful South (Dave Rotheray)

Tom Baxter

Bell X1 (Dave Geraghty)

The Blue Nile (Paul Buchanan)

Paul Brady

Breakdown Rambler

Baum

Nell Bryden 

C

Paddy Casey

Carlene Carter

Paddy Casey

Adrian Crowley

Mary Coughlan

CPI Music Awards

The CMC

Cuckoo Savante

Eoin Coughlan

D

Dark Room Notes 

Duke Special (2006)

Duke Special (2007)

Marie Doyle Kennedy

Damien Dempsey

The Dandy Warhols

The Dandy Warhols

Drugzilla

Drugzilla (2009)

Donncha Ó'Dúlaing

Dead Cat Bounce

Cathy Davey (2008)

Cathy Davey (2010)

Dire Straits (John)

David O'Doherty

Director

Delorentos  

E

Joe Echo

F

Mick Flannery

Frank and Walters (Paul) 

The Flaws

Frank and Walters/FIFA Records (Ashley)

Fight Like Apes (Jamie)

Fight Like Apes (MayKay)

Mick Flannery

Fred

Jerry Fish

Froud 

Julie Feeney

G

Gorbachov

Nanci Griffith

Grand Pocket Orchestra

Julian Gough

Julian Gough

Rory Gallagher

Stace Gill

Rory Grubb

Dave Geraghty 

H

Richard Hawley (PULP)

Gemma Hayes

Lisa Hannigan

Lisa Hannigan (2009)

Home (Alan Cooke)

Horslips

David Hope

I

I'm From Barcelona

The Infomatics

Rick, Bruce and Paul Weller

Andy Irvine

J

The Jam (Rick Buckner)

Mark James

The Jimmy Cake (Jurgen)

K

Phil King (Other Voices)

Kila (Rónán)

Dan Kennedy

Jon Kenny

Spider John Koerner

Jinx Lennon

L

Jinx Lennon

Daniel Lanois

Lilac Blue

The Lightning Seeds 

M
Pearse McGloughlin

Erin McKeown

Mundy

Mundy (2009)

Ronan Moloney

Mp3 Hugger

Muggar Dave

Jim McKee

Mumford and Sons

Mumford and Sons

Mail Order Messiahs

Eleanor McEvoy 

Lou McMahon

O

Simon O'Reilly

Declan O'Rourke

Declan O'Rourke (2009)

Maura O'Connell

Ocean Colour Scene

P

Pier 19

Ocean Colour Scene

R

Eddi Reader

Red Stick Ramblers 

RSAG

Fionn Regan 

S

The Stunning

Skazz

Sanzkrit

The Speks (Quince)

Stiff Little Fingers

Seneca

Saw Doctors

Candi Staton 

Spiritualized

Stereo MCs 

Size2Shoes 

The Stunning

T

Sean Tyrrell

Travis (Neil)

Sandi Thom

Teenage Fanclub

U

Unseen Sounds: Aileen

Unseen Sounds: Breakdown Rambler 

Unseen Sounds: Fia Rua 

Unseen Sounds: Kiernan McMullan 

Unseen Sounds: Meadhbh Boyd 

Unseen Sounds: Serious Mischief

Unseen Sounds: Van Diemens  

Stiff Little Fingers

W

Garrett Wall

Walter Mitty & the Realists

The Walls

Y

You're Only Massive

#

28 Costumes

The Teenage Fanclub Podcast

It shouldn’t work but it does. Andrew Hamilton chats to Gerry Love about the multiple-personality-disorder which is Teenage Fanclub.

