A Goss Man Altogether!

KIERAN GOSS has a grin as broad as a UCI widescreen – as usual. For a man who earns his bread and butter on the back of tales, both melancholy and manic, he somehow always manages to twist the perspective just enough to plant a rapt grin on everyone else’s mug too.

And for a long time now he’s had plenty to grin about. After establishing himself as a songwriter, popping his ditties in the laps of the likes of Mary Black, who devoured his ‘Brand New Star’ in an instant, he embarked on a musical partnership with Black the Younger (that’s Frances for those of you who’ve emerged from a bunker lately) that packed out venues all over the country and left audiences slobbering for more. It would’ve been so easy to switch the controls to auto-pilot: with sales of their eponymous debut hitting the 10,000 mark (phenomenal, given the less than gigantic domestic market here), cruise control would have been the route opted for by most. But Kieran Goss doesn’t quite fit under ‘most’. In fact he doesn’t quite fit under ‘some’ either. Occasional allowances for artistic flights of schizophrenia notwithstanding, there is only one Kieran Goss. And he’s a hoot. A comedian in the grand tradition of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, he can locate a funny bone at 20 paces – and then land a missile to the cardiac region en route.

Has he ever considered shifting the focus from music to comedy since his rapport with the audience is more tangle-free than a hairdressing salon full of kit bags of No More Tears?

“I think that I’m naturally funny,” he acknowledges, “but I wouldn’t be into writing scripts or anything like that, though a number of people have made that suggestion to me alright.”

By now Goss’ story-painting abilities are the stuff of folklore though tales of how he’s plain forgotten to use the guitar at the odd gig here and there where the seanchaoí in him took over are a tad exaggerated. Coming from outside Newry, he was steeped in the tradition of weaving a tale into the fabric of a song to lend it more resonance and colour.

“Tommy and Colm Sands were always big believers in talking to the audience,” he recalls “and Christy Moore does it, though he does it very differently in that it’s an extension of himself – he’s not a comedian but he’s very funny. So I just see it as part of that whole entertainment thing that people want to hear when they go out for the night – but it also has to be with a bit of integrity.

So despite furious attempts to dress Goss up and wheel him out (as a Kevin McAleer clone according to one ambitious promoter’s vision) he’s determined to stick to the original job description which tells him that he’s a writer and a singer of songs, first and foremost, and if his wry sense of humour wins him a few extra apostles along the way all the better.

He’s been keeping a low profile in recent months following the dissolution of the Goss & Black phenomenon, busily writing material for his second solo album, New Day, released this month. I imagine that it can’t have been easy landing back on solid ground after the duo’s staggering success, particularly their live performances which snowballed to Olympia proportions before they’d had a chance to draw breath. Then with the Woman’s Heart tour extending their bus passes for even longer it looked for a while like they might never come off the road long enough to see the inside of a recording studio again. Goss nods at the drastic changes that came when he and Frances decided to put a halt to their collective gallop.

“Actually for me (the touring) went on much too long,” he says. “It became to all intents and purposes a touring act, which I didn’t want it to be, and I felt that the original direction that we had been going in was lost, and that’s not a slight on either Frances or James (Blennerhassett – double bassist extraordinaire and possessor of a Jerry Lewis-like grin to rival Goss’) and although I could understand why they wanted to move it into that sphere, I still felt that at some stage I had to pull back and do my own thing.

“I also wanted to get back to doing more writing but I couldn’t, because I was working so much. I can’t work in a situation where I do three gigs this week and when I’ve four days off, I sit down and do some writing. It just takes me much longer than that to get into a more personal mode. So me and Frances just agreed that we were setting out to do two different things really, and she’s done great since then. We just wanted different things from it, I suppose.”

So the legendary nightly booze ’n’ babes routine that’s so integral a part of touring didn’t seduce him utterly?

“I get tired of touring after a while,” he says. “I love the singing but I just get a pain in my face with the shit that’s around it, all the long driving and everything.”

And recording studios do tend to have more comfortable furniture. Goss has no difficulty making himself at home there, proof of which can be gleaned from the fact that he co-produced New Day with Brian Masterson. Wasn’t he daunted at the prospect of twiddling all the knobs as well as being chief musical cook and bottlewasher?

Goss smiles at the stereotype: the delicate artist who won’t trouble his weary mind with the sordid details of technology.

“I have to say that I love being in the studio. For me it’s the most creative part of the entire process and to be honest I think that there’s a big myth about studios. A lot of people are afraid of them but a lot of that is a load of shite. A lot of session people get hardened and get restricted by their own rules – but I was lucky in that I was working with people who still approached recording with a fresh eye and ear and weren’t afraid to try things.”

New Day differs dramatically from the Goss/Black collaboration in that 10 of the 11 tracks on it are self-penned and the overall hue is more than a tad darker than its generally shiny happy predecessor. Listening to tracks like ‘Look My Way’, ‘Take A Look At My Heart’ and ‘Find The Words’ it appears that all has not been a bed of roses in the Goss household. Heartstrings have been pulled and dragged in all manner of directions and it sounds like this year’s model is a whole lot wiser (and perhaps a touch wearier) for his journey. It’s a soundscape that could almost sit in a ‘concept album’ framework, if that term hadn’t been so misshapen by the bloated outfits who’ve hijacked it in the past.

Goss is happy with his progeny for that very reason.

“One thing that always impressed me about Altan in particular,” he says, “is that they make albums, as opposed to just putting a string of songs down in the studio. And that’s why I wanted to work with Brian Masterson as well. I’d heard the sounds he’d got on the Altan albums and I felt that someone who could get the sound that close to the speaker and still make it sound natural was exactly what I wanted.”

