The sun also rises

For two years in a row The Revs played at a festival in Lanzarote. It was a charity gig but we got our flights and hotels paid for and it was fantastic – a big rock thing with a couple of thousand people at it. The second time around I met a girl after the gig who was living over there. One thing led to another and I found myself going back two weeks later. I’ve been living there for a year and a half now.
At the time The Revs were sort of falling apart. We’d done a tour of Germany – our last stronghold where we actually made some money. We started getting on each other’s nerves and we came home after four days. We’d gotten so stressed at that point. The year before that, we’d recorded what we thought was our best album. But it did nothing, which was very frustrating. We just ran out of steam.
When I moved over to Lanzarote I still had to pay the rent and buy food etc. so I had to swallow my pride and go and audition in a few bars. It was just me and an acoustic guitar. It was quite humiliating being told ‘no’ by a few bars. Three years before The Revs had played Slane with the Stereophonics. I found it difficult at first. A lot of drunken Irish people shouting up for songs you don’t want to do.
But I got lucky and met a guy from Galway who’d just set up a bar in the old town. He said, ‘Play away, do whatever you want and if people come in, we’ll split the till’. All of a sudden it started ticking away nicely. I was able to do about 20 of my own songs mixed in with a bit of Springsteen, Neil Young, The Beatles and Nirvana – stuff that I liked. There was about 25 people in every night. The tough thing was it was a three and a half hour gig. With The Revs we used to do 50 minutes and be complaining! Then I met a few lads from Barcelona and we got a little band together.
Along with the tourist haunts, there’s a beautiful old side to the island. There was an artist from there called Caesar Manrique who was Andy Warhol’s best friend in the New York pop art scene. He moved back there in his 50s and became the arts minister. He put up all these murals around the city and monuments on the roundabouts – really wacky, modern art stuff. He brought in a rule that the houses could only be painted white, green or blue. Some of the villages look amazing now. But he died seven years ago and the big hotels started expanding. There are a lot of young holiday makers and stag parties.
I didn’t like it at first. I was living in Puerto del Carmen and it was a bit like Ibiza Uncovered where you had to watch out for the puke as you were walking home – it had a bit of a seedy element to it. But I got a car and moved out of there. I can now drive up to a two mile beach and there’ll be four people on it. The cost of living is very cheap. You’ve no heating bill to worry about and it’s €2 for a beer or a bottle of wine – I live in the wine-making district! Food is cheap too. It’s very easy to get home. The way I look at it is, Donegal is four hours from Dublin and so is Lanzarote. Funnily enough it’s about the same size as Donegal.
When I went over first I had no TV, I just found myself sitting outside the house, reading, listening to music, going for walks. I didn’t pick up the guitar in three months. I had become bitter about music – nothing new was good enough. But the sun revitalised me and I love the place now. I speak a little bit of Spanish, enough to get by with the barmen and taxi drivers.
I wrote the album in Lanzarote and recorded it in Germany. I find it easy to write in the sunshine. The sun puts a smile on the music. My dad bought me Pro-Tools and a microphone, and I played all the instruments myself apart from the pedal steel, which is my dad.
I’m really chuffed about it. I’m launching it in a house that was owned by Omar Sharif – he lost it in a poker game and now it’s a venue/restaurant. I’m looking forward to my first tour on my own. I’ll be back in October for a college tour. It’ll be low-key. I’ve realised that my day job is a musician and I’ll still do the stuff in the bars.

Rory’s album God Bless The Big Bang is out now