Gerry Love has seen his share over the last 20 years. From those big- label days, when even Kurt Cobain thought they were the best band in the world, to their more recent endeavours, when the Scottish three-piece-plus-a-drummer began to live less in each other’s pockets and more in each other’s work schedules. That’s why, when he says that the band is still close - and it’s the music and not their personalities that keep them together - you’re inclined to believe him. “If we are touring, if we are in each other’s close proximity for a while then we do share music and talk about what we are into now and things like that. And more often than not it turns out that we are still into the same things. But we don’t really communicate, in some ways, in terms of actual words. If someone just puts down some music, then the rest of us know they are doing okay. We don’t really sit about talking - we talk about football and world events - we don’t really ask each other how we are getting on. But somehow we each know how the rest are getting on [without talking]. It’s sort of a weird, intuitive sort of relationship. Although Norman is living in Canada now, it doesn’t really feel that he is that far away. I live near Raymond and Francis but I probably see them as much as I see Norman. But that’s fine, we all have our own lives now. When we meet up in a place to do what we do, it still feel very natural. I think even the fact that we can still make music and people still like it tells its own story, regardless of whether we go for a pint with each other or something. The fact that we can have a harmonious relationship together in a musical sense is quite a deep feeling," he said.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #130 The Teenage Fanclub Podcast

The Adrian Crowley Podcast

With a growing reputation and a Choice Music Prize-winning album under his belt, Adrian Crowley is an artist on the rise. Andrew Hamilton chats to the late-bloomer of Irish music.

By the age of 25 most people are packing in their teenage dream. Too old to play for Man United, too lacking in star quality to be an actor, too much of a grown-up to be a rock star. Yet it is at just this age that the world first began to hear the name of Galway musician Adrian Crowley. While Crowley is certainly a late developer from an “industry” point of view, his music and song-writing is something aged and matured over many years. It was a long journey, but one that, according to Crowley, that had to be made. “I think the music brought me there itself. I didn’t start out with too many great expectations of making a career out of it. The way I approached it was that when most people would have been out there looking for gigs I started working on my first album. I took an unusual approach to the whole thing. So, the momentum started growing slowly over a few years so when I finally decided to go full-time it just happened by itself. I wasn’t really a decision that I would try and make a go of it but there was one year when it all just started coming for me and I went with it. I was doing music to satisfy something that I was striving for - I had no idea what people would make of it and I wasn’t trying to sell it to anyone. I think that had an influence on the music that came out on the other end. People are always telling me how unusual my music sounded and different from what they might have heard before.” 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #128 The Adrian Crowley Podcast

The RSAG Podcast

Andrew Hamilton chats to Jeremy Hickey aka Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) about success from the sidelines and his latest album, Be It Right Or Wrong.

Jeremy Hickey never set out to be a one-off. After learning his trade behind the kit, the Kilkenny drummer plied his skill in small venues around the southern coast of Ireland, learning and experimenting as he went. When a borrowed four-track recording presented him with a window into life as a solo recording artist, a giant light-bulb went off in his brain. He hadn’t got there yet, but with this new discovery - and the new moniker of Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) - he finally knew what road he had to take. When his second album Organic Sampler was short-listed for the Choice Music Prize in 2008, he knew he had almost made it. But despite his success and critical acclaim, there was still a large slice of doubt in his mind. It took 10 long years to get there, but there was still a very real chance that people just wouldn’t get it. “I probably still get a lot of that, I’d say. Definitely. When I started out, everyone thought that it would work. Some people backed away from me going ‘I just don’t know about this’. There was a long, long time when people were very stand- offish. But when it really started to get going and we got happier with the visual side of RSAG, then it changed. The music was always there but the idea of presenting it live was the tricky one. I think after a while people just got used to it - you know, the idea that what I was doing was a little bit different,” he says. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #127 The RSAG Podcast

The Walls Podcast

Five years after the release of New Dawn Breaking, The Walls are back with a new strut to their step. Andrew Hamilton chats to Steve Wall about protest songs, fresh plans to conquer America and the problem of being your own worst enemy. 

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, a book caught hold of Joe Wall. When he had finished, he passed it to his brother Steve and before they touched down in Australia, both had walked The Road with Cormac McCarthy. That book, like every great piece of art, has a way of lingering. Three years later and the shards of The Road began to resurface. Mingled with thought of recession, and the generations of Irish who carried their fire to every corner of the world, an idea sparked at 30,000 feet became the hopeful, up-temp song of the summer. “We went to Australia three years ago to do some support for Crowded House and it was on that long flight that we all read The Road. Joe read it first and then passed it to me and I remember not moving out of my seat until I closed the last page. Joe took that line from the book - the idea of carrying the fire. He must have made a mental note of it and it came over into the song. One thing which is interesting about it is that he has taken the phrase and brought it into the Irish context. The lyrics are about the Irish diaspora post-famine. I don’t know of many other Irish pop songs that namecheck Oliver Cromwell or the people in the coffin ships. So it’s
a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meets Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea but in a pop song - that’s the best way I can describe it," said Steve.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #126 The Walls Podcast

