Hot Press meets Bressie

Bastard! I just thought I’d get that out of the way. In the 14 months since Hot Press last had a proper chat with him, Niall Breslin has shed a couple of stone, put muscles on his muscles and generally become an even bigger god’s gift to women.

Add in the 740,000-plus people for whom watching The Voice Of Ireland is a Sunday night requisite and a new album, Rage And Romance, which features one pristine pop tune after another and it’s shaping up to be a vintage year for the Mullingar man.
2012 wasn’t so great, however. Bressie confides that he suffered a series of panic attacks, which for a while he feared could be career-threatening.
“The first time it happened was during a live …Voice Of Ireland,” Niall recalls. “Kathryn Thomas was coming across to me and I couldn’t breathe. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s fucking happening?’ She knew something was wrong and steered the conversation away from me. During the ads I splashed some water on my face and managed to get to the end of the show, but it crippled me for months, knowing that I was that close to breaking down on national TV. The album, Rage And Romance, is all about me coming out the other side.”
What seemed irrational at the time now makes far more sense to the Mullingar man.
“I went from being in The Blizzards, who maybe 10% of the population here knew, to not being able to walk down the street without someone stopping me,” he resumes. “People think you’re being a moany old gobshite. However, losing all your privacy is a tough thing to deal with.”
Adam Clayton told us in the last issue of Hot Press that it took him 10 years to come to terms with the phenomenal success of The Joshua Tree, during which time he indulged in more drink and drugs than was healthy.
“I can totally relate to that, although obviously he’s a million times more famous than I am,” Bressie responds. “What’s freaking me out at the moment is Justin Bieber. It’s clearly evident that he’s very, very ill and having panic attacks. The paparazzi know that and are going to keep pushing until he has a total breakdown. It’s bear-baiting – stick a camera in his face and see how crazy he gets. They’re not photographers, they’re antagonists – that’s what their job is. He’s rich and famous, yeah, but he’s also a fucking kid. He was in his dressing-room for two hours unable to breathe and having a panic attack and people were going, ‘The little brat, he was off drinking or shagging someone…’”
Does he agree with the former Manchester
City and QPR footballer Joey Barton’s observation that Master B is “a smack addiction waiting
to happen?”
“If I had a child it would be absolutely over my dead body that they’d be getting into this industry at 13. I’m glad that you have to be a certain age to enter The Voice. You might think you’re mature enough to deal with it, but you’re not. I look at how Justin Bieber is now and think, ‘Fuck, it’s Macaulay Culkin and Michael Jackson all over again’.”
I remember when Amy Winehouse died, thinking that earlier intervention on the part of her management or record company might have prevented her demise.
“If I was Justin Bieber’s manager and cared about him, I’d pull the tour and get him some help,” Niall asserts. “It’s deal-able with, if you confront it. But not if you push it aside. By not switching the money-making machine
off they’re guaranteeing it’ll break down in
the future.”
On the subject of early starts, was Bressie surprised recently when Noel Gallagher and his ex-wife Meg Matthews allowed their 11-year-old, Anais, to start modelling.
“That’s another industry which sucks you in and spits you out – Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell both survived it, but only just! It’s obviously not a money thing with Noel Gallagher’s daughter. Perhaps she really, really wanted to do it and to avoid arguments they said, ‘Yes’. At least they’d recognise the pitfalls having been through all of that themselves.”
No gig where you’re judged almost entirely on your looks is an easy one!
“I’m in my early thirties and had problems dealing with anxiety. How the fuck would I have dealt with it if I was a kid and probably having negative things said about me on social media as well? I’ve worked out that for every thousand great tweets you get, there’s going to be a bad one that fucks you up. As a teenager you don’t have that sort of perspective.
“One of the songs on my last album, ‘While You’re Dreaming’, is about a friend of mine’s 12-year-old daughter, who killed herself. She said in the letter she left that the only time she was happy was when she was sleeping – hence the title. It’s a massive issue and I definitely think the Internet’s got something to do with it.”
Does that put Bressie in the same camp as Enda Kenny who, prompted by the Minister for State Sean McEntee taking his life before Christmas, wants tougher regulation of social media here?
“No, it doesn’t. Certainly as an adult you have the option not to read it. Anyone who’s in the public eye is going to get pounded on Twitter – it just goes with territory. You lose the right to defend yourself because anything you tweet back is liable to be seized upon. I’ve had whole stories written about me where the ‘quotes’ have been pulled from Twitter.
“What happened to the Minister was tragic and you feel terrible for him and his family – but when you start censoring something it’s hard to stop.”
Like Adam Clayton, Niall was deeply shocked last year when Ciara Pugsley and the Gallagher sisters, Erin and Shannon, took their own lives as a result of cyberbullying.
“I’d love to know if it’s something teachers talk to kids about in school,” he ponders. “If they don’t, they should. When I was 12 this guy kept picking on me in the playground. I put up with it for a while, but then one day not knowing how else to deal with it, I got him in a headlock and ran headfirst – his head – into a pole, which bust him up pretty badly. The point I’m trying to make is that there was no real mechanism at the CBS I attended to deal with bullying, and there really needs to be.”
How did Bressie manage to kick the anxiety attacks he was suffering into touch?
“My way of fighting back was to get fit,” he reveals. “I’m doing a series of triathlons for LARCC, the cancer charity my mother runs, which is why I took myself off to a training camp recently in Spain. I say ‘training camp’, but it was really a holiday with a bit of cycling thrown in to make me feel less guilty about going on the piss abroad. I honestly think I had a bit of Seasonal Affective Disorder before I went. It’s been a really long and shitty winter.”

