15 years ago today: Villagers released Becoming a Jackal

Originally published in Hot Press in May 2010:

Mentioned in dispatches by Jon Pareles in the New York Times. A glittering Other Voices set. A much-lauded appearance on Later With Jools Holland. An upcoming slot at the Richard Thompson-curated Meltdown festival. Hailed by Jape man Richie Egan as embodying “everything I hold dear about music”.

Something’s gone very right for Conor J O’Brien since the dissolution of his first band The Immediate left him free to hone his skills as a sideman for Cathy Davey before forming Villagers, an ensemble who, before they’d even released their debut album (more of which in a moment), were opening for acts like Tindersticks and Neil Young.

“Every single step of the way you’re constantly a sponge, trying to take stuff from people, how they sing, how they perform,” O’Brien says on an April afternoon in Brook’s Hotel in Dublin. “I hope that never ends.”

Before we proceed – did he get to meet ol’ Shakey?

“I didn’t speak to Neil Young. He kind of walked by us in a haze of green smoke and wandered to his dressing-room. I spoke to his crew, they were all awesome. They are a mafia, but a very friendly mafia, a very helpful crew. You can tell they’ve all been with him for years, really old dudes.

“I was very excited watching him. I came to him quite late, I was only starting to listen to him properly at the beginning of writing these songs, which was two years ago. I think I just heard Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and On The Beach and Harvest. ‘Vampire Blues’ was very important, just the general looseness of it. Tommy (McLaughlin), who engineered the record and plays guitar in Villagers, he’s a massive Neil Young fan, so he was very happy about my new love of Neil. We were just trying to maintain the space that’s in some of his recordings and copy his drum sound, geeky little things like that. The songs had already been written, but it was more how to present them.”

The album Conor’s talking about is the extraordinary Becoming A Jackal, due for release on the Domino Recording Company. Says label boss Laurence Bell: “Villagers is a powerful and brilliant blend of poetry and melody. Conor has the voice of an angel and perfoms with a rare intensity. I’m glad our paths crossed when they did.”

Bell’s Domino colleague Harry Martin recalls the label’s first encounter with O’Brien:

“Myself and Laurence had actually seen The Immediate play at the Dublin Castle in Camden many years ago,” he reveals, “and we enjoyed that, it reminded us a bit of Sebadoh in the way they kept rotating as a band. It seemed like a novelty in a way, but a great performance, great songs. We were busy enough and thought no more of it, but when Cass McCombs came to play in Dublin towards the end of 2008, Villagers were supporting, and (Friction PR boss) Dan Oggly mentioned that I should check it out, that Conor was doing his own thing, freed of the band restrictions. I caught a bit of the set and was really impressed by it.

“And then a few months later Laurence heard the track ‘Becoming A Jackal’ and thought it was an amazing song and asked me if I’d heard of Villagers. And I suppose when Laurence picks up on something you start to think, ‘I should really pay more attention to that.’ So I went to a show in Whelan’s last spring with a more attentive head on and was blown away.”

Was the scope of the songs evident in early recordings?

“The early demos we heard were ‘Jackal’, ‘Set The Tigers Free’, quite a few songs he had knocking around, and he had of course the Irish 7” and EP (‘On A Sunlit Stage’ and Hollow Kind). Conor pretty much had mapped out how it would all happen, up to Donegal with Tommy, he took 15 songs and came back with 15 great recordings, and we had to battle and fight and struggle getting it down to ten or 11. There’s four amazing tracks left off the album – if you were to hear them you’d probably weep. We’ll get them out at some point. We’re here for the long run. We’re very excited about the first lap.”

Villagers are, it’s worth mentioning, the first Irish act to be signed to Domino, whose roster includes like-minded mavericks such as Franz Ferdinand, the Arctic Monkeys, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and James Yorkston.

“I remember reading that and going, ‘Really?’” O’Brien says of this distinction. “Maybe it’s just a geographical thing.”

Maybe it is. There is a strong sense of place about the album, and an even stronger sense of time. O’Brien, a Dun Laoghaire native, found himself looking beyond the pier and into a welter of possible pasts.

“It’s a pretty powerful thing, thinking that way,” he admits. “I think when you’re making art a lot of that can show itself in a really subconscious way that you shouldn’t really be aware of. There’s a real power in it, but it’s dangerous, you have to preserve the individuality of your own writing to a certain degree. But you can’t ignore the surroundings and the history of where you grew up.”

O’Brien’s songs are steeped in atmosphere, most evident on the album’s opener ‘I Saw The Dead’, as extraordinary a piece of music as you’re likely to hear all year. Indeed, the term ‘song’ hardly does it justice. The musical equivalent of a Hitchcock or Polanski film, it radiates the eerie magnetism of a fairytale, or maybe the moment in The Sixth Sense where we see what Cole Sear sees – hanging bodies in a school hallway (“That’s a really good scene in that film,” O’Brien concedes).

“The night we signed the contracts we were in a bar marking the occasion,” recalls Harry Martin, “a great pub called the Cat’s Back around the Wandsworth area down by the river. And Conor sat at the piano and started playing the melody line, almost to himself, and it hooked into our head and then about a month later this demo came through and it was that song. The whole thing is timeless in many ways. It could be from any era.”

Indeed, ‘I Saw The Dead’ might be an album unto itself, with its ghostly vocal set to a modernist but melodramatic neo-classical piano line. It’s a shoo-in for inclusion on the soundtrack of any Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In.

