The Sandi Thom Podcast

No punk rocker: Chewed up by pop, Sandi Thom was a 25-year-old musician with a career obituary ready to be written. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Scottish singer-songwriter about going back to basics and overcoming the crisis of confidence which almost finished her career.

When your debut album sells one million copies, the temptation must be to think that’s that, you’ve made it. But that’s not the way the music industry works. Just two years after Sandi Thom’s debut album, Smile, It Confuses People, became a worldwide number one, the call came down the line from the top brass at Sony - “I’m sorry, Sandi, you’re finished.” A difficult second album, one which the artist herself admits was rushed, was all it took, then suddenly the best-made plans of Sandi Thom had come and gone. In the months that followed, Thom contemplated much. Hurt, and with her confidence on the floor, the idea of packing it all in was one that came up more than once. “Confidence was a big thing. I think anybody can relate to it. It’s like losing your job, getting fired - it’s the same feeling, that same sense of rejection. I think no matter who you are in life, that is something that hurts. Your pride get bruised, your confidence take a beating and that hurts. So my confidence did take a knock. In a way, you build a family around you when you are with a label for a while and if you get dropped ’s like finding yourself out in the cold. It look me a few months to come through that, to shake it off and remember why I was in this business in the first place. It took me a while to get that back again. The thing about me is that I was relatively uneducated in the music industry and when things started to happen for me before the first album I didn’t really know what to do. That was a swift learning experience for me, especially dealing with the media.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · The Sandi Thom Podcast

The Paul Brady Podcast

Legendary singer-songwriter Paul Brady has just released the most challenging album of his career. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Strabane songsmith about changing direction, growing old and the freedom that comes when you just stop caring.

Giving up and not caring are very different things. When you give up and resign yourself to defeat, sooner or later you must entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, you were wrong all along. And that can be a bitter pill to swallow. But to just stop caring, to decide that the argument is no longer worth having, and retreat - ethical football in hand - to the safety of your own convictions, well, that can be an altogether more fulfilling exercise. Over his long and varied career, Paul Brady has never been afraid to experiment. But somewhere between the dulcet tones of 2005’s Say What You Feel and the re-entering the studio last year, something happened. He stopped caring. The freedom that came from finally telling his critics and those who direct his musical career to take a walk has proved to be the driving force behind his tenth and most experimental record, Hooba Dooba, which was released earlier this month. “I don’t really care anymore which is why I can go out there and make an album like Hooba Dooba. I feel sorry for artists who are still in the clutches of a record company. Once the accounting and marketing men moved into the record business  it was really the end of creative spontaneity and everyone then started looking over their shoulders trying to focus their brand," he said. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #122 The Paul Brady Podcast

The Lou McMahon Podcast

Proof at last that it’s not always a bad idea to annoy your parents. When a five-year Lou McMahon taped over her parents beloved Queen tapes, it seemed that only bad things would follow. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Sixmilebridge songstress and discovers the silver lining to her crimes against Freddy Mercury. 

An idea, especially a good idea, can emerge almost effortlessly. Call it inspiration or revelation, but more often than not the seed of something great can flash into existence in an instant, driven - it would seem - by its own invisible engine. Almost as if it was lying there all along, killing time, just waiting to be uncovered. But discovery is just the beginning. A good start, they say, is half the battle - but if all you have is a good start then the battle itself is already lost. Sixmilebridge singer- songwriter Lou McMahon started working on her Delicate Dancer EP way back in 2006. Now, almost four years later, this collection of six songs is finally ready to be heard by the world.  “I think it takes very little time to come up with an idea, but it can take forever to develop that idea. It took all of these years to develop the ideas of these songs to what they are now. I came to the point where  I just had to finish the recording, because it was taking so long. But I suppose that I could easily have carried on with it. They are all still ideas to me, they are still on a bare canvass,” she says.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #121 The Lou McMahon Podcast

The Carlene Carter Podcast

If American music had a royal family, Carlene Carter would be crowned princess. Andrew Hamilton talks to the country legend about her struggles with drugs and a childhood spent with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

Life brings with it an endless capacity for reinvention. Carlene Carter understands this better than most. After spending half a lifetime in the limelight, the Nashville singer decided at age 41 that the time had come for a change. She had money and a family - why not say goodbye to the endless nights on the road and retire? By the age of 50, Carlene had buried her mother and her fiancé and music producer Howie Epstein (who died tragically after a heroin overdose). She was battling her own drug addiction and had even done a stretch behind bars. But the wheel kept turning, and three years later she was back where she belonged, writing and singing. Her 2008 album, Stronger, was a triumph not just for an artist on the comeback; it was a life restarted. “I think at that stage I was trying to get my life back together. I had had problems with drugs, I had some problems with the law - I was in all of this crap and music had just taken a back seat. It’s what happens when you’re just trying to get through the day. I really thought I was going to be able to retire. I had gotten really burnt out on the road. One year I only spent 23 days at home. I was living in the back of a bus, and I just decided that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life," she said.

