All You Need Is Love

How’s this for a big romantic sloppy whirlwind love-at-first-sight story? About 18 months ago, tall, dark, handsome and rising young Dublin singer-songwriter David Kitt was onstage soundchecking at a local venue, preparing for an important show to promote his recently released second album The Big Romance (which would eventually garner huge critical acclaim and sell 30,000 copies in Ireland alone), when out of the corner of his eye he spotted a lithe, black-haired beauty, busily buzzing around the place with a screwdriver sticking out of the back pocket of her torn jeans. She was obviously a stagehand or sound engineer, but he’d never seen her before. Already a little battered and bruised around the heart (as a listen to his early recordings will testify), the 26-year-old musician wasn’t particularly on the lookout for any kind of romantic entanglement – he had a new album to promote, after all – but something about this creature and the cool, confident way she carried herself had him transfixed. He asked someone in his band and discovered that the name of this vision of loveliness’ name was Poppy. Poppy! Poppy!! He loved her already!
She was so gorgeous, he could barely take his eyes off her, let alone concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing. When he finally pulled himself together enough to play, he quickly became aware that she was watching him closely too. The attraction was very obviously mutual. Throughout the soundcheck, they behaved like giggling schoolchildren – continually catching each other staring and then shyly looking away. Even before they’d spoken, they knew there was a special connection – an electromagnetic emotional pull that they could both feel pulsing across the room.
Later that night he played one of the best gigs of his career, secretly serenading her from the stage. Afterwards, when the crowd had gone home happy, he approached her and, after a few minutes of forgettable chit-chat, nervously asked her if she fancied going out somewhere, sometime, anytime. She looked him square in the eye, laughed cruelly, and told him to go and fuck himself!
Relax readers, I’m jesting. Of course she said ‘yes’. Their relationship was, he admits, “pretty electric” from the very beginning. It must have been. Within six months of their first meeting, the pair were married in Nashville, Tennessee, by an eccentric old judge named Mr. Charles Galbraith. It was a quiet affair, but still somewhat rock ’n’ roll – even the judge wore a Hawaiian shirt and ripped sneakers. Directly after the ceremony the happy newlyweds drove to Memphis, stopping off briefly in New Orleans for a recording session with the appropriately named swamp-pop super-group Lil’ Band O’ Gold.
But let’s backtrack a little here, because this story isn’t just about happy endings, it’s also about new beginnings. In Poppy, David Kitt soon realised that he had found more than just a life partner – he’d also met his musical muse. The very first night they spent together, his future wife (who’s also a DJ) played him six or seven records that not only rekindled his love of pop music and re-awakened him to the possibilities of what it could express, but also sent him off in an entirely different musical direction from the rocky road he had previously been travelling.
“There was definitely a huge musical connection between us,” he recalls. “I was at a point where buying music and listening to music was becoming too much like research or something. I was just always anxious to keep up with the latest electronic release or experimental stuff, whatever, and it kind of got me back in touch with how important music was to me when I was growing up, and just the emotional content of music and how there was a lot of music out there that could really give you a lift. I guess when I was a teenager I really relied on music a lot more. But meeting Poppy really kind of woke me up to that, and steered me in the direction I should’ve been going for quite a while.
“Prior to that, I was just at a bit of a creative dead end. I was at home working on programmed stuff and electronic stuff. Spending days on end working on tiny details. It was more about the exercise of getting something interesting but by the time you got there, there wasn’t any huge satisfaction in it. It was becoming style over content.”
As it happens, Kittser’s new album Square One is actually pretty stylish musically, despite – actually, because of – its deceptive simplicity, but content-wise there’s really only one theme running throughout its thirteen songs. From feelgood album opener ‘Me And My Girl’ (“I’m in love with a girl/The funniest girl in the world/Didn’t know it could happen to me”) to soft and gentle lullaby closer ‘Hold Me Close’, this is a warm and comforting record of unabashed, unashamed – but thankfully not unrequited – love songs. Radio-friendly moments like the ultra-hummable ‘Got What I Need’ or ‘Your Smiling Face’ aside, it’s really much more a Poppy record than a poppy record.
“I really wanted to put the emphasis back on the songs,” he says, “you know, the kind of stuff you could sit and play on acoustic guitar. And it was great to make a record that celebrated something that I wanted to sing about again and again. Obviously, from a point of melancholy, it can be difficult to write songs that you know you’re gonna have to get up on stage and sing night in, night out. Because you’ve gotta relive something that maybe you don’t want to relive. But with this, it’s just me basically trying to celebrate something that I felt I’d really like to be singing about out on the road.”
