Everything but the boy

Gemma Hayes

Gemma Hayes’ (pictured above) recorded output to date suggests that music should be as schizophrenic as the people who buy it. Last year’s brace of EPs, the acoustic, contemplative 4.35am and the fiery drone-rock of the follow up Work To A Calm, hinted at something now made explicit in her new single ‘Hanging Around’. Hers is the sound of someone having an argument with themselves in the dead of night. And, as Hayes’ association with the likes of The Frames and Sparklehorse suggests, the Ballyporeen native has more kinship with rural Irish-Americana than urban Europa.

“I can only speak for myself, but I find the whole urban London sound really boring,” she says. “There’s something about the rural American culture and sound, there’s a bit of rawness to it, there’s something driven and passionate about it. There’s maybe a weird connection ’cos Ireland is pretty much made of country, and it’s dark and there’s like a hidden second level there, poetry and music. There’s something in the countryside, that dark winter feel that you sometimes get in middle-America, a loneliness.”

So, Hayes’ choice of Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, Sparklehorse) as producer makes total sense. The Phil Spector of the new weird America, Fridmann has endowed much of Hayes’ work with his characteristic skewed sensibility, but without compromising on rawness.

“The record label I’d signed to weren’t too keen to use him,” Gemma admits, “they wanted me to go with Nigel Godrich, the big UK producer, and I really wanted to stay away from the UK sound. Nigel Godrich is amazing, anything he’s ever done with Radiohead has blown me away, but I had been a fan of Dave Fridmann for quite a while and had my heart set on approaching him.”

So, Ms. Hayes got her way. Together with ex-Frames guitarist Dave Odlum, a serious producer in his own right, the singer managed to avail of Fridmann’s technical expertise while retaining the integrity of her live band.

Hayes: “I kinda didn’t walk in guns blazing, like, ‘This is not going to sound like everything else you’ve done’, but at the end of the day I had a band and we had rehearsed a lot of the arrangements, they had their own feel anyway, so going over to Dave Fridmann there was already a sound there. It’s mad because David Odlum ended up engineering and co-producing more songs on the album (Night On My Side, due out later this year) than Dave Fridmann did. I think that David Odlum is very talented and in a way I love the fact that nobody knows it except for a few people.”

If you can count several thousand die-hard Frames fans as a few people, that is. Has Gemma received hate mail from Church of Hansard devotees who’ve cast her as the sultry temptress who lured Dave into the woods?

“There’s been touches of it,” she laughs, “it’s been hilarious for the past while because David is a grown man, he’s 32 and he feels it’s time for him to branch out and do other work and he’s not sure even at this moment whether he wants to be fully in my band or not, because he wants to focus on production and engineering and that’s his decision. And the backlash has been just like: ‘Whaaat?!! She lured him away from the cosy family unit!’ It’s died down a bit now, but the two of us have had to laugh at it really.”

Pina

She’s an Austrian abroad in Ardgroom, but Pina Koller didn’t move to the West Cork wilds for the scenery. The reasons for the relocation were rather more prosaic: Koller and her then husband, an illustrator of children’s books, decided to leave Vienna several years ago when the Austrian government introduced compulsory health insurance for artists. With a baby daughter to support, it was an outlay they could ill afford.

“They just treat artists as if they were millionaires,” Koller says. “They took 33% of the net income just for health insurance. It’s absurd and I was pissed off and after a couple of years doing that I just said, ‘No, I want to go somewhere else’. We didn’t know anything about Ireland then but we saw a culture series on Austrian television, and there was one author who said that he had moved to Ireland because you get at least treated like a person.

The anger Koller felt at her home country resulted in perhaps the highlight of her debut album Quick Look – a collection that often evokes riled up screech owls like Heather Nova and Alanis Morissette – a song called ‘The Tower’. And as you’d imagine, the singer experienced acute culture shock upon moving to Ardgroom.

