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 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...

Eoin Coughlan [April 2007]

In April of 2007 Clare People Interactive made the short journey to Tipperary to chat to tradster turned singer/songwriter Eoin Coughlan. The former Nomos stalwart spoke about his new album and his collaborations with Genna Hayes, Damien Dempsey and Ann Scott.

Erin McKeown [March 2007] - The Podcast

Okay, after falling foul of Soundclouds uber efficient copyright software, we are back up and running with a new... ahem... rustic intro which is definitely all my own copyright. So here we go, the Erin McKeown podcast.

The Stunning [December 2006]

In December of 2006, fans of The Stunning got what they'd been wanting for more than a decade - a new album and a tour. In the lead up to the released of the Tightrope live album, I spoke to Steve Wall about the band's highs and the regrets of what might have been.

[apologies for the less than perfect sound quality on this podcast]

Duke Special [November 2006]

In late 2006, the world was just beginning to take notice of Peter Wilson [AKA Duke Special]. Days before his first appearance on the Late with Jool Holland he spoke to ma about this quick rise to stardom and his brilliant version of 'Clare to Here'. Cheers,
Andy