At this point, your tactless hotpress correspondent says the wrong thing entirely: “Though, of course, if you start having marital difficulties, it might make singing them difficult. You know, if you have a fight with her on the phone some night, you mightn’t feel so upbeat about, em, proclaiming your love for her from the stage.”
D’oh! From the gobsmacked look on his face, I might as well have just slapped him one. It’s obvious that the thought of any trouble in paradise simply hasn’t occurred to him. “Exactly, yeah… Em, I mean, that’s…” Alarmed, he takes a long drag on his Marlboro Light and stares off into space for a worrying length of time. Then he tips his ash and grins widely. “Shit! I really hadn’t considered that. Well, I guess I’d better just do my best to keep it sweet at home…”

Home for Kittser is currently a rented 19th century redbrick schoolhouse, about 40 minutes drive outside Dublin. It’s small, but oh-so-perfectly formed, and more than half a world away from the tiny bedsits he used to live and work in. With weathercocks, high gables and intricately designed windows, from the outside the place looks more like an old Protestant church or something out of Hansel and Gretel than anything else. Inside, its remarkably high ceilings have great acoustics, and its wooden floors and open staircase give a homely feel. It’s a great house for a musician and a DJ to be sharing (though they’ve yet to throw a serious party in the place).
Casually dressed in T-shirt and jeans, and looking deeply tanned from a recent holiday in Crete, Kittser gives myself, photographer Roger Woolman and Friction publicist Dan Oggly, a brief guided tour of his impressive new abode. Naturally, there’s a well equipped home studio, with heavy drapes shielding out the light. In the spacious main room, guitars and amps lie around the place and there are hundreds of vinyls neatly stacked against the wall (Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home prominently angled on top of one of the piles). If he ever finds himself doing MTV Cribs – not all that unlikely an eventual prospect – his house will put all those LA rapper’s art-deco monstrosities to shame.
Eventually Poppy returns from a shopping trip and while she sticks on a record and helps the others set up for the photo-shoot in the living room, myself and Kittser retire to the kitchen (or should that be kittchen?), where he makes me a superb rum mint julep and prepares to square-up to Square One. As quietly spoken in conversation as he is on record, he doesn’t so much listen to questions as slowly absorb them. There are long contemplative pauses and probably far too many cigarettes. I don’t know him personally, but I’d say he’s undoubtedly a better listener than a talker.
“Actually, I can talk about other people’s music till the cows come home,” he tells me, “but when it comes to my own… (shakes head and trails off). I guess I just think that it is what it is, you know.”
Although he’s always home-recording, most of the new album was laid down in Ian Burgess’s Black Box Studios in France’s scenic Loire Valley over three separate periods in 2002 and 2003. As well as being technologically advanced, the studio is also equipped with lots of old analogue and valve equipment (previously used by such luminaries as Curtis Mayfield and Ike & Tina Turner), something which came as a source of great inspiration and infinite possibilities to the singer and his musical accomplices – sound engineer Jimmy Eadie and hugely talented producer Karl Odlum (formerly of the Mary Janes). It was Odlum who put him onto the studio.
“Karl and his brother Dave had been using the studio quite a lot with various different bands, and that was how the word got back to me,” David explains. “Karl’s a veteran of the place so initially I got him involved just because he knew the drill over there. You know, he really knew how to run the studio – and it’s a little bit tricky. He started in the background – he had the computer set-up, and we had the whole analogue set-up running at the same time – but, just as it went on, the three of us got really close and by the end of it we were a really well-oiled working machine. Getting ideas down really quickly, with no arsing around, but still having a lot of fun.”
Apparently, they were having so much fun they just couldn’t stop working – and regularly did 24 hour days, without taking any breaks.
“We just got a huge buzz off doing good work,” he enthuses. “It’s the biggest buzz. I mean, there was a lot of coffee, cheap wine, a few smokes, a few drinks, and all that. But really the best buzz came from the work.”
Although most of the recording was done in France, he did take some time out of his honeymoon last year to record the wonderfully waltzing ‘Faster and Faster’ in New Orleans with Warren Storm and Dickie Landry of the Lil’ Band O’ Gold.