“I was trying to copy Philip Glass with the music,” O’Brien explains. “I had this piano piece which didn’t have any words for ages. The song is a repetitive chord sequence which was a small part of a bigger musical piece which had loads of different kinds of slightly dodgy rock opera parts, and I really needed to make myself edit them out. I was thinking, ‘That’s a good bit, and that’s a good bit, and that’s a good bit – everybody should hear all these good bits and they should all happen in these four minutes.’ Which is not the way to write a song at all, I think the simpler the better.”

And what of the creepy-crawly lyric?

“The words were... like all the songs, I was just playing with words. The title was the first thing, and I wrote the rest of the lyrics knowing it was going to be the first song, ‘cos it was the last song I wrote for the album. I wanted to write a sweeping introduction. I knew ‘Becoming A Jackal’ would probably be the second song, so the idea of scavenging... all these human traits that I was exploring, I wanted to make it almost grotesque and physical with ‘I Saw The Dead’, the ‘You take the torso/And I’ll take the head’ bit... I don’t know why. I find it really hard to do interviews about these songs to be honest, ‘cos they’re all just automatic and a bit subconscious. It’s that thing, talking about music is like dancing about architecture. That’s my current motto right now. But at the same time I’ve had good times figuring it out.”

And presumably he’s having fun hearing people’s interpretations – and misinterpretations – of the songs?

“Well that’s the thing. If you’re writing a song you’re being playful, you’re being childish, there’s space, and a lot of people have different ideas about it. Someone will say, ‘Is that song about a girl?’ ‘Well it obviously is for you. You just said it was!’ But the artwork for that song is important as well, it’s two old ships on which people had perished. In 1804 or something Dun Laoghaire harbour hadn’t appeared yet, and the only reason it appeared was two particular ships had perished on the rocks and hundreds of people had died, and I just had this image in my head when I was doing the artwork. But that was only after I’d written the song.”

If Becoming A Jackal wasn’t such a strong collection, O’Brien might have had some serious problems following that tune. Fortunately the rest of the record is as rich in dramatic irony and emotional potency, sometimes digressing into Arthur Lee territory, as well as exhibiting a fair grasp of pre-rock ‘n’ roll song-forms. ‘The Meaning Of The Ritual’, ‘The Pact’ and ‘Pieces’ all execute the classic David Lynch trick of juxtaposing doo-wop sweetness with pure horror.

“Transcendental darkness and the weirdness,” O’Brien laughs. “You’re onto me! That’s what I was trying to go for in some of the songs. Dark imagery or feelings alongside really mundane domestic everyday things. Let them rest beside each other, peacefully.”

Or not so peacefully. The first time we saw Twin Peaks’ Killer Bob was in the doily-like Palmer household. Which was, perversely enough, far more frightening than if we’d encountered him in a cabin in the woods.

“That’s true, it’s got the total childishness of ‘50s teenage life. There’s a sweetness and beauty to doo-wop music that when you put it in a certain context...”

Scare the bejesus out of a soul. That other Lynch favourite Roy Orbison had it too. O’Brien, as it happens, is a fan of the Big O’s gothic pop operas. You can hear it in songs like ‘Ship Of Promises’ and ‘That Day’.

“The chord changes, the lyrics, everything works with Roy Orbison,” he enthuses. “He’s a master. Although I’m not too sure about ‘Drove All Night’! That’s kind of weird. But still kind of cool.”

O’Brien, for all his impeccable sensibilities, is not afraid to occasionally go OTT. There are moments in his songs when, bizarrely enough, I’m reminded of Richard Harris doing Jimmy Webb’s ‘McArthur Park’.

“I don’t know that,” he confesses, “but I saw The Field recently for the first time. Amazing. I’d never read it or seen the play. I thought Harris was phenomenal, I was completely in that film, his acting, the ideas that it raised, it was mindblowing. It gives you really strong ideas about power and lust and the sadness of the whole thing, how it turned him into a complete monster. And that scene where he’s fighting the sea, it’s like Lear in a storm or something.”

If there’s an equivalent operatic moment on the Villagers record, it’s at the end of ‘Pieces’, when O’Brien abandons language and howls at the moon. A great moment, precisely because it dares to go beyond indie-schmindie notions of restraint.

“I remember recording the demo for that,” he says, “and it was about three or four in the morning, and I was on a break from touring with Cathy Davey. ‘Pieces’ was written in about five minutes, but the arrangement took about a year, and when I came upon that doo-wop version with the different time signature on the piano, it opened the song up for me. I remember having this moment of epiphany, howling as I was recording it, really excited and joyous, the most joyful experience I’ve ever had, which contrasts with the song’s meaning or feeling. That jackal howl.”

That jackal howl. A phrase to put hair on your chest. And an atmosphere not a million miles away from Elvis’s ‘Blue Moon’.

“I think it’s just blues,” O’Brien concludes. “A lot of people in interviews have gone, (adopts Euro accent), ‘What exactly is ‘Pieces’ about, what was happening to you in your life at that time?’ And I can’t remember, it’s just like a blues song, you’re singing and you hope whoever is listening to it knows what you mean in their own terms. You’re not trying to focus on your ego, you’re not trying to get everyone in the room to listen to your problems, you’re putting it out there so it can make a general connection. You can just howl. Everyone’s going to understand that.”

Listen to Becoming a Jackal below: