CPI Archive 2009: Andrew Hamilton chats to Clive Barnes about burning his musical influences and the lap-slide guitar that saved his life.
The 1990s were the decade of the Irish singer-songwriter. From Paddy Casey and David Gray (he’s wishes he was Irish, you know) to the Devlins and Damien Rice, this cult of whinging Paddies - each crawling over the other to be first to share his broken feelings with the gushing public - almost took over the world. It was a musical bubble, inflated by ego and endless hot air, pumped to within an inch of good taste. And when it finally popped, there would be no soft landing. Yet for a time, the youngsters of Ireland abandoned the rock bands which had served them so well in the past, trading their distortion pedal for a harmonica and a hard luck story. In 1999, right at the peak of the singer-songwriter mania, Clive Barnes had already smelled a rat. After trying, and failing, to make an impact doing what everyone else was doing, he decided to call it a day. He left Dublin broken, and returned to his native county to regroup. A sailor, cast on the rocks by the beguiling whingers, destitute and depressed, ready for a new way home. “I had been playing on the whole singer-songwriter scene for a while and for some reason all of that just didn’t sit too well with me. I was just getting worse and worse up there. I was pretty much destitute so I decided to move back to Wexford and have a think about things again,” says Clive.
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