The Ronan Moloney Podcast

CPI 2009: Andrew Hamilton chats to Clarecastle actor Ronan Moloney about his time as one of the Kings of the Kilburn High Road.

FEBRUARY 25, 2008, and the eyes of the world turn to North Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard — to the Kodak Theatre and to Los Angeles. Billions tune in as a tiny Irish film once again manages to capture the hearts of middle America. Eight thousand kilometres away, in a small flat in Harold’s Cross, Ronan Moloney watches on as Glen Hansard does his best ‘Hugh Grant with a Paddy heart’ routine. The Kimmage Road is a long way from the City of Angels, but for tonight at least, the distance doesn’t seem unconquerable. In an odd Oscars year, the best foreign language category threw up its fair share of surprises. No place for The Lives of Others, none either for Persepolis — and sadly too, no place for Kings. For this Clarecastle man, however, the disappointment wasn’t too great. The joy of the experience was all that mattered. “I was in college in Galway, in my final year. A mate of mine, Mark Hennigan, said that they were doing open auditions for plays that were actually written by students. So we went in for those and we both got lead parts. I was really bitten by the bug from there, straight away. 

CPI Archive 2009 · The Ronan Moloney Podcast

The Garrett Wall Podcast

CPI Archive 2007: This is more the Garrett Wall interview than the Garrett Wall podcast. Some of the audio clips used on the original podcast are now copyright protected, so I am unable to upload the original podcast. But below please see the text of the newspaper interview with Garrett Wall. 

Andrew Hamilton talks to Garrett Wall about his Spanish musical redemption and his triumphant return to Ireland.

DUBLIN, September 1998. As the Celtic Tiger finally begins to growl, Ireland’s second greatest revolution of the closing days of the 20th century bides its time in the fringes, silently. It would be three full years before David Kitt’s The Big Romance first sparks the flames. A further 12 months before Mundy would rein- vent himself in 24 Star Hotel. Not until Damien Rice’s O, in the heady summer of 2003, would the transformation finally be complete. In 1998, as the cold Dublin winter closed in around Garrett Wall, the cult of the Irish singer-songwriter was nowhere to be found. Timing, they say, is everything and for Wall, faith had conspired to deliver him slightly too early — a musician ever-so-slightly out of time. The only option was to leave, to travel to Spain and reach for a fresh start in Madrid. “I came over here in 1999, so it has been eight years almost. I had been quite busy in Ireland, gigging around with my band and had released a couple of records. I guess I was burnt out with the scene at home,” he said. "At that time, it wasn't as healthy certainly for singer-songwriters, as it is now.

I always thought they were waiting for me to leave before the scene really kicked off over there! “There were a couple of other things that happened to me in Ire- land that gave me a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Also, at the time I had a relationship, and you know, the usual reason for going anywhere is either because of work or because of a relationship. “I guess I came over here for a break. I actually thought at the time that I would give up music altogether because I was so cheesed off with it. That was the plan, to start a new life for myself in Spain. It was a big move, I had to start everything off again from zero.” The music business is a lot like the Mafia: you’re not really out until you're dead. And just when Wall finally thought he was free, slowly but surely he was dragged back into it. “I started getting work over here in advertising, singing jingles and things like that. I was lucky, the most sought-after thing over here is o be able to sing in English and to be able to copy someone’s voice. I mean, I’ve done Bowie, I’ve done Bono, I’ve done Simple Minds. I found a little niche there that let me into other areas, like writing sound- tracks for movies,” he said. “It was great to be able to make a living that way as a singer. Then I was offered the opportunity of making an album of new music. It was great to get back into writing songs and doing concerts. But I didn’t really think hard enough about it and I made a couple of mistakes in terms of the people that I worked with and the direction that they took me down. “It was a good introduction to the music scene here though. It was good to start from scratch in a new scene, to be able to start with no taboos and avoid the pitfalls that I might have fallen into in Ireland. But it took a long time and a lot of working with people to rediscover the sound that I really wanted. And that’s what I’ve got now.” Wall’s latest album, Sky Point- ing, meshes guitar, trumpet, bass and cajón drum in an atmospheric soundscape that has more than a modicum of the Mediterranean. “My music has never really been too definable. I mean, people could listen to me and never know that I was Irish. But I think that this album has been defined in a lot of ways by the use of the cajón, which is a Flamenco instrument. It gives it a definite sound. The thing is that we’re playing pop/rock/folk music but with these Flamenco instruments,” continues Wall. “I remember playing in Waterford a couple of years ago, with the Guggenheim Grotto. Their drummer was there playing a bongo. He saw our drummer, Robbie, playing away on the cajón and now I see pictures of them all playing away on the cajón. Robbie is almost spearheading the cajón movement in Ireland. “We also included a lot of clapping in places, which is a very Flamenco thing to do. I like to include the Flamenco bits, even if it’s only a little nod. It’s a lot of fun.” This tour means a lot to Garrett Wall. Finally, he’s coming home with an album and a collection of music that he feels he can be truly proud of. "I had a long tour back in Ireland about four years ago. I enjoyed that, but at the time I wasn’t really convinced by the music I was doing. I wanted to come back with music that was 100 per cent right. And that does make a difference. Even the reactions and the help that we’re getting from the media are at a different level,” he said. “I think that my confidence about going back this time is really rub- bing off on people. It’s exciting for me. We are going to some nice venues and a lot of the lads have never really been in Ireland before so it’s sort of like a road trip, where you get to show your mates around the country you’re from and play a little music along with it. For me, it’s a complete adventure.”