“One of the guys in the band was a friend of a friend of Poppy’s so that’s how that came about,” he says. “It was quite a musical honeymoon, that whole journey from Nashville to Memphis. The initial premise of my trip wasn’t just to get married, it was just to go and try some co-writing stuff with Nashville songwriters. My publishing company wanted me to go over. They love to get people to come over and co-write just to get a different angle. So get a new Irish songwriter and pair him off with some of the local guys and see what they come up with.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t come up with anything particularly worthwhile over there.
“To be honest, it was quite dry and I didn’t really enjoy it,” he admits. “Creatively I didn’t get anything from it. And it was a real eye-opener in terms of how songs are written over there. It’s just all so mundane and they get very mundane songwriters to write for people who just like mundane music. It’s a far cry from the days of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.”
Earlier this year, most of his family paid a fleeting visit to Black Box during the final stages of Square One’s recording. As tends to happen on Kittser records, they all wound up making musical cameos on the finished album.
“Basically my brother Robbie and my sister Ruth were gonna be singing on the record anyway,” he chuckles. “I wanted my other brother to sing as well but he couldn’t make the trip. My sister sings on ‘Faster & Faster’ and on ‘Long Long Stares’. And my mum and dad came out with them, because they were going to Paris anyway. I had written a song for my mother called ‘House With Trains’ and it kind of made sense to have her sing on the finished track. She’s very low in the mix but you can hear her.”
His already legendary 13-year-old brother Robbie – who debuted at age 11 on Kittser’s home-recorded Rough Trade debut Small Moments – also sings on the record.
“I just love that he’s interested, you know,” he smiles, with obvious fraternal pride. “For his birthday one year I bought him my top ten hip-hop albums of all time. He’s playing classical piano now at grade three. He’s incredibly talented – if he wants to do music, he’ll be well able. He’s an incredibly smart kid, real all-round smartness. From a really early age, if I was at home recording, he’d always be trying to get involved. And he’d come up with amazing melodies. But I love that I’m able to contribute to his musical education.”
And keeping it firmly in the family, his father, TD Tom Kitt, also wound up contributing some backing vocals. “I knew he was dying to be asked to chip in a bit, so he ended up singing one line on ‘Saturdays’. Actually, he came up with the harmony himself and it was really great.”
Your family are obviously very important to you…
“Ah yeah, but when you’re growing up in a small suburban house, everyone is in everybody’s face and so you kind of have to get on with each other. But my parents are always the first people to get the mixes of any new stuff, and I really value their opinion.”
Of course, David isn’t the only celebrity in the Kitt family. His Fianna Fail father, Tom, is Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. Father and son get on, er, famously. In fact, they attended a Gillian Welsh gig at the Roisin Dubh in Galway together just two nights ago.
But as a musician with a media profile, is he constrained because of his dad’s prominent position? Obviously, he couldn’t throw any Liam Gallagher style tantrums…
“No. It’d be all over the papers and it’d be a slur on the family name and all that. It comes up again and again, and you’re almost constrained just by the fact that you have to talk about it in interviews. But he does his thing and I do my thing, and we try as much as possible to lead very separate professional lives. And then our personal lives are obviously something different.”
Any interest in politics yourself?
“Not really, no. Unfortunately. I mean, my whole life is taken up with music. It’s not that I’m apathetic, more that I don’t really have the time. I try and read the papers and keep in touch with what’s going on. But growing up in a political household, you tend more to develop an aversion to politics.
“The initial aversion was a result of looking at what my dad had to deal with. If we went down to the local supermarket, he’d always have to spend half an hour talking to every Tom, Dick and Harry, and I’d just be going, ‘Jesus, how the hell does he have the patience for that?’ And he’d be treating everybody with the greatest respect and courtesy and I just couldn’t fuckin’ do that.
“Ironically, I’m now in a position when I’m out and about, I do have to deal with that. Obviously it’s different, because they don’t approach me the same way and a lot of them are quite passionate about music – but sometimes you’re just not in the mood or your mind’s on something else, but you have to be polite.”
Do you think that being brought up somewhat in the spotlight has made you less impressed by the cult of celebrity?
“Probably,” he nods. “I mean, as a family we had our picture taken for the papers quite a lot if we went out anywhere with dad. It certainly helped prepare me for this end of things, there’s no doubt about that. And I’m quite comfortable with it. But for some reason, I’ve no idea why, because I was quite a shy kid – and I still am quite shy in many ways – but the whole performing thing comes easy to me. I’m not that mad about getting my picture taken – I’m not that good at posing or whatever. But it’s a necessary thing to do. But when it comes to getting up on a stage, I don’t get nerves for some reason.”
