John Lambert is a Dublin musician who bucked the trend and decamped from the city to the country to pursue his art. He was drawn to the wilds of Sligo by the offer of a musician’s fellowship (a what? I hear you cry, in disbelief) courtesy of the Model Arts gallery. From this period of bucolic contemplation was born his critically lauded album, Penny Black.

“I got a €4,000 bursary and was asked to curate a gig at the Model,” he says of his sojourn in the north west. “So I invited one of my heroes, Murcof, over from Mexico.”
Sligo, he says, isn’t quite the backwater it’s often made out to be.
“It’s a very fertile place for the arts and I’m constantly amazed by the number of us out here! I’ve been stationed in Sligo for the last couple of years since the fellowship. When it was offered to me, I grabbed it with both hands and moved straight down, which they maybe weren’t expecting.”
Since completing the fellowship and releasing the album, John has stayed in Sligo (“I got my hands on a lovely little space to work in near the Benbulben mountain, out in the countryside, and it’s fantastic”) where he’s piecing together Chequerboard’s follow up to Penny Black and plotting an appearance on RTE’s Other Voices, as well as working on a new project with a Spanish artist.
He elaborates: “My experience at The Model Arts opened up a lot of things to me in terms of sound, the world of galleries and sound art. I’m currently developing a new project with Marta Fernandez Calvo that’s themed on rain (The Rain Project). We did the first stage of it already in Sligo and the second stage is in a gallery in Milan in January, where we have a five-week residency. My role is as a sound artist. She’s a conceptual artist. It’s really interesting to see how we can work in tandem, exploring where music ends and art begins, and the dance between them.”
Chequerboard will be indulging his penchant for gallery gigs again on December 6 in Dublin’s Joy Gallery, his last before Christmas, which is sure to be a very different experience from his most recent one: the night before our interview, he was supporting The Jimmy Cake at Vicar St.
“It went fantastically well,” he beams. “There was a really good turn out. The Jimmy Cake were on fire! I was delighted, because I got to tell the crowd about my friend’s art class in Perth. She’s been using my music in the class. The kids have been doing paintings to the songs, and on Monday, I got a package of 30 paintings and hand written letters from the entire class of 10-years-olds in Perth, Australia asking me all sorts of brilliant questions like what animal I’d like to be and who flies me round the world doing gigs and whether I’m ever coming to Australia. It was just amazing, there were all these mad digressions, like how they love football and dancing and Chequerboard! I also heard about one kid’s recently deceased goldfish and his fat cat who was 17 years of age and then in the same sentence, he wrote ‘You ROCK!’. Amazing.”