Bressie comes out fighting

"He was next door with his top off. And you didn’t tell me. Bastard!”

A female member of Hot Press staff who shan’t be named is apoplectic with rage – or should that be lust? – because I neglected to tell her that 1) Niall Breslin was popping into our photographic studio to do a cover-shoot, and 2) It involved several changes of muscle tight T-shirt.
The fairer sex’s fondness for the former Blizzards mainman, now operating simply as Bressie, was also apparent last month when there was a 10:1 ratio of women to men at his debut sold-out solo show in Whelan’s. Most of whom spent the duration screaming, shouting out lewd comments and generally treating the soon to be 31-year-old like a piece of meat in a butcher’s window. The lucky sod! Does it bother him that his audience mainly consists of nurses on a night out who want to give him more than just a bed bath?
“It probably means that Whelan’s was the safest place to be in Dublin that night in terms of first-aid being available,” he laughs as we settle down in a city-centre hostelry for our chinwag. “Is being screamed at embarrassing? A little bit, yeah, but I’m enormously appreciative of people turning up to my gigs. It’s kinda carried on from The Blizzards – there were a lot of nurses into us! I just think females at concerts make more noise than guys do.

“It’s funny, during my entire time with The Blizzards I was in a long-term committed relationship (with fashion designer Eva Maguire) and I was as good as gold,” he proffers. “Never cheated, never even thought about it. And so I kind of had this façade – trying to pretend that I wanted to go out and be Russell fucking Brand, but I couldn’t.
“I had the kind of fun you’re talking about as a teenager. Awkward fun, but fun! Then I went from Mullingar to college in Dublin where there were all these super, super hot chicks walking around and thought, ‘Now my life begins!’ But then I was in a relationship. You look back and go, ‘Jesus, Bressie!’ but then again I’ve never been interested in swapping around and sleeping with every person.”
Did it bother Ms. Maguire that wherever her boyfriend went, there were women desperate to jump his rock ‘n’ roll star bones?
“No, she was very cool and secure. She knew I was a loyal guy, and working in a similar type of industry understood how the game’s played. I never had to explain myself and I walked away from that relationship with no regrets because I never did anything wrong. Actually, you’re the first person all week to interview me who hasn’t had, ‘So are you single?’ as their first question.”

This obviously being because I work for a serious music magazine that values artistry over Heat-like celebrity froth. That said, is it true what I read in the Sunday World last week about Bressie getting jiggy with E4’s Jameela Jamil?
“No, we’re not an item,” he insists.
Was he an item last year with MTV presenter Laura Whitmore?
“We were supposed to be living together and having a mad affair, but that was bollocks too. Some fucking completely misguided journalist latches onto a story and it grows legs. Laura’s a mate – we mix in the same circles but that’s all.”
So he’s not planning to beat seven shades of shit out of Danny O’Reilly for nicking his mott?
“No,” he laughs, “and I had my chance a few weeks ago when I was supporting The Coronas in Marlay Park. I think it’d be a pretty even fight though – Danny’s a bit tasty!”

In deciding to go solo Bressie called time on a six-year Blizzards career, which saw them notch up two platinum albums and a string of top ten singles, pull some of the biggest ever Main Stage crowds at Oxegen and elsewhere get to play alongside such heavy hitters as AC/DC and Oasis. Were the rest of the band angry with him for killing off the cash cow?
“People think that I got offered this great opportunity and went (clicks fingers), ‘Sorry guys, I’m done.’ That’s a load of fucking arse. I remember saying, ‘You’re no fan of mine if that’s what you believe.’ It upset the lads as well because they knew that’s not what happened.”
How did it go down then?
“I wanted to make a third album and for it to be better than the second album. The second was better than the first so I wanted to keep progressing, and in order to do that it would’ve taken an awful lot of work and an awful lot of sacrifice. We had a five-record deal with Universal and our expected budget for the third record was almost quartered. It’s very difficult to make a great sounding album for less than €50,000 and we had nowhere near that available to us. Plus, priorities change. The guys in the band have children and they found it very hard to go touring, which a band like The Blizzards has to do. They’d say, ‘Well, The Killers have kids.’ The Killers have millions of pounds behind them. We didn’t have that. I turned to the guys and said, ‘I can’t commit to this album… yet.’ I will do another album with them. We didn’t fight, we didn’t fall out.
“They’re actually far better off financially than they were with the band. Declan and Doran run a very successful bar in Mullingar – they’re making money for the first time and they can bring up their kids. I don’t think they’re as happy as they were when they were making music, but the trade-off is that they get to be at home with their families.”

