One of the biggest problems Mark Lawlor faced when he and his band Fade Street finished their debut album was what to call it. Eventually he opted for 16B Fade Street in honour of the residence off Dublin s Grafton Street in which most of the material was conceived and knocked into shape.
But he could just as easily have tagged it In At The Deep End, because Lawlor, brother of the more famous showband singer Peter Law, has been plucked from total musical obscurity and plunged by his record label K-tel into a maelstrom of
promotional activities up and down the land.
The guitar-dominated album, which ranges in style from quality pop to a sort of grunge folk, differs from most outpourings by Irish singer-songwriters in that it actually sounds like a nineties record.
It s a difficult one to judge, that, says Mark. You want to stay true to the songs, but on the other hand I think you owe it to the record company to make it as accessible as possible. You want the production to add something to the songs without smothering them in technology for the sake of it either. But I had a brilliant producer in Jez Coad who was really into the songs and I think he got the balance just about bang on.
Lawlor was also smart enough to record this album of thoughtful and intelligent songs in an old mill house in Kildare where the pressures of the more conventional studio clock were less demanding.
I didn t want to rush the album, so we spent a lot of time deciding how to develop each track in the way it needed, while at the same time keeping a sense of continuity in the sound throughout the album, he explains. The lack of the usual time pressures helped in that respect.
This is not Lawlor s first brush with the wonderful world of entertainment.
Well, on my arrival back in Ireland from Hong Kong where I d worked in the financial market, I was approached to manage a gang camp in Ballymore Eustace which was linked to Paul Newman s Hole-In-The-Wall Gang worldwide network. So I took it on a short-term basic and was later made chief executive. I met both Paul and his wife Joanne and they were both charming people to work with.
But the real yen the father of two brought back from Hong Kong and still holds most dearly, was a long-standing desire to give the singer-songwriter trade a shot. You only have a limited amount of time to do the things you want to do, so I decided to get down to it and give it my all before it was too late.
For me music works in that I enjoy playing around with words and chords and melodies, but I also find it chills me out and keeps me sane, he says.
And does the experience in Hong Kong help?
I suppose it s given me a sense of how to go about doing business, but I also accept that the music business is a totally different ball game, and I m basically starting on the ground floor, he muses. But then there s probably no better place to start in any career. They say you should make your career your pastime, and I ve been a music fan for as long as I can remember, so I start with that advantage. n
16B Fade Street by Fade Street is available now on K-tel.