David Kitt – new romantic

Dublin Airport, early Friday, the Ryanair departure lounge. We’re on our way to see some of Ireland’s finest musicians support Tindersticks at their tenth-birthday bash: a mixed-media mini-festival at Le Botanique in Brussels. It’s too-early morning, and accessories appropriate to the early hour – bottles of water, burnt-tasting coffee, fag packets and trooperish good humour – are currently all the rage at our table. Welcome to the David Kitt travelling show… minus one essential element. David Kitt isn’t here. He apparently arrived to the airport extra early this morning, read a magazine, had a leisurely coffee, and then proceeded to the check-in desk only to discover that yes, you do in fact need your passport when you are flying to Brussels. So back into town he has gone, and it is unclear whether any of the remaining flights today will be able to get David to Belgium in time for this terribly important, dream-come-true of a performance. In the meantime, Kitt’s two co-conspirators, multi-instrumentalists Diarmuid Mac Diarmada and Paul Smyth, are possessed of an impressively sunny gallows-humour optimism. They are entertaining the worried mini-masses of PRs, journalists and record company people in a manner apposite to the Tinder-sticky night that is, hopefully, ahead of us. How? By doing Stuart Staples singing-impressions. As you do.

“Mister…” intones Diarmuid heavily, a maximum of pathos and heartbreak seeping from a cartoonishly conceived baritone, “does this bus…” he sighs, “…go to Camden…”

“Ohhhhhhhh, Bodyform,” answers Paul mournfully, in a similarly morose, bassy rumble. “Bodyform for youuuu…”

The David Kitt travelling show, then: clinically tested to remain cool under fire. It’s just as well Paul and Diarmuid aren’t worried; that they are, after their long collaboration and more recent live dates with Ireland’s man of the moment, practiced and professional enough to take minor disasters like these on the chin. Because not only will David – or “Kittser”, as he is known to his friends, not to mention most of Dublin and quite a lot of everyone else – not only will Kittser arrive in Brussels on time; he will also get just enough of a soundcheck to sufficiently prepare his trademark pedals and Minidisc, both of which supply the beats, noises and harmonies which serve to amplify his gentle, funky mini-pop; and he will also, tonight, play probably the strongest live performance of his career to date. Of which more later. But first, a little night music: some small moments, and some Big Romance.

The Big Romance. An oddly colourful, extroverted, almost swashbuckling Hollywood-musical of an album title, perhaps, from a man whose music is characterised by gentle introspection, tiny epiphanies and time spent in contented solitude; and a man whose debut album – a home-recorded mini-album, released last August, bears the title Small Moments, an altogether more cosily insular, pastel-hued moniker. But as we speak to David Kitt – for late pints in the Long Hall, followed by sundry traipsing through familiar rain-soaked Dublin streets, having missed each other in sunnier Brussels – we see that the two records work as bookends to a specific period in Kittser’s creative life. They also, handily, serve as a comprehensive, fully-rounded introduction to Kitt’s gentle, beat-driven aesthetic: a double-album Chapter One, if you like; a kind of downbeat, quietly exultant manifesto for the future.

But never mind the future just yet. Tuesday, Dublin, the Long Hall, last orders. David Kitt’s already done six interviews today. He can only remember, at this point, whom four of them were for. This is not out of a disdain for the unavoidable task of record promotion: Kitt is quite clearly too sorted an individual, and not nearly egotistical enough, for that kind of Nascent Star, don’t-bother-me-I’m-an-artist harrumphing. It’s more the workaday forgetfulness of someone for whom a tremendously long day, the most recent in a series, is causing the edges to blur between one job on the To Do list and the next. So it’s partly question-answering fatigue, and partly Kittser’s own slow, thoughtful demeanour, that causes our chat to take the form of pint-aided elliptical thought-process rather than straightforward conversation.

“Lately I’ve been trying to use interviews, in a way: trying to use the time to work stuff out that isn’t even, er, related, maybe,” he admits, with a small semi-guilty grin slowly reaching his large dark eyes. “It’s like French orals, where you kind of try to steer it round to something – Ok, that’s not quite the right analogy, maybe, but… Instead of talking about something that you’ve totally sussed, you push it into areas that are related to things that have been on your mind, as if they were related to what you were asked,” he giggles, and then glances at me. “It’s not like I’m taking the piss or anything, but… when you can do it, it means you can get something out of the conversation. ’Cos…” He shakes his head, making a face that says, It’s all ridiculous, really. “Otherwise, pretty much, it’s just, like: me, talkin,” he shrugs. “You know what I mean?”