“The end of the world,” she laughs. “It was a real shock for me. My daughter must’ve been about five months old when we left, it nearly broke my heart to leave my family. When you get a baby you just want a nest, and I had to give up everything. I felt very lonely. It was not an easy time but at the end I’m very thankful because I found this guy called Alan McEvoy, a business manager for the Cranberries, and he just gave me addresses and made some phone calls and found a lawyer for me in London.”

When Peter Gabriel heard Pina’s guest performance on a Heather Nova song recorded by the Afro-Celt Sound System, he offered her a deal with his Real World label. Pretty soon she found herself in Bath, recording Quick Look.

“I’m really in love with the label,” she says, “they’re a whole family, people who stick together. For the whole recording session I had my child with me and they just looked after her, a really big help. The Afro-Celts helped me a lot. They played the song Heather Nova had written, and she had a completely different melody on it. I just invented something new. And thankfully they liked my voice.”

It’s a voice that Pina began developing as early as three years of age, singing Austrian folk songs in kindergarten. At nine she discovered classical guitar, which she later studied at Vienna’s famous Conservatorium. This grounding later proved valuable when scoring and arranging the material on her album.

“Real World was great because they gave me a chance,” she says. “There was not a big budget and they didn’t approach me with things like, ‘We’d like this record to sound like Sheryl Crow’, and basically I had to do everything by myself, the arrangements, everything. Loads of these backing vocals, they were only sung because we couldn’t afford instruments. So, stick to the minimum.”

Margaret Healy

At 27 a late starter, Kilmainham songwriter Margaret Healy (pictured) refrained from opening her mouth until she had something to say – albeit softly. The lion’s share of the songs on her debut album And You Are?, released last September, sound hushed and almost tentative, as if they were written in fear of waking someone.

“They probably were,” she admits, “Definitely I’m not allowed to play too loudly in either of my dwelling places! Probably earlier on I wrote without letting anybody know I was doing music, I was kind of embarrassed about the whole thing, so I would’ve been in my room doing it very quietly. Some review said ‘another album of bedsit dementia’, putting me in with Paul O’Reilly and David Kitt or something and I went, ‘Oh no!’ I think what’s happening is that a lot of the singer-songwriter crew, dare I use the phrase, are getting it together to put albums out more than before, so maybe that’s just where we’re coming from rather than being in a garage or a rehearsal studio.”

The difference is Margaret Healy manages to put a spin on the acoustic archetype via her use of electronic textures, giving her songs more the feel of a High Llamas or Blue Nile record, particularly in the way she evokes the city at its most vulnerable. In ‘Coming Home’, Healy makes poetic devices out of place names – Dorset St., Smithfield, the Quay “and heaven’s gate is James’ St.”

“That’s just an exact train of thought,” Margaret explains, “I used to live in London, so that was my journey home, all nostalgic and happy/sad, when you feel all weird.”

And You Are? is full of such urban ennui. In ‘Something Real’ Healy pledges herself to “No more endless nights with mindless types/Smokin’ shit and talkin’ shite ’til your head is numb your mouth is dry/You hate your life and you don’t know why/And you’re dyin’ for someone just to say ‘I like/I love/Are you okay?’” Then there’s the near haiku in ‘Sound Of The Rain’ – “Realising too late/clouds don’t disappear/They break”. Or bleakest of all, ‘Taking It Back’ with its admission that, “I’m stuck inside this crowded bar/Bubble-wrapping up my heart/Waiting for the end”.

“I’ve written a lot of these songs, and hadn’t thought that they’d make me squirm or that they were as honest or open as some people think they are,” Margaret admits. “I just wrote down what I was thinking at the time. That was probably a memory of the time I started writing, a whole phase of just going out, sitting with all these people, coming home at three o’ clock, working in business and accountancy.”

That was then. What next?

“Leave this job! I’m doing accountancy part time to pay off the album. That’s what I did before I did this music thing, so I came back to it last year to get together the cash and I finish next month. It’s been kinda hard ’cos since September when the album came out I’ve been here at work at least 30 hours a week. But now gigs are starting to happen and people are starting to ring me, so when I get out of here I’m going on the road.”