The Blizzards must have earned a decent few quid from playing the big festivals and their various corporate hook-ups?
“Yeah, but you haemorrhage it too,” he reflects. “We’d put money into an account and pay ourselves a small wage each week and if a bigger gig came along we might give ourselves a few more quid, but we weren’t really making a whole lot. I was the writer, which was okay and we got some nice royalties for TV stuff. With success comes bigger responsibilities – you’ve got to put on a better show, have a better crew. Expenses go up too. We had our own crew and we paid them well. The one thing I’m happy about with The Blizzards is that we walked away owing nothing to anybody.”
So The Blizzards ended because the others couldn’t commit to three months in a studio and a year of non-stop touring after that?
“Yeah, it was that simple. I miss the lads like fucking hell. I miss being on the stage with them. I miss making records with them. You have to have so much more self-belief as a solo artist. You’ve no-one to ask, ‘What do you think of this? Is the idea worth developing?’ It can get very fucking lonely.”
Although in the full-time music making business for less than a decade, Bressie has seen quantum changes in the way record companies operate.

“The days of an A&R guy discovering some kid out of school and saying, ‘I’ll take this and develop it for five years’ are over. The budgets just aren’t there anymore. With Florence + The Machine for instance, it was the producer Paul Epworth who spotted the potential, put the work in and then sold her to the label. He did the exact same thing with Adele.
Paul’s like Phil Spector… except that he’s not criminally insane!”
He’s also had to watch as the lifeblood of the industry, record sales, has drained away.
“It’s the labels getting the blame, but it’s not the labels who are causing this, it’s the people who are stealing music,” Bressie maintains. “Here’s how I feel about illegal downloading: I feel it can’t be stopped. If somebody is illegally downloading music they’re not educated enough to know what goes into this and what it takes. If someone does steal my music – and that’s what it is – I won’t stand there with my finger in their face going, ‘How dare you’ but at least give it a bit of respect. Hopefully there will be people who care enough about Colourblind Stereo to actually want to buy it.”

Having played his final gig with The Blizzards in December 2009 – in case you’re wondering, it was a sell-out bash in the Dublin Olympia – Bressie hotfooted it over to London where he scored a deal with Simon Fuller’s 19 management stable. How does one go about gaining the attention of somebody who’s already responsible for guiding Will Young, Jennifer Lopez, Annie Lennox, Lewis Hamilton, Andy Murray, Carrie Underwood, Lisa Marie Presley, Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks and the Beckhams’ careers?
“Well, it wasn’t really him,” Niall explains. “The guy who signed me to Universal Publishing when I was with The Blizzards got offered the job of Head of Music at 19 literally two weeks later. He said he believed in me as a pop writer. Simon Fuller is very hands-off, he doesn’t really get involved with the day-to-day music stuff.”
So he’s not some megalomaniac Rupert Murdoch-type who wants the final say on what sort of toilet paper goes into the studio khazi?
“No, he gives people briefs and budgets and lets them get on with it. There’s this idea that Simon Fuller’s the devil, but 19 have been responsible for some fucking amazing pop music. Respect where respect is due.”
Whilst an unashamed pop record – Duran Duran, Pet Shop Boys, Mika and the mighty Hall & Oates are among the trace elements I’ve detected – Colourblind Stereo contains some “Fight the power!” lyrical barbs that Chuck D and the boys would be proud of.
“I’ve never felt an anger like I felt before I left for London,” Bressie reveals. “Not only did I leave The Blizzards, I couldn’t stomach living here anymore. That’s how bad I was. I had visions of seeing Brian Cowen or Bertie Ahern in the street and
killing them.”

Sentiments which I suspect are shared by a goodly part of the Irish population. What in particular was it that made Bressie want to go ex-Taoiseach-hunting with an AK-47?
“My dad worked his fucking ass off his entire life in the army, only for them to cut his pension by 15%. How can they do that? They’re robbing him. He was always away – he had to go to Israel and Sarajevo constantly so he could climb up the ranks and get a better pension. Then this happened and I was like, ‘How fucking dare they.’ My sister said they were treating us like animals, so I wrote a song called that which made it on to the album.”
A political polemic dressed up as a thumping Europop floorfiller, its ‘Treat us like animals/That’s how we’ll react’ refrain has more than a whiff of the civic unrests about it.
“I would love to have seen Irish people riot – not riot but fucking stand up. That would have been a revolution because we were fucked. We were fucked up the ass. What makes me really angry is that like goldfish we’ll forget about this and who caused it. The Bertie Aherns and Brian Cowens of this world will be fine.”
I think it might be prudent for anyone connected to Fianna Fáil or the Irish banking system to give the 19 dates on his current Irish tour a wide berth. We haven’t rioted here, but they sure as hell did recently in London where Bressie witnessed some shocking scenes.