The Tom Baxter Podcast [August 2007]

Much was expected of Tom Baxter in 2007. The English singer-songwriter had taken the public and the critics by storm. And then, on a long August weekend, he came to Kilkee for the first Cois Farraige music festival.

GROWING pains — to half the medical world a misnomer but to many an adolescent a very real and genuine torment. While they may not manifest in any particular physical affliction, the journey of the teenage boy into manhood is fraught with many hills to scale and battles to fight. There are big questions to tackle, questions that few are qualified to answer. There, somewhere between the grunt of frustrated innocence and the despair of hollow adulthood, resides Tom Baxter.

In his new album Skybound, due for release later this month, Baxter takes up where he left off after Feather and Stone. Charting this journey, the jubilation as well as the despair.

“It’s working on the same emotional values in terms of song-writing.  I think that I always write from the same place. In terms of the sentiment of the record, it is, in a similar way to Feather and Stone, recording the journey from boyhood into man hood. It’s a journey of the emotional experience and the things you have to learn yourself. So there are moments of darkness,” he said.

The Dave Geraghty Podcast [July 2007]

In mid-2007, Dave Geraghty took his first steps out from behind the Bell X1 shadow and onto centre stage in his own right. Andy Hamilton spokes to him days after the release of his debut solo album Kill Your Darlings.

WHEN Ernest Hemingway spoke of killing your darlings, he wasn’t advocating any kind of mass executions of family and friends. Instead, the man who could be destroyed but not defeated, was advocating a means of creation, an artistic imperative.

For Hemingway, it was the duty, not the obligation, of the discerning artist to be able to cull and destroy that which he loves best, his art, in order to preserve the integrity of the whole. In other words, the test of the author is not what you decide to keep, but more so, what you can bring yourself to throw away.

As Dave Geraghty emerges from under the shadow of Bell X1, this is an idiom which he has grasped with both hands.

“I was hoping to achieve something grittier with this. There were other songs that I purposely didn’t go near and songs that were culled and didn’t make the album because I wanted to keep a cohesive theme. The songs had to be deserving of a title like Kill Your Darlings," he says.“I didn’t want to record a collection of songs, I was trying to create an album that had a tone and had a mood to it. I would almost prefer someone to stick this album on once a month at four in the morning after a party than to stick on one or two songs again and again and again..."

To hear the interview in full listen to the podcast below...

The Paddy Casey Podcast [July 2007]

Ahead of the release of his third album Addicted To Company, I spoke to Paddy Casey in July of 2007 and found out about his time in LA and how he wrote his way through a west Clare winter.

SUNDAY evening and the shagging electricity has gone — again. It’s been more than six winter weeks now, stowed away in this tiny hamlet on the very edge of the Atlantic and now, for the third time in those long weeks, a winter storm has knocked out the power.