The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast

There was a time when Ocean Colour Scene was the hottest band in the world. Andrew Hamilton talks to frontman Simon Fowler about the new folk revival, being happy on the fringes of Britpop and how being unfashionable has become the key to their success.

Down the years, the sleepy village of Knebworth has become accustomed to a certain amount of action. Sat lazily in the northern end of Hertfordshire, just to the south of Stevenage, Knebworth is a village unremarkable in just about every way. Except, that is, that every so often it plays host to some of the most important concerts ever. It started in ‘79 when Zeppelin came to town; Queen soon followed and then Deep Purple chose it as the venue for their first gig in more than 15 years. But there was no bigger night than August 11, 1996. On that day, Oasis were joined by Ocean Colour Scene for the second in a set of two concerts that would re-write history. Close on 400,000 people saw Ocean Colour Scene perform live over those two balmy evenings, but more - 2.6 million more to be exact - requested tickets for what has since been recognised as the largest free concert ever to take place. But that was just the start for Ocean Colour Scene. Eight months later, their third album Marchin’ Already would push their mentors Oasis off the top of the album chart, making them, for a while at least, the top dogs of Brit pop. Yet despite the massive help that it gave his band, Britpop was never something that sat easily with Simon Fowler. “I think Oasis changed the perception of what popular music really was at that time. We had been doing the same kind of thing for years and then suddenly they come along and say that, actually, they do like The Beatles and they don’t have to make excuses for it. So we would have been in their camp and in Paul Weller’s camp but really I would have seen Britpop as more about Blur and Pulp and the NME, and we weren’t really linked with that. We certainly weren’t welcome in the NME club,” he says.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #125 The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast

The Cathy Davey Podcast [2010]

After releasing one of the Irish albums of the decade, no one expected Cathy Davey to be dropped by her record label. Ahead of the release of her third and most implicitly personal album ever, she spoke to Andrew Hamilton about getting over her musical embarrassment and being forced to really sing for her supper.

The gloves have finally come off. After eight years of writing very personal yet heavy veiled music, Cathy Davey has found a way to be herself. While the confidence garnered from the success of Tales of Silversleeve was certainly a help in this new awakening, more important was her new method, or even the concept, behind the making of this album. Make no mistake, Cathy Davey’s third album, The Nameless - due for release this week - is a concept album. While concept albums have often been used as a means for the artist to take an alternative look at the world, the journey of this record is one of self-discovery, of finding a way of describing what in the past has remained, well, nameless. “I think I’ve always been personal [as a songwriter] but I probably didn’t have as much experience. Interesting things happen as you get older and it would be a shame not to be as candid as you can be. With this record, I was able to get past my own censorship because of the theme of ‘The Nameless’ which I had running through it. The Nameless is the woman in these songs and she is always an exaggerated version of me. So whatever I was going through, I was able to multiply it by 10 in order to go along with her story,” she says. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #124 The Cathy Davey Podcast

The Sandi Thom Podcast

No punk rocker: Chewed up by pop, Sandi Thom was a 25-year-old musician with a career obituary ready to be written. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Scottish singer-songwriter about going back to basics and overcoming the crisis of confidence which almost finished her career.

