A Little Bleak of What You Fancy

That’s Cork native Mick Flannery’s name, right there at the top of the Sunday headline list at the upcoming Liss Ard festival. It’s a fact which seems to come as a bit of a surprise to the singing stonemason. He’s a little scared and full of honest self-deprecation about the potential mood-dampening effect of his introspective music. “Usually the headline act is a celebratory type deal where everyone goes home happy. I’m going to ruin these people’s weekend,” he laughs. 

Nothing of course could be further from the truth. For a start, Flannery is on home turf in Cork. And, whle there is an introspective quality to his music at times, there is something wonderfully uplifting in the sheer quality of the songs, the melodies and the stories that Flannery distils on stage.
His star in also surely in the ascendant. This is the man who beat the Queen of Pop herself to the No.1 spot in the Irish charts with his new album, Red To Blue. Not that he’s gloating. Suggesting that the general Irish reaction to any type of success is to be embarrassed, he dismisses the whole thing in typically cheeky, melodious, Cork tones. “Before you’d stick your head out and say, ‘Yeah look at me’, you’d say, ‘Ooh, sorry about that Madonna, didn’t mean it. I was only havin’ a laugh!’”
Flannery says he never set out to court popularity. “I tend not to dwell on the successes too much,” he says quietly, “in case I get my hopes up. I tend to make everyone sombre around me. But everyone was delighted, it couldn’t have gone better, like. Especially considering the type of music it is. It’s not exactly top chart material.”
So how does a singer-songwriter take on the Madonna juggernaut and win? Flannery points to the fact that he’s been doing a lot of live gigs over the past two years, steadily building his fan base and winning over the unconverted. ”Those I didn’t scare away may have gone out and bought the album,” he quips. He also observes that the singer-songwriter phenomenon is still strong in Ireland. Ireland, he adds, does produce its fair share of “self-involved miserati”.
Needless to say, Flannery’s brand of “misery” has a far wider appeal than he pretends. American country singer Shawn Colvin included a version of ‘Up On That Hill’ on her latest album, All Fall Down. “It was a lovely feeling to be honest,” he says about the first time he heard it. “I was actually visiting my parents in France and my mother downloaded it from the internet and was playing it. It was a big deal for her, ‘cos she’s a big fan of Emmylou Harris and you can hear her singing the backing vocals on it.”
It was flattering and humbling that she picked that song, he says. He claims not to be fully sure of what the song is about and jokes that she could have read something entirely different into it. 
“I wouldn’t be precious really,” he adds. “She’s welcome to do whatever version she wanted to. If she did the Ibiza dance version I’m sure it would have been fine by me. I wouldn’t listen to it too often but I wouldn’t be insulted by it.”
Meanwhile, Flannery is working quietly away on his very own musical. Fans will recall, of course, that his first album, Evening Train, originally started life as a musical. “I was writing the dialogue and it was just awful, so I gave up and made it into a concept album,” he recalls. However, the project has now taken on a life of its own. A UK based writer and a director are currently trying to make a stage production of it, and Flannery himself has become involved in the process again.
“The other day, they were asking if they could change the ending, so that there is some hope,” he explains. “I said no (laughs).”
The Liss Ard Festival is one of just a handful of appearances he’s making this summer, as his thoughts are on stonemasonary: “I must build a wall on Sherkin Island,” he says with an almost Fitzcarraldo-esque determination. “If I get the job, that is. That could be a working holiday.” After that, he’s off to Germany to promote Red to Blue in “pigeon German” and will probably do more promo here in Ireland around the release of the album’s title track as a single. 
Then, he suspects it will be back to writing for the next album. “They don’t want to wait another three years like the last one. Under three years would definitely be the watershed!” And maybe he’ll return to the US, though he concedes it’s expensive to go out there. 
“Hopefully some Bigwig will just buy me a ticket,” he says with mock helplessness. “I’m waiting for that phone call!” Or he could place an ad? “Yeah,” he laughs, “Bigwig needed. Or maybe that’s not the best wording. What about: Patron. American patron wanted for miserable Irish songwriter!”

Mick plans Liss Ard Festival, Co. Cork on Sunday, August 5.