So, for David Kitt then, the Big Romance in question is not that of a man in love with the sound of his own voice, or with the notion of his own burgeoning, rapidly increasing star-hood. But we kind of already knew that. This writer recalls a very early support slot in Whelan’s, Kitt on his own with tiny Minidisc beats and acoustic guitar, entire body hunched toward the mic in utter concentration, eyes permanently affixed to the floor (not a million miles removed from his Brussels performance, actually). From that point to this, the modus operandi has been, it seems, to create something simple and beautiful without messing about with the egotism of the ‘frontperson’; about weaving complexity into the songs without ever over-gilding the lily; and about humility, really.

Which is pretty impressive when you consider his accomplishments thus far, this quickly. There were the consistently special early appearances, support gigs to just about every artist, foreign and domestic, who played Dublin over the last two years; there were the much-coveted placements on two high-cred collaborative releases (the first 1999’s near-legendary Come On Up To The House EP, an all-star jamboree of amazing new music led by the Frames’ ‘Star Star’ single; the second a split single on Road Relish) – and, most spectacularly, there was a quietly triumphant – not to say absolutely rammed – performance at last year’s Witnness Festival. And that same month, there was Small Moments.

Kitt’s voice – blanket-warm, murmury and companionable – and his simplicity and economy of language on Small Moments are probably what drew comparisons at the time with Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake. To these ears, however, Kitt’s home-recorded debut is closer to the territory of Stina Nordenstam’s People Are Strange, insofar as it successfully combines modern beats and production with an extremely warm, analogue, tactile quality. You can literally hear the room Kitt recorded in, the tiny incidental background noises, the odd glitches and imperfections he has chosen to leave in, that totally humanise all the beats and samples. And, more than anything, the joy he documents on this record – staying up recording through the night, watching how the light behaves as dawn arrives, enjoying his own solitude – is palpable. It could have been called Claustrophilia.

Featuring thoughtful counterpoint from current musical chums Paul (on pianos) and Diarmuid (gorgeous, lushly chordal saxes and clarinets), The Big Romance, then, is nearly an inside-out, more extroverted manifestation of the same world Kitt created on the previous release. A love of detail and of, er, moments that are small is still in evidence, but there’s a slightly less lyrical approach: instead, Kitt goes for the miniature pop thrill. This listener admittedly does not prefer it to Small Moments, but then I tend to take my ‘fi’ with extra ‘lo’, and anyway, if some of that earlier room-warmth and intimacy is gone, there’s so much sheer jubilance in its place that it would be churlish to mourn its absence too strenuously.

While his first album was given a home birth – recorded in his flat, in the overnights between classes in music technology at Trinity College – the second was recorded during the day, in a ‘proper’ studio (Area 51 in south Dublin); with a ‘proper’ producer (Ken McHugh); during proper working hours, and involving such realities as having to communicate his ideas to a second party for the very first time. We wonder how difficult or easy the working-method transition was for him – but it seems that even David Kitt, bedsit-producer and acoustic homebody extraordinaire, needs to get out of the damn house once in a while.

“It was strange at first, but… To be honest, it was really exciting. You‘d get in your taxi, with all your gear, your guitars, maybe a few keyboards, and it was like: Wow, I’m going to work!”

As well, there was the small matter of the bevy of fabulous new machines he got to play with at Area 51: “… You know, old analogue synthesisers, and a load of totally state-of-the-art digital synthesisers, and then this whole programming setup… I was wetting myself when I saw them,” he beams, charmingly.

“When you’re in that [home recording] situation,” he says, “it’s quite repetitive, and also your workplace is also your bedroom, and that whole thing – you know, but it was amazing for a while. ’Cos, I loved that house. And I loved my room, it was a lovely room…”

I was disappointed to hear you’d moved out. I was kind of hoping I’d get to see it.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, shaking his head mournfully. “I wish I could bloody see the room. I wish I could be back there. Cos the house I’m in now is awful,” he says, a sentiment that becomes something of a refrain over the course of the night. So what was this tiny nirvana like, then?

“It was an end-of-terrace red brick on London Bridge Road, on the way down to Sandymount Strand. And my bedroom was on the side of the house that was detached, or whatever, so noise wasn’t an issue, really. And there was a really good friend of mine sleeping in the room above me – he’s one of those people who’s just a really good sleeper, he’s out for the count and that’s it. So that was really helpful. I mean, you’d still have to have respect for people,” says the ever-solicitous Kittser, “but it meant you could actually get stuff done, so…”

Was there a nice view from the window? Could you see the sea?

