Once something of a child prodigy, Carlow singer-songwriter Joe Cleere now reckons he has the answer to self-promotion in the download age. He speaks to Celina Murphy about supporting The Script and passing out 10,000 free CDs in a month!
Joe Cleere is quite the over-achiever. Aged 14 he recorded his debut solo EP – having first picked up the guitar as an 11-year old!
While Cleere cites classic ‘90s albums K (by Kula Shaker) and Definitely, Maybe (by some scruffy, angry blokes) as the reason he started making music, he also admits to a major Hendrix fixation throughout his formative years.
“I’m a lot less obsessed with Hendrix now than I used to be!” he laughs. “It’s one of those things that happens at the start when you’re playing guitar. I learned ‘Red House’ first, note by note.”
Lyrically, though, he’s always been notably mature. Songs on his as yet unreleased full-length debut East/West deal with poverty rather than puppy love and war rather than getting wasted.
Cleere explains: “I suppose one thing that never impressed me was listening to music that wasn’t really about anything. Listening to the likes of Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley really spurred me on to think about lyrics in a deeper vein... There’s a track on our album called ‘The Ones We Left Behind’ that’s really personal. Usually, if I’m writing about a problem of mine, I think, ‘Well, how big are my problems really in comparison to other people’s? Can I really afford to bitch and moan in a song about myself?’”
Now 23, Cleere’s decided to take promotion into his own hands, pressing 10,000 copies of fiery first single ‘Queue’, which he wrote when he was just 16, and handing them out to the public.
“It was as easy and not that much more expensive to get 10,000 made as it was to get 1,000. If we got 500 people into Whelan’s it’d more than cover our campaign.”
When I speak to Cleere, he’s about half-way throught his ‘Q4FREE’ campaign.
“On Grafton Street we gave away 5,000 discs in two days! We’re already getting emails from people who have them, some from as far away as New York.”
‘Queue’ paves the way for the release of East/West in March.
“We got it mixed by a mate of mine, Philip McGee who’s mixed a few bits for The Script and does all the Aslan albums. He was kind of my mentor through the whole two years of recording. If I had a problem, I’d ring Phil in tears!”
Cleere lists supporting The Script a little over a year ago as one of his proudest moments.
“It was in the Sugar Club before ‘We Cry’ came out. It’s really inspiring to see how far they’ve managed to come in such a short space of time.”