“I was sitting in a restaurant near Camden and was asked to leave because of the rioting,” he reminisces none too fondly. “Outside it was just police and teenagers engaged in a stand-off. Luckily I know the area pretty well, so I was able to take the backstreets home to my place in Belsize Park. I was in my living room hearing these swells of noise getting closer and closer. The Tesco and Starbucks beside me were looted and they tried to burn down the fire station. Crazy fucking shit, so I went out and bought myself a baseball bat. I’m not gonna be standing there with a cup of Barry’s Tea and a packet of Tayto if some fucker breaks into my house!”
If this pop stardom lark doesn’t work out, a career in Travis Bickle-style wash the scum off the streets vigilantism awaits.
“I really feared for my safety at one point,” he resumes. “We were on the third storey and trying to work out, ‘How do we get out of here if they throw a firebomb in the letter-box?’ I’ve a friend with a six year-old in Clapham – big fucking Aussie Rules guy, massive. I rang him to ask how he’s doing and he says, ‘I’m fucking petrified! My little girl’s under the bed screaming.’ These guys were randomly throwing petrol bombs at houses.”
As anyone who followed him on Twitter during the disturbances will know, Bressie did not take kindly to MIA quipping that, “I’m going down to the riots to hand out tea and Mars Bars.”
“What a fucking twat!” he spits venomously. “She’s taken a lot of shit over that and deservedly so. I was waiting for Morrissey to make an equally stupid comment but for once he kept his mouth shut. He’s consistently fucking insane. I mean, that thing about Norway…”

I suspect that dissing Mozza has just bought Bressie a whole lot of heartbreak.
“Oh yeah, Smiths fans are like, ‘What the fuck?’ if you criticise him. I did an interview and one of the questions was, ‘What do you listen to when you’re depressed?’ I said, ‘Any Smiths song because at least I know that there’s one more miserable bastard than me out there.’ It was a joke but I got lots of, ‘Oh yeah, you’re a pop faggot!’ Get out of me face lads. You’re nearly the reason I don’t like The Smiths because I have to listen to your shit.”
But we digress. The one thing that I found perversely heartening was that it was equal opportunities rioting rather than the sort of White V Black/Asian aggro you used to get in England during the Thatcher years.
“Yeah, it wasn’t a race thing. It was kids just so separated from society and disenfranchised. It’s ridiculous and embarrassing.”
Going back to that ‘Treat us like animals/That’s how we’ll react’ line, how would Bressie feel if 200 or 300 kids from one of Ireland’s shitty sink estates suddenly went on the rampage?
“It’s a hard line to draw, but there has to be a distinction between people who are criminals and people who have no other option. For example, hardcore drug-dealers selling to their own communities and compounding the problems there should be fucked into jail and the key thrown away. I’ve no sympathy for them. Kids going out and robbing a TV because both their parents are unemployed and the family doesn’t have any money – I can’t judge them.”
Rewinding again, was Bressie’s dad directly in the line of fire during his time in the army?

“There were Irish soldiers killed in the Lebanon – by both militia and an Irish soldier who turned on two of his own people – but he was never shot at, no. He brought us over to live with him for six months on the Israeli border with the Lebanon. We’d been there a couple of weeks when we were woken up by this woman going round with a loudhailer and telling us to get into a bomb shelter. It just kicked off overnight. Luckily for us – but not the people they were aimed at – the missiles were medium-range ones, which went over our heads.”
I’ve been accused of anti-Semitism for saying this, but when I lived in Israel briefly during the ‘80s, it was an apartheid state with Israeli Arabs ostracised from mainstream society.
“It’s not anti-Semitic,” Bressie ventures. “That’s just the reality and people who say otherwise should fuck off to Israel and see it for themselves. You and I lived there so we know. They did quite like the Irish – especially the Palestinians because they feel they have a connection to us through the IRA.
“I found out about the Holocaust for the first time while I was there. I used to ask my mum what the numbers on old people’s arms were. It was an incredible experience for a 13-year-old.”
I felt terrible for all the relatives at Ground Zero the other day, but there was a sense during the 9/11 memorial coverage of American lives being worth far more than Muslim ones.
“dan le sac has a great line: ‘Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries.’ We’re the Western world and we’re right to believe that any attack on us is wrong, but they have their beliefs too.”