“Oh god no, nothing like that. It would have been a much better fuckin’ album then,” he says with a semi-guffaw. “But I had a fireplace, and a nice big window, and you’d get a bit of a spill of light, at certain times of day, especially in those hours around five, six, seven, you know: the early sunlight was really good. So, working through the night, and kinda seeing that, and a lot of the time I’d go for a walk, you know, after finishing up work. And you’d go to bed with a really clear head, and the kind of satisfaction that you’d finished something. And that was a really special time. I was getting so much out of music then. So many things were happening.”

How does Small Moments stand up for you now, having completed your first ‘proper’ studio album, so to speak? He makes a face, and hesitates, thinking.

“I really like it, you know,”’ he says, the tiniest bit of reservation tingeing his voice, and for a moment I nearly want to defend the album to its creator myself. Then he explains how important it was to him that the record find a home on Rough Trade – even as he was in the process of getting signed up to record his ‘proper’ first album The Big Romance on Blanco y Negro. “That Small Moments period was such a prolific time, and such a special time, and I felt really strongly that I had to have some kind of document of that period that was totally true to the situation that the songs were written and recorded in. I just really liked that idea.

“There are so many bands out there that come out with their first record, and it’s well-put-together, and they’re like ready to roll. They’re ready to fuckin’… take on the world, or whatever. And you just kind of listen, and wonder: there are some seeds of things in there that… you kind of wonder what they’d sound like more stripped down, just a bit less kind of polished. And that’s kind of what Small Moments was about.”

That period not only gave birth to Small Moments: it was the formative period for everything David Kitt now considers his musical aesthetic, and the place where he began to find rewards in writing and recording via finally finding a voice of his own. Which sounds corny… until you hear him tell it.

“I haven’t really had any… great traumas in my life,” says Kittser, “apart from, like, the usual broken-heart stuff that everyone kinda goes through. But at the same time, you’ve got the usual peaks and troughs to deal with. And in terms of the troughs… there was such a kind of answer to them, in making music.

“Every time I finished something, I just felt - such a sense of outpouring, but into something that was ultimately, I felt, such a positive, soothing, calming, kind of music. I would listen back to it, and just go, Wahey, this is terrific. This is exactly the antidote to the bad stuff. And it got to the point where I just got really, really heavily into it. I would leave parties early to go home and work on it, and I was just so happy doing it. I’d get home, and have a cup of coffee, and roll a joint, and get everything set up, and have a smoke, and start working. And the more active I was creatively, my engagement with the world, as an individual, in a solitary kind of way, was… I just kind of found greater resonance in everything around me. It’s like the line in that Badly Drawn Boy song (‘The Shining’): “And suddenly you’re in love with everything.” But it wasn’t to do with a relationship, or another person, or falling in love. I was getting so much from the music.”

Catharsis, revelation and epiphany; loneliness inverted into a sweet savoury solitude… Kittser wasn’t always like this. He had his wild years of angst and bloodlettings and, to hear him tell it, crap songwriting, like everyone else. “For years,” David remembers, speaking of his humble beginnings, “you kinda had that real dread-filled, kinda whingy, fuckin’ melancholy guitar thing,” he says, “But I didn’t want to let out those feelings, ’cos they weren’t doing me any good. And I reached this point where I felt that what I was playing had a more positive kind of hue to it, and I was like, yeah, wow! What fits with this music is a really different kind of songwriting. That’s where it really, really clicked.”

Did you used to write darker stuff, then? It sounds like you came to a point where you said to yourself, Hang on, this is wrong, I’m wearing clothes that aren’t mine.

“Kind of,” he considers. “It wasn’t so much that – it was maybe like, you were wearing clothes that are too tight, or… dirty or something. They may be yours, but you don’t wanna fuckin look at them. It was more an effort to write stuff that I really wanted to see, and hear, and really experience again and again.”

So does he ever write pieces of music that are up to his standards musically, but are perhaps darker, or more personal, to the point where he isn’t comfortable playing them to anyone but himself?