Armed as he is now with a skin-tight trio of Liam Bradley on drums, Ted Ponsonby on acoustic guitar and dobro and Tony Molloy on bass, Goss has a band that’d be the envy of many a lonesome troubadour in search of company. Still, with his hospitality skills so finely honed at this stage, was he tempted to go it alone directly after the split with Frances, particularly since his name is so readily recognised now from Wexford St. to Leap – and points west?

“I was,” he agrees, “but I remembered years back doing the tours of England and Germany on my own, and I just wasn’t into doing that again. Musically you can only do so much on your own, and I got bored with that. People like Christy and Dick Gaughan do it well but there’s some intensity to that and it must be exhausting. And musically it’s more interesting for me because I love arranging songs and getting the band to try out different things.”

Ever the astute business mind, Goss isn’t blind to the demands of daytime radio either.

“From a purely practical point of view it’s more likely to get played on the radio and it’s more likely to appeal to more people! But I already have plans to do a solo thing in about three years from now which will be helped by the fact that a lot of the songs will be known by then. I think a big factor for any well-known songs is that they can hold the audience.”

Two solo nights in the Mean Fiddler was enough to remind Goss of the delights and demands of the lone star. While he enjoyed the gigs, he makes no secret of his terror at the prospect of facing down audiences on his tod, with not a cymbal or a bass string for company.

“It was great, because I got a real buzz from it,” he says, that manic grin spreading across his face in an instant, “but I’m not so sure if I’d feel the same after 11 or 12 nights on my own!”

He’s adamant that commercial considerations haven’t impinged on his approach to writing in any way, though they threatened to, at one point, when writing songs for other artists posed a particularly attractive (and lucrative) proposition.

“For a while that temptation was there,” he says, “but I just found that that was moving away from what I wanted to do. I wanted to write songs for myself and if at a later stage people covered them, then that’s great. But I didn’t want to become a sort of functional writer. To me that’s getting it a bit arse about face.”

The art or act of songwriting is something that Goss didn’t slip into through a process of osmosis. He sees it as a craft that is demanding of more than a passing fancy for rhyming couplets and isn’t something that drops on the doormat in a mail order catalogue.

“Songwriting’s very much a personal reaction to something that happens,” he suggests. “I read last week where Seamus Heaney said that the best that you end up with is ‘the melt’ of the original – which I thought was a lovely phrase. And I think the point that a lot of songwriters forget, and the reason why they end up writing these introverted, drivelly songs, is that they forget that they have to get it across to their audience. It’s not enough to get something off your chest. It’s not therapy! Or at least it shouldn’t be for a professional songwriter.

“And getting it across is where the craft comes in. It’s knowing when to raise a song and when less is more, and when sometimes just to hint at something is much more effective than to come out and say ‘I miss her’. It’s a tone that you have to find.”

Although the inspirations may be personal Kieran Goss is adamant that New Day is less autobiographical and more experiential in its focus: from the personal, universal truths can be fingered and, he hopes, can be a cause for common identity for an audience open to the ideas within the cache of 11 songs.

“The title track is a song that I wrote for two friends of mine whose lives seemed to be strewn with a series of ups and downs,” Goss explains. “It was inspired by them but I wrote it to convey the feeling that the downs are what you measure the ups against. I saw it as something that would register with just about everybody because everyone has had a bad period of experience in their lives, and hopefully most of them would find that they’re actually a lot better off for it, which in fact was what I found. You think that it’s the end of the world but you’re a lot richer in some ways at the end of it – and you’re just more able to handle it again.”

Anyone who’s seen Goss live would probably file his image under ‘incorrigible optimist’, with his scatty stories and permanent ear to ear grin virtually patented at this stage. Does his own self-image gel with the one he lays on for public consumption or is there a darker version that only emerges after the houselights come up?

He laughs at the ‘incorrigible’ part but basically nods in agreement at the ‘optimist’ label.

“Yes, I suppose basically I am an ‘up’ person,” he suggests, “but New Day is not a happy happy album. Listening back to it now there seems to be a tone or a sense of melancholy or loss to it, with tinges of optimism every now and again to balance it out. It’s not a sad album but the overall feel of it is more late night than I even realised. On reflection I think it’s a more mature album than Brand New Star and probably more of an ‘album’ album than the one that I did with Frances. It’s more of a collection than what I’ve done in the past.”

The album’s identity is undoubtedly firmly rooted in stories of love and life in all its forms and frailties. The tone is one of a personal communiqué rather than an attempt at any political treatise. Coming from Mayobridge, outside Newry, was Kieran tempted to try to put his own personal perspective on matters political, particularly given the extraordinary advances of recent months?

“I certainly haven’t made a conscious effort to steer clear of politics in my songwriting,” he insists, “but there are people who can do that better than me. It’s just not the way I write. I am fairly politically aware but I’ve always stood back from platforms. I don’t trust them. I’ve always been suspicious of people who try to express everyone’s feelings for them. It’s the personal that I want to get across to people and if it is universal, then, all the better. If you can tap into the feelings of a whole generation, then great! Then you’re a genius – you’re Bob Dylan!

“I’ve always considered myself nationalist and Irish in that I speak Irish and culturally I’ve much more in common with Irish people than I have with English people, but that’s about as far as I’m going to take it. Inevitably the North had to be solved by people sitting down and talking through their differences and compromising. But that political situation didn’t move me to write in the same way that more immediate things, like my own or my friends’ experiences do.”

As far as Kieran Goss is concerned he’s here for the long haul. He knows what he wants to write about and he recognises his own musical strengths which allow him to carry on along the path he’s taken so far. The decision to go it alone is one he’s happy to live with because, for him the bottom line is that he “wouldn’t make an album that (he) couldn’t stand over.”

“After all,” he says, grinning, “Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen are in it for the long haul. So why can’t I?!”