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.
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