“Yeah,” he agrees, to my surprise. “There is certain stuff that I write, where I go, ‘Wow, that’s lovely, but…’” He shakes his head. “There’s this one song that…” He pauses. “Last week, I’d decided it was going to be the B-side to (upcoming single) ‘You Know What I Want To Know,’ but then, I decided this week, no, I just can’t do it. And my friends keep saying to me, ‘No, you have to release that song, it’s beautiful!’ It’s about five years old, but it’s really lingered, for a lot of my friends, as one of their favourites. And it’s kind of a fighting song, a song where there’s a struggle, an effort to overcome something, and in tone it’s more melancholy, and more wordy, and more weighty,” Kittser rolls his eyes with a little self-mocking irony, but not much – “I was really making an effort with the words. And I do think it’s quite well written, but… You’re almost anxious to keep songs like those to yourself, cos it’s like a secret. And you feel that if you share it with other people, they’re gonna want to hear it again – and then,” Kittser goes on, apparently visualising the snowballing effect, “people might request it at gigs, and meanwhile you really just don’t wanna play it. ’Cos that kind of song,” he shakes his head again, “just takes so much out of you.

“Seeing Nick Cave the other week, just putting himself through it… I don’t know whether he actually does, or whether it’s an act, or whether he’s developed this means where he can… catch himself…”

Stuart Staples out of Tindersticks, as well. Comic impressions aside, he told me in Brussels that the only way he sang those songs in the beginning was by staying drunk for two years.

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s the way I was when I was nineteen. I used to drink a naggin of whiskey before a gig. And it’s so alien to the kind of person I am now. I wouldn’t go near a naggin of whiskey these days. Well, not before a gig, anyway. And it was a very different performance,” he smiles, cringing slightly. “It was a very arrrrrrrrrrr performance, you know,’ he says, with accompanying semi-threatening gestures. ‘With a whiskey drunk on. You can imagine. I used to tell people to shut up, and get out of the way, when I was playing, and be really cranky…”

‘Cranky’! Dr Kittser and Mr Hyde! Let’s pause for a moment while we all try to imagine David Kitt in a cranky place. It’s not an easy thing. To paraphrase Roy Scheider, we’re going to need a bigger pause.

His easygoing, seemingly inexhaustible positivity aside, the impression that comes across of David Kitt is that of a man who likes – or, more to the point, needs – solitude, head-space, his own company, call it what you want. Is he a loner?

“I remember when I was in Spain (Kitt spent a year teaching English in Madrid) – I was living with a girlfriend, and I remember… I really enjoyed living with someone and stuff, but there was a necessity that, in order to facilitate my creative urge… well, it was a small place, and I almost had to kind of create some kind of solitude.

“I remember reading that Paul Auster book, The Invention Of Solitude, at the time, and it was a real eye-opener, it was a really good book to read. It’s years since I read it, but it’s kind of about living in an urban context, and about [that idea of having] a total loner side, and how he kind of achieves it in kind of claustrophobic urban situations. Like, in a bedsit, when you’ve got one room, and you’ve got loads of activity around you, and loads of sounds, and how you could manage to shut that off, and just get down to the task of creation,” he says, almost quoting directly, in spirit at least, from his own ‘Headphones’ track from his first album. “I can’t even remember the devices the character used, but – I suppose I’ve always had that side that needs a bit of space, that needs my own little space.”

Kitt is, intriguingly, soon going to be learning the joys of big spaces.

“So much of Small Moments was written and recorded in a situation where I couldn’t make that much noise,’ he says. ‘And a lot of The Big Romance was written in that same situation, and I think that carries over. But I’d like to write the next record in a situation where I could make a lot more noise. So that the tone of stuff – it would add a bit more urgency, and all that. So I’m trying to find a place to do that. I’m really excited about that.”

In addition to touring, the last few months – as evidenced by Kitt’s schedule today – have brought an unbelievable (if, admittedly, standard) amount of media obligations. And while the press has been overwhelmingly positive so far, all this attention still must require a considerable mental shifting-of-gears for a bloke who was busy keeping the noise down in a bedsit studio only two short years ago. Kittser, however, appears impressively unruffled.

“I can’t say it’s hugely interfered with my personal life, up to this point,” he posits. “Everyone around me seems to think it’s gonna get worse. I think… (pause) I grew up in a household where, because my dad’s a politician (Tom Kitt, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment), everything I did was quite public anyway. And I was always quite conscious that anything controversial that I did, would affect my dad’s public image. I always felt like I was maybe kind of under observation a little bit, when I was a kid, in school. Like, on the bus, you’d meet some guy you went to school with when you were 19, and he’d ended up being a drug dealer, and he’d pull out a big lump of hash, and go, Whatcha think, is that a good ounce? And I’d be like, ‘Ohhh, I wouldn’t know.’ And meanwhile, the old ladies are behind you, going, (whispers) ‘That’s Tom Kitt’s son! And he’s doing drugs!’

