At home with Shaz Oye

Shaz Oye lives not too far from where she was born in the docks area of Dublin’s North Wall, although a recent canvasser for Fianna Fáil earned her wrath when she refused to accept that Ms. Oye had been born in nearby Holles Street and that she was fully entitled to a vote, prompting one to presume that the FFers are so desperate for votes they’ll set any old racist loose on their constituents.

The luckless canvasser’s ire was inflamed when she’d been informed that Oye would never/had never voted for FF because the party had prevented her enjoying her full rights as an Irish lesbian.
But today, Shaz is in more hospitable form and seems much at ease with both her house and the locality. “When I was growing up in this area I shuttled between my grandmother’s house, my Aunt May’s and my mother’s house after she got married,” she says. “So when my partner Patricia Kennedy and I decided to buy a house we settled for the area that I knew best, and it’s a decision neither of us regretted.”
The house is a two-storey Victorian dwelling with a red-brick front in an area that is undergoing what the planners euphemistically call ‘regeneration’.
“These houses were built around the 1880s for workers building the railway line,” Shaz says, “but there’s a lot of building going on around here now, which makes it quite noisy. We were once colonised by the British, but we’re now colonised by property developers. And you’ve also got these awful areas called grey public spaces which have replaced the nice green spaces we should have. But on the other hand, there was a time when this area was practically a no-go area for outsiders. Even the rottweilers used to go around in pairs, but it’s totally different now.”
Venturing inside, you jaw-droppingly enter a different world, minimalist and uncluttered, with wooden floors and delicate cream colours. Shaz’s wardrobe has her shirts all in a row neatly facing the same way, and so are her jeans and everything else. So she’s the tidy one, yes?
“Almost to the point of being a control freak. Whereas Patricia wouldn’t be quite so tidy. Let’s just say we have a general sense of relaxed tidiness!”
This is the house where Shaz composed the songs for her debut album Truth According To Shaz Oye on her own label, and where she and Patricia, who’s also her manager, do most of the work on her career, including such glamorous chores as packing copies of her new single ‘Sylvia Falling’ to send out to radio stations and others.
“Although it’s available as a download, some media people still prefer to get a physical copy of a record,” she explains. “Perhaps the record seems more real that way, so we still send hard copies out and we pack them here.”
So given that her life partner is also her business partner, and they live and work in the same house, is there not a sense of claustrophobia? “There can be, but Patricia is a great multi-tasker so she’s sometimes away doing her own thing. I have my own work room and the first thing I do every morning is to make a cup of cappuccino and retire to that room to get my head together and to focus on what I’m going to do that day. I suppose it’s a kind of meditation. I need that kind of structure to my life.”
Oye doesn’t encourage casual droppers-in, so the most likely visitors are musicians there to rehearse for a recording session or a gig. “Unfortunately, 9-to-5-ers don’t understand that when you’re working from home you don’t really appreciate being interrupted,” she says. “Of course they think you should be glad to see them, but not if I’m in the middle of something. Recently I was doing a gig with the American singer-songwriter Eric Eckhart in the Crawdaddy and I had a keyboardist, a cellist and a percussionist here rehearsing and that’s not quite the time for somebody to call in for a chat.”
And what about the neighbours, do they object to any extraneous noises emerging from Chez Shaz? “No. My voice is my main instrument and I need to keep it exercised every day, but I’ve never had any complaints from our neighbours about it or any of the music I play either live or on record.”
Although the house is equipped with a TV, it’s never allowed to become a distraction.
“We only put it on for something specific, like the news, or The Sopranos or programmes like Grand Designs which I’m a big fan of,” she admits.
Her radio listening tends to be as a wind-down after a gig, so she’s likely to be found tuning to the likes of John Creedon and Lillian Smith late at night on RTÉ Radio 1. In fact, she gets to hear most music on CDs, her substantial collection ranging from Bach’s Cello Concertos, to Miles Davis, Eleanor McEvoy, Michele Ann Kelly and Antony and The Johnsons, to more recent acquisitions like Joan As Policewoman. “I also like to check out the way different artists develop, to see how Bruce Springsteen or Paul Weller or Leonard Cohen grew from their early albums to their later work,” she says.
Oye is an extremely literate and articulate woman and obviously an avid reader, but her reading diet is not as totally serious as one might assume. “I’m a huge fan of the Harry Potter books, almost to the point that I’m considering queuing for the next one in July,” she admits. “I probably won’t, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also a fan of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, although there was a period where she went off the rails a bit. I read Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings about every two years because I think it’s the best sci-fi-fantasy novel ever written. Other books I’ve read recently are Middlesex by Geoffrey Eugenides, and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, so my reading is quite varied really.”
Among the art works on the walls is a particularly striking piece by Kevin Sharkey.
“Kevin has a gallery off Thomas Street and I popped in to talk to him. We have a shared backgrounds, as black people born in Ireland, and I really like this piece he gave me. It’s called Woman At The Bottom Of A Well. I also like the work of Deborah Pugh and the Donegal painter Seamus McGuinness.”
Another object not likely to escape your attention is a green pot about two or three feet high. This, Shaz explains, is the one object she would probably always want to have with her no matter where she’ll ever live. “One of the reasons it’s so important to me is that it comes from Anascaul Pottery in County Kerry. They don’t make them any more, so that makes it even more special to me.”
Shaz Oye’s new single ‘Sylvia Falling’ is available now as a digital download from iTunes, downloadmusic.ie, and outersounds.ie.

Photos: Cathal Dawson