He’s come a long way, baby. I can still remember clearly the shaggy-haired boho kid sitting hunched over his acoustic at the Ruby Sessions in Doyle’s pub. His fringe almost touched the strings as he nimbly picked out his fluid, silvery melodies and, eyes closed, laced them with a soft, wailing voice in front of a sparse audience, all the while entirely lost in his own world of reservoirs and falsettos and key changes and rhythm.
Even back then, in 2003, in the tiny upstairs room of a Dublin pub, Regan had the ability to reduce a room to a haunted, captivated silence.
A great deal has changed since then for the Bray native. He’s selling out tours left, right and centre, and his debut album has been nominated for both the Choice Music Prize and Mercury Award. But he still knows how to grab an audience by the scruff, bring them together, knock out the chatter and make them sit up and pay attention to what he has to offer. If anything, he’s gotten better at it.
This was never more evident than when hotpress caught him live at last month’s Bella Union 10th Anniversary show at the Southbank Centre in London, where, second from the top of the bill, he cheekily pinched the limelight from headliners Howling Bells by employing his favourite stage trick — singing with no mic, to bring the scattered audience up (or down) to his own level. It worked, and by the end of the uplifting ‘Be Good Or Be Gone’, he had his fingers held tight, with us safe and happy in his palm, begging not to be let go.
Talking on the phone from his home in Bray, Regan sounds unsurprisingly worn out. He’s just got back from America, where he played a nine-date sold-out tour in support of that Mercury-nominated album, The End Of History. The tour took him from Boston to New York to Toronto to San Francisco and LA (and points in between), before dropping him back home in a heap of suitcases and jet lag.
“That was a series of rooms and cars and loads of transport. Handshakes, crooked smiles, hot air balloons and things,” he recalls, of the tour. “Actually, it was just like a revolving door. But it was interesting to view the bone structure of a country that I really only know about through reading. Just to be sitting in front of a window was nice. We got back a couple of days ago, just paced round the house, checked the post box… you don’t know what to do with yourself. I’ve been unscrewing harmonicas just to see how they’re made.”
It must’ve been a great adventure, I wonder aloud. A sold out American tour, piqued with a Mercury nomination, the world an oyster and he the pearl, sailing down the interstate going faster miles an hour… But for Fionn, it’s just another revolution in one great — and at this stage, seemingly endless — spin of the wheel of experience. He’s been on tour since April 2006, he reminds me, and all the romance of the road captures your imagination less easily when the road is home and home is, well, as elusive as the road once was to a struggling musician.
“The only time to come home is to unzip your old suitcase and just look at the stuff inside it and close it back up again,” he ponders. “The lifestyle does suit me though. I’ve been doing it for a long time now, and it changes slightly, but the feeling is the very same. When you stand up in front of people, whether it’s in a shed or an attic somewhere, telephone box, wherever it is, it’s the same thing. Sometimes you go to sleep with a curtain wrapped around you on a floor somewhere. Then there’s other times you’ll wake up in a four-poster bed. But the feeling when you play is exactly the same, no matter what the circumstances.”
You’d think that, from the outside looking in at least, there’d be more in the way of four-poster beds and less in the way of curtains on floors after the year he’s had, but the reality is apparently different.
“Put it this way,” he confides, “it’s very easy for me to stay humble. I’ve got no gold taps on my sink. In fact, I don’t even have a sink.”
Fionn Regan likes his metaphors. Planes, ships, forests and rays of light. Any tangible situation that can add a deeper layer of understanding to whatever he’s trying to express. He talks like he’s in constant lyric-writing mode, drawing similarities with un-similar things, finding hidden meaning and explanation through colourful, relate-able imaginary examples — a good way to go, when trying to quantify something as complex and surreal as the last year of his life.
“Sometimes it feels as though you’ve been thrown into a storm or a hurricane,” he says, looking back. “I suppose it takes you a bit of time to learn how to keep the boat sailing in that situation. The sails take a battering, but I think every time you step up the ladder you’re hoping that the platform’s going to hold you. It still feels the same when it does, though. Sometimes, these moments of elevation, even though you feel like you’re carrying the weight of Lough Derg or the Liffey on your shoulders, they help you to get inside the walls of the songs. It happens more times than not.”
The pressure exerted by 75 miles of murky, littered water on one unsuspecting man and his guitar isn’t a bad way to describe the levels of concentrated media attention a Mercury nomination can bring. For a musician who has consistently ploughed his own furrow determinedly away from the mainstream, the brightly-lit impact of nomination means — in terms of his day-to-day life right now, at least — a lot more than a silver and blue sticker on his album cover.
Did he know he was being entered? “Nope!” he replies. “No I didn’t. We’d just come back off tour in America, so there was a landing of a plane, then instead of coming home to open my suitcases and then close them back up again, we took another plane over to England to play at the nominations announcement. So yeah, then there was a room full of flashbulbs and image capturing machines. How was it? Yeah, you know, I said it before, but I felt like a lighthouse keeper at a wedding. Sort of like you arrive in, and it takes you a little while before you can deal with that many people. It’s like being a shepherd on a horse, trying to get down a dual carriageway. It was just like a big bright light being shone on you. Did I know any of the other artists being nominated? Nope, not at all. Did I talk to any of them at the ceremony? No, I didn’t. I didn’t talk to anyone, except for TV people and stuff like that. Do I think I’ve got a chance of winning? It’s hard for me to talk about it, because I’m inside the thing. So the way I look at it is that there are two coats I could put on to answer that question, and I don’t want to wear either one of those coats. It’s very hard. I’m not an industry analyst, I’m not a bookies. You might prefer Bacon over Picasso, or vice versa, but… It’s a… I don’t know, I don’t know about these things!” he exclaims. “My life is populated by other realms.”
The Mercury realm, and all its associations, doesn’t seem to be one that this singer songwriter is too interested in beyond the initial wonder, or one he expects to attach itself to him for too much longer: “It shines a light for a little while on something that is maybe top secret,” he says, before concluding, resolutely: “I’ve always been the underdog. I don’t see that changing.”