When I meet Tony McLoughlin he is somewhat shell-shocked after an interview with Alan Corcoran on South East Radio. McLoughlin is on promotional duty for his debut album Cine Rama and had been expecting the usual “how’s she cuttin’” soft-shoe interview routine. Instead, the former 2FM man asked some searching questions about the track ‘Billy Wilson’ which the Northerner had written about the first Protestant he’d ever met socially.

“Alan had obviously listened seriously to the album and that took me aback for a start! His questions brought it all back, growing up in the North in a Catholic-Nationalist environment. I can’t recall getting close to any Protestants. It was when I moved to Birmingham to university that I had the first real discussion with a Northern Protestant and I was the first Catholic he’d met. That’s where the song ‘Billy Wilson’ came from. We were both victims of Irish apartheid, but how can we learn to live together when we’re educated apart?”, McLoughlin asks in evident frustration.

Then there was Noel Madden. The late Noel Madden. “Myself and Noel shared a girlfriend. He was magic with women. Then one day he was made to carry a bomb into the customs barracks in Newry and it blew up and killed him. I don’t know how he got roped in because he had no interest in politics. That would turn you against the bombings, but then the RUC and the British Army would do things that would make you think again”, he remembers.

While enjoying the Queen’s education system he started gigging in folk clubs. “I was drawn to singer-songwriters like James Taylor who wrote about personal subjects I could connect with. I liked Neil Young, Dylan, Peter Green, Taste, Clapton, John Mayall, the Beatles and so on, but I was more drawn to American artists.”

From there his tastes shifted to through Frank Zappa and Steely Dan, but after he moved to Waterford, where he became a mainstay of the local songwriters’ forum, he became increasingly smitten with the music of the harder country acts like John Prine, Guy Clarke, Joe Ely, Cooder, Don Williams, Merle Travis and John Hiatt.

“I try to write songs that are part

of me. The title song of the album is about the time my father brought me as a kid on the train to Dublin to see the film How The West Was Won in

the Cinerama format. I can still recall the impact of that film on me,”

he explains.

‘Tears Upon The Water’ was inspired by the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that and a song called ‘Mexico’ suggest that McLoughlin’s obsession with Americana is not confined to the Northern hemisphere. “When you travel around a lot, you come into contact with different worlds and fresh ways of seeing things, and you get the time to absorb them into yourself.”

That line about broadening the mind has rarely been more apt.

Cine Rama by Tony McLoughlin is distributed in Ireland by Gael Linn and elsewhere in Europe by Glitterhouse.