While it might help prepare someone for the glare of publicity, having a high profile politician for a father can also have its serious disadvantages. When Kittser moved from Rough Trade and signed to Blanco Y Negro in 2001, several journalists wrote nasty stories suggesting that he only got his major deal because of his father’s influence. An ill-judged piece by the usually reliable Emily O’Reilly in the Sunday Times obviously still rankles.
“It was just a completely ludicrous proposition – this suggestion that I was only signed because of who my father is,” he sighs, rolling his eyes. “I dunno – to see somebody who’s supposed to be a professional, and who’s highly rated by some people in her profession, to stoop that low, I just thought it was a bit pointless really. It really did show just a lack of understanding of the business, for a start, and a total lack of understanding of my music. Though I somehow doubt she’d ever even heard it.
“Looking back, though, those things were inevitably gonna happen. There was a fairly nasty story in Ireland on Sunday as well. There have been a couple of headline-making stories based on the connection between myself and my father. People were always gonna be on the lookout for something. It’s like this guy’s coming through, he’s sold a few records and he’s the son of a prominent politician – people are just waiting for any sniff of a story.”
Does it bother you that you’ve got less leeway and can’t really afford to fuck-up the way other musicians might be able to?
“Not really. I’ve a very open relationship with my parents, so they’re the only people I would be worried about hurting. And even more so than them, my grandmother – who’s kind of the head of the Kitt dynasty – would be more traditional. She has a pretty sharp understanding of most things but I guess my lifestyle would be something quite alien to her. Obviously you’re worried about upsetting those people or those people worrying about you, but I think everyone who knows me well knows that I’ve a pretty good handle on what I’m doing, and the main focus is always the work, the music I’m making. And all of those people are really into the music so they’re just happy to see that I’m progressing.

Not just progressing but also getting far more professional about what he does professionally. David Kitt admits that when he began playing live gigs, at the age of 17, he was initially somewhat belligerent. He’d often drink a naggin of whiskey before going on stage and wind up getting really aggressive with the crowd if they weren’t responding the way he wanted them to (luckily he never came to blows with any audience members – thereby sparing himself the indignity of the obvious tabloid headline ‘KITT HITS FAN!). Nowadays, though, he reckons near total sobriety is essential for a proper performance.
“I’m only now getting more professional, and I’d usually not have more than one drink before going on stage,” he says. “There was a small gig in LA about three or four months ago, and it was on campus on Memorial day in UCLA. And the girls who were organising it didn’t have that much experience of organising gigs so there was no rider, no drinks at all. So we were all going, ‘Jesus, where will we get a couple of cans?’ but everything was closed on campus. I realised that it was the first gig I’d ever done without having a single drink. It just goes with the territory that there’s always some drink around backstage at gigs. And I sang better than I’d ever sang in my life that night. It really dawned on me.
“I’ve realised that people are paying twenty quid to see you, and you cannot get up having had even three drinks. You’re gonna be sloppy. And you can’t be. Once you realise the sheer joy you get out of it when you’re actually sober and totally in control of your instrument – and in control of the gig. It’s particularly hard at festivals because you’re hanging around all day and there’s drink everywhere. Trying to avoid it in a situation like that is tricky. But I got up at Wittness this year and it was great being that much in control when you’ve got that many people – there were probably the shortest gaps in between songs of any gig that I’ve ever done, running between instruments and totally knowing what was coming next. Just more in control of it. A much better buzz.”
Has Poppy sorted you out in terms of healthier living?
“Well, we both have aspirations to be healthy,” he grins, lighting up another fag. “It doesn’t happen all the time but in general being happier means that you don’t rely so much on drink or anything. I just like being away from that scene where you’re just in pubs all the time. In Dublin, me and my mates could drink till 7 in the morning, seven nights a week, if we wanted. Living out here, you go without drinking without even noticing.”
There’s a real Nick Drake–ish sense of melancholy on the album – as indeed there is on much of your previous work. Did you ever suffer from depression?
“Well, I guess I’ve always had a melancholic disposition since I was a kid. I was always kind of a loner, you know. And in many ways a lot of the stuff I’ve written in the past has been about the bliss of those very solitary moments of epiphany or whatever, where everything around you seems to kind of just fall into place, and it really resonates with you and you overcome that melancholy side. But I’m not really depressed – and certainly not now!”
Is money important to you?