“When I was a teenager, I was your typical indie kid with the long hair and the big coat, and there were lots of people in the estate who thought I was on drugs, even though I wasn’t. I was like, fifteen, and they were like, Ahh, he’s on fuckin’ smack. So… eh,” he laughs, “it’s actually not hugely different to that.”

Mmm, yes: the Divine Comedy syndrome. Being the politician’s son mustn’t have been the coolest, or easiest, thing to be as a kid.

“Well, I was never embarrassed about what my dad did,” Kittser says. “It was just what he did. And I was proud of him for the stuff he did. But now, when I’m doing something that is coming from me, it’s my own identity – well, in a way; it’s a public identity, anyway – and I suppose there’s a certain amount of pride in that you’ve kind of established your own identity, and people are recognising you for that. And maybe if I hadn’t had the kind of upbringing I’ve had, I wouldn’t be as ready for this. So I kind of take it all in my stride, really.

“I understand what it is to be a public figure, I’ve understood that from quite an early age. And I understand how little it means. I’ve known from an early age how different my dad was as a person to how he was portrayed in the press. I understand that line between public and private. It’s just part of what you do, of your profession, your occupation, whatever you want to call it. Which just so happens to be exactly what I would be doing with my life even it it wasn’t a profession.”

You seemed unbelievably calm in Brussels, I tell him.

“Yeah. I was. I did feel it was one of the most together performances we ever had. Because of the bizarre circumstances of it, me missing the plane and all that, I ended up having a really relaxed day in Dublin. I came back from the airport, and went into Road Records, with Dave and Julie, and just had a cup of tea, and went back home. And I was in kind of a… a state I really like, really kind of overtired, on 3 or 4 hours of sleep, but with that real kind of lucid quality that kicks in sometimes, with lack of sleep. And I ended up going home, and writing a really nice song.” You couldn’t have. Are you serious?

“Yeah, yeah. I sat on the edge of my bed, for about 45 minutes, and this song popped out, and then I went to sleep for half an hour, and then I went back to the airport, and read my book on

the plane. So by the time I got to the gig – the whole day, I said, I’m not gonna worry, If I

make it, I make it, if I don’t, I don’t. If the flight was delayed at all, which the earlier flight was,

I was… well, I would really, really be cutting it fine. Turns out the flight was delayed by 20

minutes, I got picked up at the airport, the guy weaved in and out of traffic, he knew I was

under pressure, I got to the gig about 20 minutes before I was due onstage, checked all the pedals and the guitars, didn’t even get to talk to the

lads first…”

You three seem a great partnership.

“Yeah, completely. We always get on with each other, you know what I mean. They’re two incredible people. We have a similar sense of humour…”

What makes you lot laugh?

“Em,” he considers, quite seriously. “Quite silly stuff…”

I tell him about what an amazingly good mood everyone was in, the morning of heading to Brussels. The whole Stuart Staples business comes up again.

“Yeahhh, we’ve kinda been doing that,” he giggles. “Diarmuid got caught, actually.” What, by Tindersticks?

“Yeah. By some of the brass section, I think. He was just kind of coming up the stars, going (drops head forward; adopts depressive, basso profundo drone, with extra vibrato) “Eeeeeeehhhh…”

“It was really funny,” he continues as I fall about the place, “’cos when we were touring with Arab Strap, and we had the one gig with Tindersticks in London, the whole way down in the car, we were all doing Stuart Staples impressions, and singing the Bodyform ad, and it go to the point where Barry, the driver, who didn’t even know Tindersticks, he was actually doing impressions of Stuart Staples… But I think, as a foursome, including Barry, the tour manager, there’s a nice dynamic there. We’re all people who enjoy our own company, and so when we’re travelling, we always have this natural ability to find space and then come back together, when we need a chat. We’d all have a pretty…”’ he giggles, “…detailed knowledge of each other. I can talk to them about really, really personal things. So to have that around… I really miss them when we’re not touring.”

That night in Brussels, after a day of confusion and missed connections and endless potential for nervous breakdowns to be had at any number of points by everybody concerned, David Kitt and co play a tight, focused, intimate, happy-making stormer. After, characteristically, apologising for not having either French or Flemish (indeed, for shame!) they storm through a searing, swelling ‘What I Ask;’ they move the sweaty venue to grooving, head-bobbing heights during ‘Song From Hope St’, and they pretty much combine their usual Dublin-ish warmth and affability with enough gorgeous new innovations to indicate that, for David Kitt, the rest of 2001 is going to be very interesting indeed. And – to borrow Damon Gough’s phrase again – suddenly you’re in love with everything. That’s the Big Romance.

The Big Romance is out now on Blanco Y Negro.