Beets international?

Dr Sean Millar and the Beet Club have just released his third ‘solo’ album Always Coming Home. Earning a hefty double-five on the hotpress review dice it’s a collection of heartfelt stories and reflections that echo the work of giants like Dylan and Waits while also drawing on the accents of a more arcane Americana. Songs such as ‘Hard Years’, (in which a younger Millar lifts some cash from a stranger’s purse) and ‘You Just Can’t Let Things Go’ (when our protagonist survives a knife-point mugging and a subsequent car-breakdown only to discover that his unmarried daughter is pregnant), are almost cinematic in their imagrey. It’s quite a leap for Millar.

“I deliberately tried to work against type with this album and be less indulgent than I may have been in the past. I’ve always been influenced by songwriters of the ‘30s and ‘40s, people like Gershwin, Rogers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter and I tried to attain that accesibility, that populism, while keeping true to the mood of the song. I’m an anarchist, seriously, and have always been very anti-authoritarian, even in my writing. This time I tried to work against type, disciplined myself and just let the songs be themselves. It’s about getting away from ego.”

Although the album is ultimately an uplifting travelogue there are dark alleys and bleak vistas on the way. How much of himself and his own journeys are contained within?

“I’ve done three albums and they’ve all been a mixture of personal stuff, storytelling stuff and what I’d call, ‘Just got to get this off my chest’ stuff,” says an faintly exasperated Sean Millar. “I’m not going to tell you that I had a really hard time of it and that’s why I can write these songs, because while that might be true, I don’t think it’s very interesting, or even relevant. I don’t want to dramatise my life experience. Yes, I suffered violent physical abuse at school as a teenager and that led to a mistrust of authority and subsequent depression and suppression. But, you know – (whispered) no more than most people that I knew. And yes, you attempt to self-medicate and I had a miserable couple of years with alcohol and drug problems until I eventually had to re-examine my whole attitude that life. And I can enjoy a drink now, for example, but it’s just that, I enjoy it. And I didn’t enjoy it then, it was something else.

“I’m also expecting my second child soon and I’ve been in a steady relationship for ten years and that changes the way you look at things. My daughter’s birth was like a sort of benign atom bomb, it affects your life on every level, it’s actually quite trippy. And I’m still learning.”

Is there a possibility that this new-found security will hinder his song-writing ability?

“You know, it’s the very opposite,” he insists. “I don’t get these writers who say, ‘Hell, my girlfriend’s left me but I got a really good song out of it’. If I get dumped the last thing I feel like doing is writing a song! I’m crawling into a gutter and dying, okay. Of course I might write about that…”

The new album is already attracting rave reviews and the attentions of the some international music business moguls. His US live shows have seen him feted as the next big thing yet he seems remarkably unfazed by such occurrences.

“I’ll tell you a story about the nature of success,” he offers. “I grew up on traditional music as well as rock and folk and whatever, and I was a huge Planxty fan. Years later I met the bassist with US band Green On Red at a festival in Austin, Texas, and they turned out to be Planxty fans, had all the records, convinced that Planxty were as big in Ireland still as, say, U2. And we were hanging out and playing and talking and they told me once they were in a small German town and they passed a really tiny Irish pub and they noticed that a guy called Andy Irvine was playing there that night. And they thought that he must be the unluckiest guy in the world to share a name with Planxty’s Andy Irvine, who they figured would be playing stadium gigs in Europe. And I hadn’t the heart to tell them it was the same guy. So if this album does really well, great. Either way I’ll be doing another album within two years. ‘Cos that’s what I do.”