Get Jape, Hear Jape, Fly

It was 2004 and a Redneck Manifesto member was wandering around Dublin Zoo with comedian and keyboard enthusiast David O’Doherty. Said Rednecker was flying solo for the second time, so to promote his new album, The Monkeys In The Zoo Have More Fun Than Me, this magazine’s crack editorial team thought a trip to the Phoenix Park animal enclosure (get it?) would make for a fitting, funny piece. The larks didn’t last long, however, with O’Doherty’s pal Richie Egan getting deep as they passed a Brazilian tapir: “I had this huge revelation last year. I realised for the first time that eventually I am going to die, and understanding that is the biggest thing that has ever happened to me. It has completely changed my whole life.”

Would that all artists have such a mortal wake-up call. Novelist Lawrence Durrell posited that the realisation was the point at which “one becomes an adult”. In Egan’s case, it marked the point at which he became a serious creative force. He certainly wasn’t going to waste a second thereafter and his primary act, Jape, has been the benefactor. The Monkeys… gave the world ‘Floating’, his signature song for a time, before the Crumlin musician scaled even greater heights with 2008’s Ritual and 2011’s Ocean Of Frequency, both of them Choice Music Prize winners.
Life continued to happen outside of the studio. Since Ocean Of Frequency, Richie has moved to Malmö with his Swedish wife Noomi. He’s welcomed their first child, Aoife, into the world and said goodbye, unexpectedly, to his mother. The wonder and fragility of this mortal coil still has its hold on him after a decade.
We’re in a Dublin hotel to talk about fifth Jape LP This Chemical Sea, having missed a trick not conducting the interview whilst jumping off The Forty Foot.
“It’s important to be aware of what’s going on in all aspects of life,” Egan says. “Because you can only appreciate the beauty of being alive when you’re fully aware that you will die. Having my ma die and having my child be born, it’s like you see the two ends of the spectrum and it’s fucking trippy. Trippy as fuck!”
Perhaps that’s why he’s also fond of reading the oft-disturbing Morbid Reality subreddit online. Being honest, this writer is too, for reasons unknown. For those not au fait, Morbid Reality has been described as ‘the exact opposite of cute cat videos’ and is notorious for its footage of people drowning in their own blood and crashing airliners (seriously, you do not want to go there).
“I’ll tell you why,” says Egan assuredly. “Because you know that shit could happen any day! You could walk out of here and get hit by a fucking truck, you know?! You’ve got to fucking know about that shit because that shit makes you live on a knife edge: that fire over there looks menacing. Did you hear about that guy who got baked in the oven? It was on Morbid Reality, I was reading it there. He was cleaning an industrial oven and someone shut the door and turned it on. He got cooked.”
A ‘modern-life-is-rubbish-and-could-possibly-end with-you-being-baked-like-a-turkey’ vibe pervades the electronic pop mastery of This Chemical Sea. But this is juxtaposed with an overall sense of acceptance. Note the almost meditative lyrics of ‘The Heart’s Desire’, for example.
“I wrote ‘The Heart’s Desire’ when I was meditating a lot,” he nods. “It’s a weird world we live in, as you know and, being an artist in this world, sometimes you feel like ‘man, I have nothing to say that’s going to add anything to this place’. So you’re trying to find something that you can hang on to; that you can stand behind. With this record I tried to find words that felt true. Even if I didn’t necessarily understand them, they still felt true.”
His daughter’s arrival and the halt to the recording process that came with his mother’s passing was the “edge of living” that understandably informed everything.
“The weird thing about being a songwriter is, if your ma died, it’s an amazing thing to happen to you. Although that sounds weird, you don’t get any more alive than when that happens and, as a songwriter, that’s what you’re trying to get out there. That’s why I love listening to so much music. Even this dude Hozier, he’s the biggest guy in the world right now and I love his shit because he’s thinking about shit. He’s contemplating his particular reality, trying to send it back to you.”
The boy Hozier Byrne has made global strides over the past year, but artistically he’s a long way yet from Richie Egan’s level. Without question one of our most accomplished and consistent Irish songwriters, This Chemical Sea could be his masterpiece. Produced by David Wrench (the man behind Caribou’s Swim) and with long-time Jape cohort Glenn Keating acting as a sounding board, it is a collection of art-pop gems. Cool electronics recall Hot Chip, a pared, bass-led aesthetic nods to Future Islands’ Singles, and yet it is unmistakably Jape. In fact, Egan feels it is his first intrinsically ‘Jape' sounding’ record.
“The other Jape stuff has always been quite experimental in the sense that you have a dance track here and then you have an acoustic track here. I just wanted to have a coherent album because all my favourite albums – apart from The White Album, which is the opposite of what I’m about to say! – have a coherent sound… I wrote loads of acoustic songs that I still have; they’re all sitting on a fucking laptop somewhere. But this time I was like, I’m not going to stick them on, I’m just going to keep going ‘til I get 10 nice electronic tracks.”
Not that Egan’s entirely pleased with all 10. This is the man who said he’d change plenty about the universally acclaimed Ritual and his ability to whittle is on par with his ability to create, even if it means he is hard on himself.
“Well you’ve got to be. I remember somebody telling me Stevie Wonder would listen to ‘Superstition’ and go ‘aw, I’d change that drum beat’. That’s the way you’ve got to be. If you start thinking you’re gold, you’re fucked. In any walk of life.”
Maintaining daily office hours, his commute helped the mental gold panning.
“The walk to the studio was a 15/20 minutes and I listened to the songs probably 200 times. If I start getting bored at any moment, the song goes. So, with this one, I wanted to have 10 songs that I didn’t get bored listening to. On the album now, since it’s been mixed and mastered, nine of them have held up for me. I’m not going to tell you which one didn’t, but nine of them have held up!”
I can vouch for the quality of all of them, from opener ‘Séance Of Light’ to the closing notes of the quivering title-track, along with the euphoric ‘Love On The Crest Of A Wave’ and Conor O’Brien collaboration ‘Ribbon Ribbon Ribbon’.
“I love Conor,” Egan says. “I love him with real love, y’know? You just feel like you’re on the same wavelength. Conor is a fucking genius.”
Collaboration remains important to Egan, though the logistics are difficult when you’re holed up in Scandinavia. Although he’s learning the language, Richie Egan still feels like “an interloper” in Sweden.
“I’m back so much,” he says of Dublin. “My dad calls me ‘The Boomerang Man’ because I come back all the time! Recharge my batteries – my Guinness batteries basically – and hang out.”
Touring gives him an excuse to touch base.
“As long as I can do that I’ll be super happy. If it got to the point that I wasn’t able to do that I’d be kind of like [tenses up], ‘I need to go to Ireland!’”