Whilst we’re in political commentator mode, what did Bressie make of Her Maj’s visit to Ireland?
“I thought it was amazing,” he enthuses. “The coverage in Britain was so positive. One reporter said it was the first time she’d seen the Queen smile like that – y’know, when she was down over a fucking barrel of fish in Cork. It didn’t feel as contrived as most people thought it would be. It felt genuine, like she meant it.”
It certainly didn’t play out the way Gerry Adams and his Sinn Féin cronies had hoped it would.
“Gerry Adams is gone, he’s done. He doesn’t think properly anymore. I’m fucking 30 years of age. I’m as patriotic as the next person but I’m also a realist. It’s over. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the Queen to come here but she did it with unbelievable grace and it did a lot of good.”

Was Bressie politically inclined as a teenager?
“I just remember being incredibly patriotic. I have a staunch Glaswegian Catholic mother. Glaswegian Catholics are even more… I wouldn’t say insane, but intense than the ones here. My mum’s family are from Glasgow but all their family are from Derry and Omagh. There was a point where republicanism was amazing and the IRA weren’t thugs and they actually truly believed in what they were doing. That all changed. I was never a republican because I hated any other country. I was just very patriotic. It’s the way my dad raised me.”
Bressie’s AK-47 hit-list isn’t confined to politicians, with a certain Z-List celebrity coming in for regular tongue-lashings on his highly entertaining @nbrez account.
“Kerry Katona makes me vomit from pure disgust,” he says disdainfully. “She’s the poster girl of how fucking unbelievably crass and crude things have gotten on TV. I just don’t think she’s a nice person.”
And what of her erstwhile Celebrity Big Brother housemates Jedward?
“They’re horrendously annoying, but there’s not a vindictive bone in their bodies. Could you ever imagine them saying anything bad about somebody? With so many people out there being mean and cynical it’s great to have two nice, remedial guys… if two babies came out of the womb and were able to talk and dance, that’s Jedward!”

In addition to assembling Colourblind Stereo, Bressie has also at Simon Fuller & Co.’s behest been collaborating with Gomez singer/guitarist/keys man
Tom Gray.
“We were supposed to be doing some writing for Olly Murs,” Bressie smiles, “but that quickly got knocked on the head and instead we came up with a really beautiful acoustic song called ‘Please Don’t Break My Android Heart’, which is on the album.
“Actually, it was funny – when Tom got the email about Olly Murs he was like, ‘Who? X What?’ He detached himself from the music scene years ago. There’s a quirky dimension to his writing that I love. He’s doing a lot of stuff at the moment with (Dublin songstress) Jenny Lindfors, which he’s very excited about.”
Other songwriting hook-ups have proven to be less successful.
“I’ve been in rooms with people going, ‘Right, we need the words ‘dancefloor’ and ‘DJ’ to be in it…’ I can’t do that. I did one song with a writer in London called ‘Greeter Girl’, which is about the girl in the GAP advert. It was obviously intended for a 15-year-old girl, so when pitching it I had to sing in a 15-year-old American accent. Halfway through I just went, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ I love pop music but c’mon!

“I’ve enjoyed working though with some of the young acts 19 are developing. They’re great at spotting talent and bringing it through.”
Had things worked out differently, Bressie could have spent last Saturday with Drico and the boys celebrating victory against the Aussies rather than playing an all-ages gig in Mullingar. Watching the Auckland heroics did he think, “Fuck, if I’d kept playing rugby I might have been part of that.”
“Honestly? No. It’s the most perfect game in the world but I lost my passion for playing it. I was a flanker, back row. My biggest issue was that I never thought I was good enough, I didn’t have that self-belief. Even after I got a phone call at 20 saying that Leinster wanted to sign me, I was still questioning my worth and that sticks out like a sore thumb in rugby. I spent my first year at Leinster in awe of being in the same squad as the likes of Gordon D’Arcy and Brian O’Driscoll.
“And then,” he continues, “I kept getting injured. The same injury kept coming back and back and I felt embarrassed. I felt that I wasn’t fully right when I was out on the pitch. I’m a very happy person, but I was genuinely miserable. Given all of that, the decision to walk away was a pretty easy one. Hand on heart, I couldn’t be any happier with where my life’s at right now.”

Bressie’s Colourblind Stereo is out now. See bressiemusic.com for details of his Irish tour, which includes a Dublin Academy stop-off on October 15.