When your debut album sells one million copies, the temptation must be to think that’s that, you’ve made it. But that’s not the way the music industry works. Just two years after Sandi Thom’s debut album, Smile, It Confuses People, became a worldwide number one, the call came down the line from the top brass at Sony - “I’m sorry, Sandi, you’re finished.” A difficult second album, one which the artist herself admits was rushed, was all it took, then suddenly the best-made plans of Sandi Thom had come and gone. In the months that followed, Thom contemplated much. Hurt, and with her confidence on the floor, the idea of packing it all in was one that came up more than once. “Confidence was a big thing. I think anybody can relate to it. It’s like losing your job, getting fired - it’s the same feeling, that same sense of rejection. I think no matter who you are in life, that is something that hurts. Your pride get bruised, your confidence take a beating and that hurts. So my confidence did take a knock. In a way, you build a family around you when you are with a label for a while and if you get dropped ’s like finding yourself out in the cold. It look me a few months to come through that, to shake it off and remember why I was in this business in the first place. It took me a while to get that back again. The thing about me is that I was relatively uneducated in the music industry and when things started to happen for me before the first album I didn’t really know what to do. That was a swift learning experience for me, especially dealing with the media.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · The Sandi Thom Podcast

The Paul Brady Podcast

Legendary singer-songwriter Paul Brady has just released the most challenging album of his career. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Strabane songsmith about changing direction, growing old and the freedom that comes when you just stop caring.

Giving up and not caring are very different things. When you give up and resign yourself to defeat, sooner or later you must entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, you were wrong all along. And that can be a bitter pill to swallow. But to just stop caring, to decide that the argument is no longer worth having, and retreat - ethical football in hand - to the safety of your own convictions, well, that can be an altogether more fulfilling exercise. Over his long and varied career, Paul Brady has never been afraid to experiment. But somewhere between the dulcet tones of 2005’s Say What You Feel and the re-entering the studio last year, something happened. He stopped caring. The freedom that came from finally telling his critics and those who direct his musical career to take a walk has proved to be the driving force behind his tenth and most experimental record, Hooba Dooba, which was released earlier this month. “I don’t really care anymore which is why I can go out there and make an album like Hooba Dooba. I feel sorry for artists who are still in the clutches of a record company. Once the accounting and marketing men moved into the record business  it was really the end of creative spontaneity and everyone then started looking over their shoulders trying to focus their brand," he said. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #122 The Paul Brady Podcast

The Lou McMahon Podcast

Proof at last that it’s not always a bad idea to annoy your parents. When a five-year Lou McMahon taped over her parents beloved Queen tapes, it seemed that only bad things would follow. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Sixmilebridge songstress and discovers the silver lining to her crimes against Freddy Mercury. 

An idea, especially a good idea, can emerge almost effortlessly. Call it inspiration or revelation, but more often than not the seed of something great can flash into existence in an instant, driven - it would seem - by its own invisible engine. Almost as if it was lying there all along, killing time, just waiting to be uncovered. But discovery is just the beginning. A good start, they say, is half the battle - but if all you have is a good start then the battle itself is already lost. Sixmilebridge singer- songwriter Lou McMahon started working on her Delicate Dancer EP way back in 2006. Now, almost four years later, this collection of six songs is finally ready to be heard by the world.  “I think it takes very little time to come up with an idea, but it can take forever to develop that idea. It took all of these years to develop the ideas of these songs to what they are now. I came to the point where  I just had to finish the recording, because it was taking so long. But I suppose that I could easily have carried on with it. They are all still ideas to me, they are still on a bare canvass,” she says.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #121 The Lou McMahon Podcast

The Carlene Carter Podcast

If American music had a royal family, Carlene Carter would be crowned princess. Andrew Hamilton talks to the country legend about her struggles with drugs and a childhood spent with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

Life brings with it an endless capacity for reinvention. Carlene Carter understands this better than most. After spending half a lifetime in the limelight, the Nashville singer decided at age 41 that the time had come for a change. She had money and a family - why not say goodbye to the endless nights on the road and retire? By the age of 50, Carlene had buried her mother and her fiancé and music producer Howie Epstein (who died tragically after a heroin overdose). She was battling her own drug addiction and had even done a stretch behind bars. But the wheel kept turning, and three years later she was back where she belonged, writing and singing. Her 2008 album, Stronger, was a triumph not just for an artist on the comeback; it was a life restarted. “I think at that stage I was trying to get my life back together. I had had problems with drugs, I had some problems with the law - I was in all of this crap and music had just taken a back seat. It’s what happens when you’re just trying to get through the day. I really thought I was going to be able to retire. I had gotten really burnt out on the road. One year I only spent 23 days at home. I was living in the back of a bus, and I just decided that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life," she said.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #120 The Carlene Carter Podcast

The Adam and Darcie Podcast

In late 2009, Kilmaley music blogger MP3Hugger releases the 21st album in the two- year history of Indiecater Records. To celebrate the milestone, Andrew Hamilton chats to Utah folkster Adam Sanders, one half of Adam and Darcie.

