Ciaran Lavery talks to Colm O'Regan about growing up and dropping F-bombs

The world over, people will maintain there’s nothing like an Irish wake. The problem, as Dave Allen noted, is you’re doomed to miss out on your own.
FOMO wasn’t, however, the inspiration for Ciaran Lavery’s new record, Let Bad In. Rather, the focus of the record was triggered by an old VHS dusted off by his uncle – but the result still has something about it that’s like laying ghosts to rest.
“It’s like a funeral, and a celebration,” the singer-songwriter concurs. “It’s almost a funeral for my childhood, but also a celebration of that period, and being able to reflect on it now. It’s a difficult one in some ways, because there’s some elements I don’t like, and some elements that I miss. It’s part of growing up, that you shed skins and become a different version of yourself – it’s more an expression of that than saying, ‘Shit, I wish I was 12 again, ‘cos I’d love to play the MegaDrive’.”
It’s probably just as well the album doesn’t involve a full-scale regression for Lavery, considering that the first record he ever owned was a Right Said Fred single, won at a youth club disco – and the first CD bought with his own cash was Savage Garden’s ‘Truly Madly Deeply’. But watching the shaky camcorder footage of his youthful self, absorbed by a visit to a planetarium, seemed to stir something within him.
“If you were trying to sell tickets to this place now, people would tell you to fuck off,” he reflects. “But I was watching this ginger kid I couldn’t relate to, and he was utterly fascinated. Nowadays, I’d probably be super-cynical, but at the time I was blown away. When you’re an adult, you lose that childish side that you wish you could have held onto – because there’s nothing worse than seeing people who look so fucking depressed.”
And while the 29-year-old confesses that the years are indeed taking a certain toll – I, for one, am relieved to know that the strange noises that occur while getting in and out of armchairs is something he shares – it hasn’t prevented him harnessing the innocence of youth on the LP. From lessons learned – as on the title track – to the kind of worldly wisdom that creeps up on you over time, it’s a record that draws upon adolescence and adulthood in almost equal measure.
At the same time, Ciaran confesses, the record involved giving careful consideration to his musical direction. “It was always my idea,” he reflects, “that this album would be a marriage of my first one, Not Nearly Dark, and the Kosher EP from 2014, where I started to take more risks. I always enjoy albums that are, well, not ‘all over the place’, but that have highs and lows, and ups and downs. Maybe that’s a freedom you have as a singer-songwriter, where sometimes you can put a band around you, and other times do things completely alone. ‘Sonoma’ and ‘Let Bad In’ are recorded straight onto my phone, in my living room – it was one of those things, where bringing it to the studio would have seen all the meaning lost.”
When crowned the winner of our competition, The Big Break 2015, Ciaran stressed his aversion to being labelled as just another singer-songwriter. But, from the moment a brass section erupts on second track ‘Okkervil River’, those fears are completely dispelled. 
“It’s easy to be shoved into a corner and that’s it,” he explains. “I can’t say I feel there’s any particular attitude towards singer-songwriters out there. But then, I’m the one who keeps saying I don’t want to be pigeonholed, so perhaps I feel it more than even I realise.” 
However the man from Aghagallon may be ‘seen’, it’s certainly doing him no harm. His success in The Big Break was followed by a Glastonbury appearance, jaunts around Europe and a hugely busy visit to SXSW in March. For a homebird like Ciaran – a bloke who found the hustle and bustle of Belfast too strenuous – it begs the question: how he’s finding life on the road?
“It’s about striking a balance,” he shrugs. “Which is, apparently, a dark art. I’ve asked a few musicians how they manage it, and it seems to come down to saying no, at least some of the time!”
And if he’s feeling particularly stubborn, there might even be a little extra spice thrown into his negatives! ‘Return To Form’ sees the somewhat surprising deployment of an F-bomb. For a self-confessed hip-hop fan, is this his effort to land a Parental Advisory sticker?
“Yep,” he grins. “And it didn’t work! You get an E for Explicit on iTunes though. When I was 14 or 15, I had a massive Tupac poster, which had the Parental Advisory thing at the bottom, and I thought it was really badass. But it’s funny, because in a way dropping an F-bomb kind of freed me up from the nicey-nice, singer-songwriter thing.”
A nicey-nicey singer-songwriter, Ciaran Lavery most certainly is not. He is a complicated and challenging artist, who delves deeply into the kind of emotional places that others too often fear to tread. He is one for the long haul.

Let Bad In is out now.