Blood on the tracks

Niall Connolly is a singer/songwriter who thought nothing of a little blood-letting to finance his first album. Estimating he could complete the recording for £2,500, he signed up as a participant in a medical research project. “Basically, I popped pills and gave them a blood sample every hour for two days. I got paid £500, which I then brought along to the Credit Union. They gave me a loan on the strength of it that covered all the costs involved.”

Niall is hardly the first musician to sing the Credit Union’s praises. “As record companies go, they’re the best”, he says. “They gave me complete artistic freedom, and I can pay back the advance in my own good time. If they hadn’t been so helpful, I might have called the album Blood, Sweat And Tears.”

The album, as it happens, is called Songs From A Corner, a name Niall settled on because it seemed to best describe his compositions’ modest origins. “I’m sure I could have gone for something more grandiose, but I’ll leave that for the third or fourth album. Songs From A Corner just seemed like a suitable title for what I’ve been doing to date.”

Niall has been writing songs since getting his first instrument, a bass, when he was fifteen. He played in bands like Whumanz and Anomie while at college, and then began to perform his own material at solo gigs. On completing his Arts Degree at U.C.C., Niall took up an offer of a place on the Music Management Course at Scoil Stiofain Naofa, where he first came into contact with the musicians who would make up the

Token Mellow Band; Justin O’Mahoney on drums and percussion, Emmet Christie on bass,

Aisling Fitzpatrick on cello and Karl Nesbitt

on bazouki, bodhran, low whistle, flute and didgeridoo.

“When we first got together as a group, we were asked to perform at a CIT gig. At the sound-check, we noticed that all the other bands were into playing punk or nu-metal, so I thought I’d better point out to the organiser that we were a little quieter. He just said, ‘Yeah, I know, but we needed a token mellow band’. Rather than be offended, we thought we’d adopt the name for good.”

Niall is now in his second year at Scoil Stiofain Naofa. “It’s a great environment to be in”, he enthuses. “Being there last year helped me to identify just what it was I wanted to do with my songs. I got to be a lot more aware of the intricacies of the business, and learned to set realistic targets. The best thing about being on the course is that I’ve come to think of writing and playing music as being a full-time career rather than just a side-line.”

While Niall favours writing songs in an acoustic mode,Songs From A Corner also captures the Token Mellow Band’s proven live ability to kick up a storm. From the blistering opener, ‘Peel Back The Sky’, the album reveals itself to be full of light and shadows, from the fittingly dream-like ‘Lullaby’, to the belligerent love-song, ‘You Know Best’.

“That’s probably the strongest song on the album,” says Niall. “It’s about someone who can’t tie their own shoe-laces trying to tell you how to live your life.” The gentler numbers on Songs From A Corner were recorded with Ray Barron in Douglas, Cork, while those that got the full band treatment were done with Rory O’Flaherty in Killarney.

To date, Niall has been content to sell the album at gigs and through the Comet outlets in Cork and Dublin. “And Roscrea”, he adds, “the only outlet in between.” Having pressed 500 copies initially, he will soon have recouped his costs. “We’re hoping to put out a single in January”, he says, “just to get a buzz going again, and to get more radio play. John Creedon has been playing songs from the album on Radio 1, and they’re also getting played on 96FM, so a single with a video would probably be a good move.”

Niall feels under no great pressure to look for a record contract.

“I’m happy to do things at my own pace for now”, he says. “I’d like to license the album as it is to a small distributor, but otherwise I’ll just continue to market it myself. If it comes to it, I’m just as happy to do the next album myself as well. I’ve got at least another album’s worth of material, and I’m writing new songs the whole time. There’s one song, in fact, called ‘Six For A Fiver’, which I had meant to release in some form or another before the Euro changeover. The title refers to buying a six-pack of cider, and ‘Six for 6.35 euros’ will never have the same ring to it.”