O
(16/100 Greatest Irish Albums)

Hearing a rough demo of ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ persuaded composer David Arnold to lend Damien Rice the money to record his debut album. Assembled over a two year period in Kerry, Paris and Dublin, O was released in Ireland in February 2002, to universal acclaim. It debuted at number 7 in the Irish charts – then things got really interesting. Rice’s songs seemed to have been sprinkled with some sort of magic dust, even the likes of ‘Cheers Darlin’, recorded in a bout of drunken spontaneity at 3am, or ‘I Remember’, written while walking home from Celbridge GAA club on a cold winter’s night.
His uniquely personal voice, delivering songs like ‘Cannonball’, ‘Delicate’ and ‘Amie’ (with a string section courtesy of Arnold) struck a chord: the album started to fly off store shelves, going gold after just two months. O was released in the UK in March 2003, in America three months later, and enjoyed a similar reaction there. A host of awards followed and O is still sitting proudly in the Irish top 10 three and a half years after its initial release and has sold in the region of a million and a half copies worldwide.