The city of Provo in the state of Utah, population 117,592. Home to Rock Canyon, the Osmonds and Brigham Young University - the largest Mormon finishing school on the planet. Yep, it’s a long, long way from Clare to here. But not so long, it would seem, for Clare music blogger MP3Hugger. His latest release, ‘California Trail’, features Provo’s finest, Adam and Darcie. “It all happened in a really cool way. A few months ago, we were playing a few shows with one of the bands that we really like here in the States, The Very Most. They mentioned that they’d been working with Indiecater Records and it all happened from there,” says Adam. “It’s a really great label. As we learned more about the other bands on Indiecater and got to know the MP3Hugger and his approach to things, we liked it more and more. He’s got a really natural, relaxed way of doing things. We were close to finishing the album and were wondering how to get the music heard outside America - Indiecater was brilliant for doing that for us.” Adam and Darcie features Adam and his partner Darcie, along with an ever-changing collection of band members. It can be a good thing and a bad thing. We have so many friends who are so talented. This is a big university town and a lot of people tend to come and go. So the people we play with are always changing. People might be here for a few months and then they turn up on the west coast or the east coast. Most of the writing for the songs comes from myself and Darcie, but the band adds an awful lot, especially when we start looking at the live side of things. Because the people are always changing, it’s always exciting, there’s always a breath of fresh air being put into the songs,” said Adam. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #119 The Adam and Darcie Podcast

The Mugger Dave Podcast

Primal screams: It’s been a long time coming but Mugger Dave are about to arrive. Andrew Hamilton chats to Simon Noble, frontman of one of the most exciting and in-your-face bands to emerge from the west of Ireland in recent years.

Decide in haste, repent at leisure. That would seem to make sense, right? Well, unless you’re an artist, a musician let’s say, with near endless options and all the time in world to walk down each avenue and see just how it feels. For these poor souls, the moment of decision can be a fleeting one - a delicate butterfly being pushed ever farther by the winds of creativity. The result, I’m afraid, is near complete inertia. It has taken Galway band Mugger Dave more than 18 months to record their debut album - roughly the same time it took The Beatles to release Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and The White Album. It’s an experience that frontman Simon Noble will not be repeating. “This album has been finished about three or four times in the last few months but now we’ve finally put a full stop behind it. It took a year and a half to record this album, which is far too long. We will never record an album in this way again. Next time we’ll book a studio for two weeks and when we leave the studio then that will be it. Some people say that you never really finish a song, that it’s just a version of a song at a particular time, and I guess that’s true. But this is our full stop for now for these songs. Both myself and Sean had been playing in bands before so we knew the process of getting together and playing music with new people so it didn’t take long to gel. We decided that we wanted to record very quickly into our time together so we went into the studio to record that first EP when we had only been together for about eight weeks or so. I think you can hear in that record that we’ve only been playing together for a short time but, still, you can hear the bones of what went on to be our album there too,” he said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #118 The Mugger Dave Podcast

The David Hope Podcast

After two years touring Europe, David Hope is back with a new band and a new EP. Andrew Hamilton caught up with the Shannon singer-songwriter and found out what it takes to be big in Germany.