Dawn Kenny

If I described Dawn Kenny as a Limerick songwriter who cut her teeth playing piano for Corkonian lunatic fringers like Cathal Coughlan and 9 Wassies From Bainne, you’d reasonably expect a kooky keyhole case with a bent for prog-punk arrangements, sort of Lydia Lunch meets Tori Amos.

Not so. Kenny in fact belongs firmly in the traditional songbird field, citing Joni Mitchell and Carole King as chief inspirations. Qualify this with hints of Kate Bush and Jane Siberry in the vocal department, and you’re close to where her current single ‘Playing On My Mind’ is coming from.

“When I did some keyboard tracks on the (9 Wassies’) Ciddy Hall album I was the kind of person who just wanted to get my name out there,” Kenny explains, “but I didn’t necessarily know the business so I just said yes to everything. I thought the 9 Wassies’ music was very interesting, I think that was a brilliant album. And Cathal Coughlan’s a brilliant songwriter, I’m sure at the time he influenced me even, but I was always a singer-songwriter behind that, that would’ve been my main priority. I think people are really only getting to know me now as Dawn Kenny.”

Dawn’s debut album Through The Loop was co-written with her professional and personal partner Michael O’ Toole – she writes the music and interprets his lyrics. It’s not an unheard of approach, but hardly a common one either.

“We kind of feed off each other,” she says. “It’s interesting because a lot of the songs are very personal to me, and a lot of them would be about me. We’ve been in a working and living partnership for the last eight years. I like to tell people that because sometimes when you’re singing a song and it seems very personal and then someone says Michael writes the lyrics, they think it’s not personal and it actually is.”

Is it ever hard to reject anything Michael comes up with?

“Oh no, I reject a lot! I’ve hundreds and hundreds of lyrics that didn’t become songs, and when I look back on them it’s just that they didn’t mean a lot to us. And the same with music. I don’t think there’s a problem, we don’t fight into the night about them, y’know? I mean, if I never met him I’d still be writing songs, but I just don’t think my lyrics would be that good. But I’m going to keep writing until I drop. I love playing, it’s the easiest job I could possibly do.”

Lynn Ryan

She didn’t just lick it off the stones. Lynn Ryan’s father John was lead singer and rhythm guitarist with the Atlantic Showband, so as a youngster she got more than enough first hand accounts of ballroom blitzes and piranha-like promoters. But didn’t he try to talk her out of a career in rock ‘n’ roll, like any sensible parent?

“Actually quite the opposite,” she says, in a hybrid accent that betrays hints of her Sligo/Waterford/Cork upbringing. “I’m used to having music around from when I was very young and being encouraged. They were never forceful, but it was always something that I wanted to do, although the parents did encourage me to have something else to rely on, so I studied as well, I got my degree in Computer Science. My dad would’ve known the ins and outs of the music industry, and you’ve everybody warning you it’s the worst industry to go into. To keep going in it you have to keep on your toes.”

When Ryan left school she undertook a sound engineering course, educated herself in sequencing and sampling and moved to Dublin, spending her nights visiting venues, establishing contacts, getting her act together. She also took on some work as a session singer.

“I think it that definitely helped me because when I went into the studio to do my own demos I knew what to ask for,” she says. “I don’t think it’s essential but I found it helpful in that I’m not lost when I go into a studio. Especially with the single, I co-produced a lot of the stuff with a guy called Shane Power, so I know what I’m looking for.”

The single in question is ‘I Won’t Be Me’, the first fruit of her deal with Universal Ireland. The song, a glossy cross between Meredith Brooks and Alanis, appears to be written in the voice of a girl playing out the role of a male fantasy object as a means of preserving and protecting her true self. Lynn explains:

“I wrote the song on a couple of different levels, really. To me it’s about somebody wanting you to be what you’re not, not even from a male fantasy point of view but someone trying to change your personality more than anything. Different people get different things from it.”