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #120 The Carlene Carter Podcast

The Adam and Darcie Podcast

In late 2009, Kilmaley music blogger MP3Hugger releases the 21st album in the two- year history of Indiecater Records. To celebrate the milestone, Andrew Hamilton chats to Utah folkster Adam Sanders, one half of Adam and Darcie.

The city of Provo in the state of Utah, population 117,592. Home to Rock Canyon, the Osmonds and Brigham Young University - the largest Mormon finishing school on the planet. Yep, it’s a long, long way from Clare to here. But not so long, it would seem, for Clare music blogger MP3Hugger. His latest release, ‘California Trail’, features Provo’s finest, Adam and Darcie. “It all happened in a really cool way. A few months ago, we were playing a few shows with one of the bands that we really like here in the States, The Very Most. They mentioned that they’d been working with Indiecater Records and it all happened from there,” says Adam. “It’s a really great label. As we learned more about the other bands on Indiecater and got to know the MP3Hugger and his approach to things, we liked it more and more. He’s got a really natural, relaxed way of doing things. We were close to finishing the album and were wondering how to get the music heard outside America - Indiecater was brilliant for doing that for us.” Adam and Darcie features Adam and his partner Darcie, along with an ever-changing collection of band members. It can be a good thing and a bad thing. We have so many friends who are so talented. This is a big university town and a lot of people tend to come and go. So the people we play with are always changing. People might be here for a few months and then they turn up on the west coast or the east coast. Most of the writing for the songs comes from myself and Darcie, but the band adds an awful lot, especially when we start looking at the live side of things. Because the people are always changing, it’s always exciting, there’s always a breath of fresh air being put into the songs,” said Adam. 

cpiarchive2010a@gmail.com · #119 The Adam and Darcie Podcast

The Mugger Dave Podcast

Primal screams: It’s been a long time coming but Mugger Dave are about to arrive. Andrew Hamilton chats to Simon Noble, frontman of one of the most exciting and in-your-face bands to emerge from the west of Ireland in recent years.

Decide in haste, repent at leisure. That would seem to make sense, right? Well, unless you’re an artist, a musician let’s say, with near endless options and all the time in world to walk down each avenue and see just how it feels. For these poor souls, the moment of decision can be a fleeting one - a delicate butterfly being pushed ever farther by the winds of creativity. The result, I’m afraid, is near complete inertia. It has taken Galway band Mugger Dave more than 18 months to record their debut album - roughly the same time it took The Beatles to release Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and The White Album. It’s an experience that frontman Simon Noble will not be repeating. “This album has been finished about three or four times in the last few months but now we’ve finally put a full stop behind it. It took a year and a half to record this album, which is far too long. We will never record an album in this way again. Next time we’ll book a studio for two weeks and when we leave the studio then that will be it. Some people say that you never really finish a song, that it’s just a version of a song at a particular time, and I guess that’s true. But this is our full stop for now for these songs. Both myself and Sean had been playing in bands before so we knew the process of getting together and playing music with new people so it didn’t take long to gel. We decided that we wanted to record very quickly into our time together so we went into the studio to record that first EP when we had only been together for about eight weeks or so. I think you can hear in that record that we’ve only been playing together for a short time but, still, you can hear the bones of what went on to be our album there too,” he said. 

CPIArchive2009D · #118 The Mugger Dave Podcast

The David Hope Podcast

After two years touring Europe, David Hope is back with a new band and a new EP. Andrew Hamilton caught up with the Shannon singer-songwriter and found out what it takes to be big in Germany.

There’s something about the Irish sound that make the Germans stand up and take notice. More than that in fact; there is something about the music of the west, and Clare in particular. From the days when the Russell brothers were as famous in Dusseldorf as they were in Doolin, the Germans have always latched onto something in the music of Clare and taken it for their own. And so it remains. The latest in this long line of musicians is Shannon singer- songwriter David Hope. After releasing his debut album, A Picture, in 2007, things seemed to go a bit quiet for Hope. This perceived quietness in Ireland was brought about by the explosion in his popularity in Europe and in Germany in particular - something which may have had some influence on his latest EP, Daybreak Someplace. “I’m not sure if it has or it hasn’t. It’s hard to know what exactly can sneak in and influence you on a subconscious level. Stylistically, I don’t think it has really influenced me. The new CD is a little bit more rootsie, a more American kind of sound than the first album had - it was more Irish-sounding. I still like that element and I wouldn’t say that I’ve changed things too much since I’ve been touring over in Germany. I guess the reason I’ve been over there so much is that they like what I do and that reinforces it with me. Working as an independent artist, undertaking a record is a big, big responsibility. It’s all well and good to put together recordings and put them out there but unless you have time enough to do it and do it right, then maybe it’s best to wait. It’s not as if I took a break or anything. I was always writing or recording but never found the right group of songs or the right group of musicians to sit down and play with.

CPIArchive2009D · #117 The David hope Podcast