There’s something about the Irish sound that make the Germans stand up and take notice. More than that in fact; there is something about the music of the west, and Clare in particular. From the days when the Russell brothers were as famous in Dusseldorf as they were in Doolin, the Germans have always latched onto something in the music of Clare and taken it for their own. And so it remains. The latest in this long line of musicians is Shannon singer- songwriter David Hope. After releasing his debut album, A Picture, in 2007, things seemed to go a bit quiet for Hope. This perceived quietness in Ireland was brought about by the explosion in his popularity in Europe and in Germany in particular - something which may have had some influence on his latest EP, Daybreak Someplace. “I’m not sure if it has or it hasn’t. It’s hard to know what exactly can sneak in and influence you on a subconscious level. Stylistically, I don’t think it has really influenced me. The new CD is a little bit more rootsie, a more American kind of sound than the first album had - it was more Irish-sounding. I still like that element and I wouldn’t say that I’ve changed things too much since I’ve been touring over in Germany. I guess the reason I’ve been over there so much is that they like what I do and that reinforces it with me. Working as an independent artist, undertaking a record is a big, big responsibility. It’s all well and good to put together recordings and put them out there but unless you have time enough to do it and do it right, then maybe it’s best to wait. It’s not as if I took a break or anything. I was always writing or recording but never found the right group of songs or the right group of musicians to sit down and play with.

CPIArchive2009D · #117 The David hope Podcast

The Lisa Hannigan Podcast

After 12 months on the high seas, Lisa Hannigan is coming home. Andrew Hamilton caught up with the Mercury Prize nominee and got a sneak preview of the new songs on the horizon.

One album, two American tours, three times round the UK and right around Ireland more times than she can count - the last year has been an amazing voyage for Lisa Hannigan. With her debut record Sea Sew capturing the hearts of fans and critics alike, the Meath singer-songwriter has finally found her own place in the sun, far from the reach of Damien Rice’s ever shrinking shadow. But now, after living and breathing the album for more than a year, the temptation to move on to newer pastures grows ever stronger. “It’s exciting. I have a few songs done and we are playing them all live at the moment. I definitely want to play them live for a while before we record. As soon as I write a new song, I want to play it live straight away. So we have been doing a bit of that and I think in January I’ll just hunker down and do some serious writing for the next album. I’ve got a good few done but I have a long way to go yet. Some people are able to keep writing all the time but I wouldn’t put myself in that category at all. I mean, I’m always getting bits of ideas but I tend to write more in bunches. I have a few on the go, you know, a few bits and pieces that might eventually turn into songs but there’s no rhyme nor reason to how I go about it," she said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #116 The Lisa Hannigan Podcast

The Fionn Regan Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: Army of one: “Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” - that was Jack Kerouac’s advice to the world. As he returns from his own American odyssey, Andrew Hamilton caught up with Fionn Regan.

Sooner or later, most musicians will tend towards solitude. Whether in their creative or personal life, the lot of many creatives can be an isolated one, a world peopled only by their own thoughts and ideas. For many, this is the nature of the beast - a price to pay for the creative process. “For me, it’s about ploughing your own furrow. Everything seems to work for me when I take the reins and take all the decision-making away from a committee situation. I have to go off into my own world to create something. It’s the same sort of feeling as you get from a lot of directors when they talk about their films. I need to see everything from the artwork right down to the very last tambourine hit. I have my own way of doing things - everything is cut live in the room and it has its own little world to it. If there were more people involved, they might find it maddening. With this record, I wanted everything to be on show, I wanted people to be able to hear the nuts and bolts of it. I didn’t want the edges to be smoothed out. I didn’t want it to be pasteurised or to sound like something it wasn’t... 

CPIArchive2009D · #115 The Fionn Regan Podcast

The Delorentos Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: 2009 was the year that almost broke Delorentos. Andrew Hamilton chats to front-man Kieran McGuinness about the break-up, reformation and the winter of discontent that almost tore the band apart.

Blanchardstown is depressing at the best of times. But on hopelessly dark January evenings, when the rain and traffic transform the Navan Road into a World War One trench, all within the shadow of the Connolly Hospital is morphed into something reminiscent of one of Dante’s circles. It was on one such evening that it all came home for Kieran McGuinness. That record contract, the big one which had promised worldwide distribution, had just vanished, almost overnight, into this air. The band, sick with exhaustion from almost two years of non-stop touring and recording, was on the brink of collapse. And then, as if by some sort of sick slapstick joke, the company that distributes their records just happens to go bust. For Delorentos, a band which operates their own record label with no big industry assistance, this meant a trip to the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, to personally pack the car with thousands of their own CDs, their lives’ work, and bring it home to gather dust in an attic. Is it any wonder that two weeks later, singer and guitarist Ronan (Ro) Yourell decided that enough was enough? “It was a strange couple of months - a strange whole year really. We had had a great run with the first album. We played all over Ireland, we sold out venues that we never even dreamed or playing, and all the accolades that we got were humbling and brilliant. So we decided to go away and start writing the second album. As we did that, we started to get a lot of interest from record labels...

