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...