 Unperturbed, Paddy Casey feels blindly for the carefully stowed candle and the matches. Eureka, and a quick flick returns the room to its former glow. Returning to his snug beside the window, the tempest outside serves as a fitting backdrop. A gentle strum from his guitar, and the skin and bones for Paddy Casey’s latest album, Addicted To Company (Part 1), begin to take shape.

Perhaps this isn’t exactly how it went down, but when Paddy Casey returns to Kilkee next week, a brand spanking new album in his back pocket, he will be completing a creative journey that began in Lahinch more than two years ago.

“I spent a bit of time down in Lahinch, but it would have killed me if I’d stayed down there much longer. I had very little else to do down there, other than drinking and playing. You have the surfing areas which are nice but I’m not much of a surfer.

“I would have been working on songs in Lahinch. I’m sure there are songs on this record that would have been written in Lahinch but it all becomes a bit of a mash because there are bits written in lots of places.

“I think this album is a little closer to what I’d have done if I had more time to record the other two albums. I definitely aimed for a particular direction, and I seem to have hit it — I’m not really sure though.

“When we toured the Living album, I was going, ‘this is great, people are dancing, I want this to

continue’. So for this album I definitely wanted a song that was like ‘Saints and Sinners’, something to keep it up for the gigs.”

Unlike previous recordings, Casey spent a long time in the studio recording this album, the majority of it being put down in America.

“I recorded the guts of it in LA, at least half of it. It was funny, going over there for the first few days, it did feel like a totally different experience — everything was different, the culture, everything. But, when it actually got down to it, we were recording in a room that looked like it could be somewhere off the Naas Road — we might as well have been in Dublin. We were sitting in that room all day so it didn’t matter where we were.

The Julian Gough Podcast [June 2007]

WHAT would Charles Darwin have made of Julian Gough? The great thinker, master of evolution and natural selection. Would he have found a room, a paragraph or even a foot note, in the Origin of the Species for the likes of Gough?
If so, it would most likely have come in a chapter titled, ‘Thoughts on the Random Mutation’. Not that I’m suggesting that Ireland’s latest trailblazing avant garde author is some sort of literary missing link. On the contrary, Gough represents an alteration, an almost radical change of direction that is absolutely essential for progress, whether social, biological or indeed literary.
The only question left is one of genetics, dominant or regressive.
“Because it’s an unusual mad kind of book we had trouble getting shops to understand what we were doing or getting publishers to understand what we were doing in the first place. But when I won the National Short Story Prize with the prologue to the book then that changed absolutely everything.
“People began to look at the book in a different way, all of it’s vices suddenly became virtues - the little grey fella turns out to be a swan after all. Nobody want to be the fool who stands up and says ‘this is brilliant’ and be the only person saying it. So when a few Booker Prize winners say it’s good then it becomes safe...

The Rónán Ó Snodaigh Podcast [June 2007]

Four hundred years old, eight hundred years wise, and unable to come to terms with the structured nature of giant society. Andrew Hamilton speaks to Rónán Ó Snodaigh.

POET, not prophet, Rónán Ó Snodaigh is a refugee in this modern world. A wanderer of lands with an ancient mind, the Kila frontman has taken from, and given to, the spectrum of art in equal measure.

A dualist in every sense; poet and songwriter, percussionist and musician, Gaelgoir and English speaker, the challenge can often be to stop choosing and let the decisions make

themselves. Ó Snodaigh’s latest solo album The Last Mile Home, has taken the spiritual street preacher in a number of new and interesting directions.

“The first song I had on the album I actually dropped. It was kind of a bluesy song and I was practicing it with Eoin O’Boyle, the guitarist and keyboard player. There was a particular sound in his guitar-playing that I was trying to get at. I thought it was a bit of an outback sound.

“It’s funny that you said bluesy, because I thought it was even further off the beaten track than blues, kind of swampy or blues-grassy, a kind of a ‘hidden under the hills’ type of sound. I got really excited about it. I said ‘this is a sound that we could stick in a shed anywhere in the world...