CPIArchive2009D · #114 The Delorentos Podcast

The Size2Shoes Podcast

What started as a way to make friends with his younger brother has now morphed into a new and exciting musical adventure. Andrew Hamilton chats to Eoin Ó Súilleabháin, son of Mícheál, brother of Moley and one half of Size2Shoes.

It's funny. They say that no news is good news, but in the newspaper business, good news really isn’t news at all. The same, some might say, could be said for the world of art and music. From Cobain to Cohen, Morrissey to Joy Division, the overwhelming majority of musicians have a huge leaning to the darker side of the tracks. The reasons for this are many - some write to confess, others to protest but the single greatest reason (according to page 23 of the rock ‘n’ roll bible) is that it is simply much more difficult to write great happy songs. Limerick band Size2Shoes are looking to re-write this particular piece of music lore. Sons of music legend Mícheál Súilleabháin, Eoin and Moley, have begun a campaign to put a smile back on music’s face. “I guess it was always the voices that we were interested in. The music that we would have listened to growing up was always driven by the music and something that we could sing along to. The two of us are huge fans of Michael Jackson and we just saw the This Is It movie last night. Things like that have always blown us away and it’s always what we wanted to do. It’s something that we really think attracts people and turns people on,” said Eoin. 

CPIArchive2009D · #113 The Size2Shoes Podcast

The Eleanor McEvoy Podcast

Eleanor McEvoy is on the cusp of something new. Andrew Hamilton stumbles upon the hidden verses of this woman’s heart. 

Set in the centre of the East African Plateau, Uganda rises like a great wild plain from the rocky shores of Lake Victoria. A troubled land - beset by political corruption, war with its neighbours and hunger - Uganda remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet for Eleanor McEvoy, it is also a land of hope. After visiting the country with Oxfam last year, McEvoy was moved by the happiness of spirit of the people she met. It moved her and, like all emotional moments, it helped shape and form the direction of her music to come. “My aim when I went out there was to do something for charity, to do a good deed. I wasn’t going out there to enjoy it but when I went there I was amazed by the beauty of the country and the warmth of the people. When I thought of Uganda, in my ignorance, I didn’t think of a very beautiful country but it was. That said, it was very harrowing, without a doubt - seeing the conditions that a lot of these people were living in and hearing about the atrocities that they had experienced. But in a funny way it was also very up lifting. I was looking at this extraordinary power of hope and this sense of community that they all had. It was a weirdly mixed experience. I think experiences like that can’t but feed into how you do your job as an artist. As long as I can remember, and I started writing songs when I was five or six, it’s always been the case. When something dramatic happens in my life, it comes out in my songs. But that’s not always a good thing and sometimes it can be quite frustrating," she said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #112 The Eleanor McEvoy Podcast

The Director Podcast

CPI Archive 2009: After the hype, inevitably comes the calm. Andrew Hamilton chats to Michael Moloney, lead singer of an older, wiser and more confident Director. 

In many ways, 2007 belonged to Director. Young, exciting and with the song of the summer safely tucked away in their back pocket, the road ahead looked rosy for the Malahide foursome. But something was not quite right in the state of Director. The failure to crack the UK led to a split from their then label, Atlantic, and a major rethink for songwriter and vocalist Michael Moloney. Two years of thinking, deciding and thinking again have led Director into a new space. Older and happier in their skin, the band have emerged from their ponderings with a second album, I’ll Wait For Sound, streets ahead of the first and with the confidence to go it their own way. “It is and it isn’t different. It’s definitely a bit rockier and a bit heavier - maybe a bit more instinctive musically. I think on this album we got a bit adventurous, for better or for worse,” says Michael.

CPIArchive2009D · #111 The Director Podcast