Divide And Conquer

First time round the block with Pat Dam Smyth’s extraordinary debut album, The Great Divide, and you’ll be tempted to conclude that all is sunshine and light in the fella’s world.

A great, melodic cascade of a record, powered by a love of pastoral rock and woozy folkadelia – its spritely choruses and off-beam detours will have you thinking of Ram and ‘Dead End Street’, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and The Madcap Laughs, and wondering: just how much fun can a man have with his record collection?
Second go, however, and you’ll maybe divine a few shadows on the landscape – maybe pick up on one or two darker shades, which, as your relationship with the songs develops, will begin to occupy more of the space. Will begin, in fact, to occupy all of the space. So, when a magnificently bearded Pat (one part Richard Manuel, the other Caravaggio’s Goliath) reveals that The Great Divide is a record born out of a tumultuous time in his life – a time that saw him part company with Nipsy Russell, his long-term collaborator, split with his girlfriend, suffer a serious depression, and spend some time living rough on the streets of London – there’s only one proper response: no shit.
“It all came to a head about a year ago,” he explains. “I was living in London with Nipsy, playing with Smoky Angle Shades, and we were doing well: playing some great shows, writing good songs. But something changed. I found living in London quite extreme. It felt like I was trapped. It’s a huge place, but really it’s a made up of a series of villages, and it just seemed like we were endlessly playing the same places in Camden and Ladbroke Grove. I just needed a break. I wasn’t very well. I was just wandering around, really: lost; no idea what I was doing.”
We’ve all heard these types of stories. And are aware that they tend not to attract happy endings. However, in Pat’s case, he found support in (for this confirmed atheist) an unexpected source.
“I’m not a religious person, but I walked into a chapel one day and started to speak to the priest. He was a great guy and we just talked through a lot of the things that were going round my head. He didn’t once preach or judge. He told me I was having a dark night of the soul and he made a brilliant point. I wasn’t listening to music at the time – had no interest in it at all – but he said I’d have to make my own way out of it, and music would be the thing that would help me out.”
Initially, Pat put little stock in this. He returned to Northern Ireland thinking, “I never want to write music again.” Within a month, though, he had completed over 90 tracks – songs that, even in their skeleton form, seemed deeper, more experimental, and more crazily pop-infused than anything he’d done before.
“I had to look at myself and admit – this is a disease, you’re going to be doing this until you die,” he smiles. “And I started thinking in a different way about everything. When I was in the band, I never played lead guitar – but that’s all I was hearing now. And I wanted to lay down multi-track vocals. I spoke to a few producers and they said no, but I was thinking of Lennon and Kurt, even stuff like the Chifons and the Shangri-las.”
Barrett Lahey, one of the in-house producers at Start Together Studios, decided to hitch his wagon to Pat’s and, over the course of three months, the pair plunged into the recording sessions. With ultimately staggering results. For all the heavy context, The Great Divide is anything but a morose record. In fact, if you look past the directly personal lyrics, what you’ll find is an intensely emotional and (just as importantly) hummable collection of songs.
“I’ve always loved the famous ones – Blue and Blood On The Tracks – records that you could tell came out of a really intense period in someone’s life. It was three months of my life, and it’s all on there. I wanted it to be an album that summed that period up. A unified piece of work. I didn’t care about singles or anything like that. To be honest, when I was writing it, I wasn’t even thinking about leaving my bedroom.”
And did you ever try to contact the priest again?
“Yeah,” smiles Pat. “I actually went over and played a few songs to him. He didn’t say much, but I think he liked them. I just wanted to thank him. Even if you can’t feel faith – I think there are times when you should still make the leap.”

The Great Divide is out now