Ciaran is eager to jump genre boundaries, which isn’t surprising when you hear about his formative influences. Lavery’s wasn’t a musical household, he recalls. But, in fairness, his father was a first-class whistler. It was, apparently, an occupational necessity.
“My da, he was a milkman,” he laughs. “I think that’s something milkmen just have. It’s almost part of your job description: Decent at whistling!”
At the other extreme, meanwhile, his uncles were hard- rockers who earned a minor degree of notoriety in the early 1980s.
“They were in a band called called Ezy Meat,” the flame-haired musician explains. “You can look them up because there’s actually some of their stuff on YouTube! They were great. It was all leathers and that sort of carry-on.”
Given that he didn’t win the Big Break competition for his Judas Priest covers, perhaps it’d be fairer to suggest that his brother-in-law had the biggest influence on his eventual sound.
“In my early teens I was getting bombarded with these Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young CDs by him,” Ciaran says, “as well as Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and so on. At that age, it was totally new to me. Now, I’m really grateful for it. I feel like I got a head start. I mean, he did pass me some absolute shite (laughs), but there was always something good there too!”
The folk seed had been planted. But Ciaran’s early forays into music-making resulted in an altogether more raucous racket nonetheless.
“I was in a three-piece, instrumental punk rock garage band and we were well before our time,” he deadpans. “We actually posted off a tape to a guy in England who sent us back a CD of Cliff Richard’s backing band The Shadows and said maybe we should go down this road. I think that’s when we hung up the guitars!”
Any suggestion of mid-teen messing gave way to something altogether more serious during his time with an indie-folk seven-piece alt. country outfit, who traded under the name Captain Kennedy. Ciaran spent seven years with the band and remembers it as a “really good run, and a lot of fun.”
Before adult life, and the attendant pressures of work and finances intervened, they stumbled through more than their fair share of Spinal Tap-flavoured anecdotes.
“I’m glad I went through all that,” he says now. “We used to just accept gigs. Our motto was: ‘We’ll play anywhere’.
I remember one time we had a show in Belfast that was supposed to be an acoustic set in a downstairs cafe – but then we got offered a full band session upstairs. We took it straight away. It ended up being some extreme American Christian gathering! It was about two steps away from people being exorcised and casting out their demons. We did surprisingly well for an alt-country band actually. They served up some very good food, too, which was probably the highlight of the night.”
They didn’t manage to convert Lavery: he had already decided music would be his vocation. As Captain Kennedy faded, he realised that going solo would be his best option.
“I could see the end coming for the band,” he says, “but I didn’t really want to stop at that stage. I thought: ‘there’s something for me in music’.” As things have turned out, there certainly is...
Ciaran Lavery often talks about fear. Rather than allowing it to intimidate him or put him off his stroke, he uses it as fuel for his creative fire.
“I have a ridiculous fear of what might happen if I stop moving,” he smiles. “I like to keep going.”
He was determined to find the best possible base from which to begin his solo adventures. Sometimes, he reasoned, it is necessary to go back, in order to find the right way forward.
Having tried living in Belfast, he realised that Aghagallon, with its population of just over 800, was where he felt most comfortable.
"Belfast scared the life out of me!" he laughs. "It was a mixture of traffic going past the house at night and that non-stop, constantly moving thing... It sounds like I lived in New York rather than Belfast! Even Belfast was too fast for me. I gave it a good lash, but I just thought ‘I can’t live healthily here and get things done’. So I decided the best thing to do was move back home and start from scratch.”
Away from all the exterior noise, after years of channeling his alt-country influences, he began to locate his true voice.
“A lot of the city-life stuff was about bars and that kind of thing... it had a Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown feel. I was happy to get out of that. To be honest, it was a world I didn’t really know anyway. I never drank whiskey, but I’m sure I sang about it three or four times! It seemed like something you had to reference, but it doesn’t even rhyme with many words either! It took me going through the guts of my twenties for me to realise who I was.To be comfortable singing about things I actually knew. I was always trying to mask it before.”
His 2013 debut album Not Nearly Dark has a moody tenderness, which established the Lavery blueprint. It was an excellent showcase for the work of an artist with a unique perspective. Subsequent releases, especially last year’s Kosher EP, have seen disparate electronic elements infiltrate the sound to fine effect. His musical pallette was expanding. This year’s Sea Legs mini-album (a winning collaboration with Ryan Vail) took him even further. His next album is almost in the bag; processed beats and strings will add further twists to his sonic range.
He echoes James Vincent McMorrow’s sentiment that, just because an acoustic guitar is the most readily-available tool, doesn’t mean you should be lumped in with a thousand po-faced, overly sensitive strummers. Hip-hop is a big part of Lavery’s life too and that’s becoming more and more evident in the way he writes songs.
“Nobody wants to be pigeonholed,” he concurs. “In a weird way, it’s therapeutic to move out of that and into some weird, in-between genres. I’d rather not be pinned down. I always use Tom Waits as the example. He just has his own sound and that’s it. The same with Beck. Nobody says ‘oh, Beck moves around too much, I don’t get it’. It’s a different sound all the time. He goes from one extreme to the other and it works.”
And make no mistake, discerning music fans are clearly getting where Lavery is coming from. He is touring regularly in Ireland and the UK. And in recent months, with the beautiful ‘Left For America’ to the fore, he has become nothing short of a Spotify sensation, having racked up over 14 million listens on the streaming service. He calls it a “snowball” effect.
“It’s so strange how people can treat you differently when you’ve got big numbers beside your name,” he smiles. “People start paying attention. I’ve been getting small stamps of approval throughout the year. I get strange videos sent to me all the time of people covering my music in Norway, Belgium...”
Are they any good?
“Yes and no! They’re always encouraging to get, because you know it’s not people’s first language as well. So it’s nice they took the trouble to sit down and learn a song.”
It’s not only nice, it’s a rare form of validation. Lavery’s words and melodies are connecting. And now there is further vindication. The quality of the Super Six acts that made it through to the final stage of The Big Break competition, run by Hot Press in association with ALCATEL ONETOUCH, was very high. For Ciaran to be chosen is a huge boost to a burgeoning career. He is a singular talent that deserves international recognition – sooner rather than later. But ultimately, for him, it is all about writing songs that endure.
“It’s great if you can really cut people in two with one line,” he says. “Because I’ve been a singer-songwriter fan from my early teens, I’ve always been a massive fan of that one lyric which captures people’s imagination. There’s always one lyric that you remember your entire life. Those kind of lines are worth 40 million guitar solos, in my opinion.”
We’ll be hearing a lot more from this guy...