Ave maria

She’s been squirreling away progressions and fragments for four years. But when Maria Doyle Kennedy walks into the Library Bar sporting a neat bump under her Siouxsie shirt, it looks as though she’s planned it all meticulously.

The imminent arrival of her fourth child sometime this September may have drastically impacted on her availability for promotional duties, yet it’s an apposite condition for a woman who’s here to discuss Mütter, her splendid second solo album.
Listening to the gorgeous feminine sprawl of that record as she hovers between prowling Brechtian succubus and unsure Little Girl Lost, Madonna and advoutress, Dusty and Patti, you get the sense of a woman who is determined to be all things to all genders.
“When you’re a mother,” she smiles, “you’re always just cobbling all those bits of your life together, aren’t you?”
Looking at her across the table, it occurs to me that a complete stranger could probably finger this person as the author of this raw musical journal. More than two decades have passed since we first made her acquaintanceship, though she still resembles a wild, young princess lately snuck into a muddy festival, sure to get tripped up by a pea under her sleeping bag.
There are a proliferate of Marias competing for airspace on Mütter, but Mother Maria has worked it into a cohesive whole, carefully nurturing each track into being.
“We started to gig the songs acoustically ages ago,” she tells me. “Just so we could hear them. It’s easy sometimes to dress up a half-good song in the studio, especially if, like me, you have a great bunch of musicians around. I wanted to test the nugget of each song. If it’s just you and a guitar, there’s nowhere to hide. It was just at that point someone came up to me and said ‘I’ve read your album in novel form.’ Now that’s obviously a really intriguing thing for somebody to say and, of course, I became completely obsessed with it.”
The novel in question was Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, the unsavoury tale of Misty, a promising art student who is tricked into marriage and pregnancy by an odd young man and the odder island community of Waytansea. There, like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man, Misty finds herself at the centre of a bizarre ritual.
“The main thing about Diary is the tension between conformity and art,” says Maria. “With Misty, there are all these omens and signs she half deciphers. Or more importantly she half doesn’t get. I liked the idea that we are lured into cyclical behaviour. I found myself writing about formative behaviour and behavioural patterns a lot on the record.”
Happily, where other attempts to translate Palahniuk’s writing into music have, like Panic! At The Disco’s ‘London Beckoned Songs About Money Written By Machines’, been content to parachute quotations into lyric sheets, Mütter is far too classy to flaunt its allusions.
“I’d already written quite a lot of the songs at that point,” explains Maria. “The lyrics didn’t come from the book at all. And Kieran found the sound. But the book impacted in two ways. Diary is about shaped behaviour and the relevant omens and signs she half deciphers. But the main thing was this incredible gothic, ethereal atmosphere. We were at a juncture where there were loads of different ways that each song could have gone. So I kept trying. I would just go back and think about Misty again. It was a great reference point but it was abstract, like an emotional map. And it was really important for me that it wasn’t a musical reference. I stopped listening to music as much as I could. Except for Low. I couldn’t live without my copy of The Great Destroyer.”
It’s odd that the School of Chuck could impact so on such quintessentially girlish bellitude. However one views that writer’s characteristically machine-gun sentences and thrusting repetition, it forms an undeniably masculine milieu.
“That’s true,” she nods. “He has a few recognisable tricks alright. But those sharp choppy sentences and the use of repetition, I found to be very close to song structures. So that’s where it got interesting for me.”
Sadly, these lovely cantons may not reach the wider audience they so richly deserve. ‘Fuckability’, the fabulously wanton first single swiftly aroused the ire of this country’s Mrs. Grundys when the national broadcaster gave it an airing last month.
“I was astonished that it was such a brouhaha,” she sighs. “I don’t get played much on mainstream radio anyway. I just thought the people who might like my record – the DJs who choose their own records and who are into that sort of thing would play it. It was one of the lighter, funnier, up-tempo songs. I just didn’t realise what a problem the title would be. There’s only one curse in the entire song. We thought they’d call it 'F-ability' as a compromise and that would be that. Kieran was scratching his head and wondering if it was 1948 again. I mean I would be offended by a song with a sinister intention. There are a lot of booty call records out there suggesting the most appalling degradation. But those songs have plenty of beeps and beats so they get played and the message is ignored. I don’t understand why people can’t be commonsensical about these things. Honestly, if it had been called something else we might have got around that one curse more easily. I just didn’t think. And if you’re operating at this level and running your own record label it’s the kind of mistake you can’t afford to make. If something has any kind of chance, you should see to it that it gets that chance. Not scupper it.”
No matter. Mütter is yet another Great Leap Forward in an already fascinating career. By the time young Ms. Doyle was reading politics at Trinity, she was singing with an embryonic version of the Hothouse Flowers. Later, as the vocal foil to Kieran Kennedy, her husband of 19 years and Black Velvet Band cohort, she helped shape the burgeoning Irish raggle taggle scene. But her solo efforts, starting with the darksome fairy tales of Charm four years ago, seem worlds away from such gypsy galliardise.
“Well, the other bands I’ve played with weren’t mine,” she says. “It wasn’t my sound. It wasn’t something I created. What I’m doing now is what I like.”
Did she simply outgrow the role of backing singer I wonder?
“It was more about timing. When I had enough songs to make an album, then it was time. And really, during my 20s, I was busy learning to be a mother. I didn’t have anything to say beyond that. Nothing that would have been interesting at any rate. I just drifted along from accidental place to accidental place. It was very random and accidental. It depended entirely on who I ran into that day. I was happy to just express myself through the singing. I enjoyed performing. There wasn’t anything in my head that I needed to get out.”
Between touring, recording and attending to a husband and three sons, Maria has still found time to become one of this country’s finest actors. Currently, she’s wooing American audiences as Catherine of Aragon in the bodice-ripping blockbuster TV series, The Tudors.
“Well, you know, it pays the bills,” she laughs.
Whoa there, I say. Can she really be so cavalier about a career most thespians would kill, rape and pillage for?
“Oh. I know,” she says. “And I do love it. I have a great time when I do it. But I don’t ever miss it when I’m not doing it. I don’t crave it. It’s not like singing where I just couldn’t do without it. But the nice thing about acting is that you’re less vulnerable. You’re interpreting somebody else’s words. And it’s a much more collaborative thing. It’s not purely an expression of how you feel. Songs are a truer expression of yourself. You’re totally exposed and out there.”
I am supremely glad Maria Doyle Kennedy is around, scoring points for the girls. When she talks about Sirens, a compilation featuring female artists released on her own Mermaid label, she could easily, were she in anyway boastful, be making a case for herself; “It was about the music first of all,” she says. “It can’t be gender based just for the sake of gender. These were all people I admired. And they’re good role models to push out there. You don’t have to exploit yourself or your sexuality in the way you’ll be advised to. There are women who do it their own way and younger girls should be aware of them. They should be aware of Patti Smith as much as they’re aware of the Pussycat Dolls. That’s what you hope anyway.”

Mütter is out now on Mermaid Records.