“The one reason I would place importance on money now is that it gives you independence. Particularly in what I’m doing. I’d love to reach a point where I was financially independent. I could take time out to kind of improve on my skills and go back and study classical music a bit – study piano and maybe learn another instrument – and just develop another side to me that I know if I develop it could yield a lot of results musically. And that’d be the one financial goal. If there’s any importance on money, that’s it.
Who’s your biggest musical hero?
“Probably Lou Reed,” he replies, after giving the matter half a cigarette’s worth of thought. “He really had an incredibly sensitive side, and a real accessible poppy side, and a melancholy side, and then he also had this real rough urban side. I’d love to have all of those. In terms of a catalogue of songs to aspire to, I suppose he’d be the person.”
Do you see yourself getting into producing other people’s work?
“Yeah, that’s something I’d really love to do. To be honest, I’ve done more production on this record than I’ve done on any of them. I mean this record was a huge undertaking in that I did some of it at home on the laptop, I did the New Orleans thing, I did the recording in France, but then I took that and worked on the string arrangements with Dickon [Hinchliffe] from Tindersticks, and we recorded those in London. So I was the only person who was holding it all together. I was the one with the hard drives and all the computer stuff, backing it all up – doing all the technical work on this record as well, so it was a huge learning experience for me in that regard.”
Who’s your favourite producer?
“I dunno. I like Brian Eno. But probably Phil Spector. Poor old Phil!”
Well, poor old dead actress…
“Well, I know but poor troubled Phil. He’s obviously had a very rough ride from the very beginning. Genius tinged with madness, and all that. It’s terrible to see these guys – like Spector or Brian Wilson – who don’t seem to get any of the happiness that we get from their work.”
I know you were brought up Catholic, but are you religious?
“No, not at all. It’s funny, because I was just down in East Galway with my granny, and she was talking about how important religion is for her, at her age, as a source of solace or company and hope. It really just struck me that religion just isn’t part of my life at all.”
Do you believe in God?
“I don’t… but maybe,” he shakes his head. “You know, I haven’t reached any explanation but I guess I don’t believe in what I was fed growing up. I’m fascinated by the mysteries of nature and the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time…”
Dan Oggly sticks his head in the door and interrupts our theological musings with the news that the natural light is beginning to fade and the front room is as ready for the photo-shoot as it’ll ever be. As he prepares to start posing, Kittser chats away happily about the US success of Damien Rice (“I don’t really know him personally, but he’s pretty good”), how grateful he is to The Frames (“They really helped me out when I was getting started – they gave me support slots and got me on this compilation album when I really needed to get heard”) and how much he’s looking forward to getting out touring the new record (he’s already done full tours with the likes of Tindersticks, The Moldy Peaches, Starsailor and Mercury Rev).
“I think I’ve a lot to learn about my craft,” he admits. “And the only way to really get better as a singer and a guitar player is just to go out and play gigs, night in, night out. And it’s something that I haven’t really done enough of. It’s time to bite the bullet and really go for it, as much as possible.”

Twenty agonising minutes later (he was right – he’s definitely not a natural in front of the camera), Woolman’s shots are in the can and it’s almost time for David Kitt and Poppy to throw us out of their lovely home in time-honoured Cribs fashion. But before we leave, there’s one burning issue I’ve left until last to discuss. As the son of a government minister and a heavy smoker, where does Kittser stand on the proposed smoking ban?
“Jaysus!” he chuckles through a cloud of Marlboro smoke. “I had a taste of it in New York recently – I did a gig over there – and basically I reckon it’s like trying to ban milk in tea or something. I mean, in a pub you’ve got your pint in front of you and your natural instinct is to light up a cigarette. It just seems so unnatural being in that environment and being unable to smoke. And you know, it’s still kind of inconclusive in terms of exactly how detrimental to your health passive smoking is.
“I’ve worked in bars since the age of 15 – I used to be a lounge boy in a bar out where we lived in Ballinteer – and I’m aware that the pub is so much part of the fabric of Irish culture. Especially in rural areas or the suburbs, the local is just a huge part of people’s lives. And so many of those people are smokers, and just to deprive them of that one escape, maybe, that they have is something that I personally don’t agree with it. It really does seem like just another import from America. It’s a real shame to see something that is so obviously American being brought in here.”
So will you have a word in Tom’s ear?
“Well, you know…” he grins, slowly stubbing out his butt. “I always try to avoid being a lobby group!”

Square One is released on Warner on September 5. David Kitt also has a numbr of Irish live dates lined up for the very near future – see news section for details