Given how difficult he has found the whole celebrity thing, it might surprise some to hear that Bressie has given up the anonymity he enjoys in London and moved back to Ireland. What was behind that decisiion?
“It’s for six to eight months anyway,” he confirms. “I’ve got a new studio in Dublin and want to work with this girl called Orla Gartland who I’m obsessed with. There’s just something about her I adore. I’m doing an EP with Conor Quinn, who’s on The Voice – and then next week hooking up again with Pat (Byrne, 2012 Voice winner). We’re going to start his second record because he rushed the first one.”
Byrne’s All Or Nothing debut was a decent stab at making a Springsteenesque adult rock record, but only managed a couple of weeks in the top 30 before disappearing. It’s the latest example – Mickey Joe Harte, Chris Doran, Donna and Joseph McCaul, Lucia Evans, David O’Connor and Leanne Moore being the previous ones – of the winners of an Irish TV talent show falling some way short of a sustainable career.
“Mark Crossingham and the rest of the Universal Ireland team put everything behind it, but if you win a show like The Voice or The X Factor, you’re not the finished article. The people who’ve been successful are the ones who’ve had time, like Olly Murrs, to develop their stagecraft and decide exactly what they are. Pat won the show one day, and started making a record the next, which is something he’d never done before. I’ve said to him he needs to be more of an artist now.”
Bressie is dismissive of the notion that the BRIT School is statistically a better springboard to success than a TV talent show.
“I don’t think the BRIT School is the magic answer either, because you become so contrived,” he says. “The really good ones are the artists who have the strength to go, ‘I don’t want to do that’. It’s very hard to have a vision when you’re going through that sort
of process.”
Somebody who appears to have a very clear vision of where she’s heading is Soak. If Ms. Monds-Watson had come to Bressie a year ago and said, “Do you think I should take part in The Voice Of Ireland?” how would he have responded?
“I’d have told her that what she needed was to find a producer who not only believes in her, but will give her the time to develop. The reality of Soak is that she has a very pure and very beautiful voice, but she’s not the finished article. If you look at somebody like Ed Sheeran, a producer took him aside and said, ‘Right, you need to spend two or three years doing this’. Adele didn’t go straight from the BRIT School to the top of the charts. She had Jim Abiss, who produced most of 19, guide her while she worked out exactly what sort of artist she wanted to be.”
Whatever about its star-making credentials, there’s no denying The Voice Of Ireland’s ability to put bums-on-sofas. Donning my showbiz correspondent’s hat, can I enquire as to whether his spats with Kian Egan are genuine or of the choreographed pro-wrestling variety?
“It’s like the pub arguments you have with your mates – you’re genuine in what you’re saying but play to the crowd a bit,” he proffers. “Kian went to boy band school, I did the splitter line. He sold seventy million albums, I didn’t. There’s plenty of stuff we can slag each
other over!
“We actually do get on and spend hours in the dressing-room talking shite to each other. It’s good because Kian has more TV experience and is able to say, ‘Listen, the last show was a bit boring; we need to be more animated’.”
Kathryn Thomas told me recently that she’s dying to have a big Copperface Jack’s night out with Jamelia.
“I’d fucking love to be there when those two hit Copper’s!” Bressie chuckles. “Kathryn’s brilliant to party with. I was at the IFTAs two years ago when she was still going out with Enda Waters, who’s a garda, and the house band, Alabama 3, were shouting, ‘Fuck the police!’ She ran on stage and was like, ‘You fucking scumbags!’ There were nine of them and one of her, so fair play!
“Suddenly pitching up in Ireland was a culture shock for Jamelia,” he says of his newest Voice colleague. “She was a bit overly-cautious at first so I told her, ‘People will love you a lot more if you’re yourself: don’t hide it’. I also taught her a bit of Irish slang and after that there was no stopping her. Jamelia’s brought something new to The Voice. As for her and Kathryn hitting the town, wherever they end up, I suspect they’ll be the last ones standing.”
In time-honoured tabloid tradition, there have been ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’ stories hinting that Bressie and Jamelia’s relationship may be more than just professional.
“She’s great but, nah, there’s nothing going on,” Niall insists. “It wouldn’t have been fair starting a relationship with someone last year with all of that anxiety stuff going on. And now that I’m back in Dublin, there’s nowhere I can take a girl without it being plastered all over the papers the following morning. Even if we got round that, I’d be asking her to put up with me doing The Voice, training for triathlons and spending the rest of my time in the studio. No girl in the world’s going to accept that. I think celibacy is probably the best call at
the moment!”
Hear that? It’s the sound of a million female Irish hearts breaking. Does Bressie have TV ambitions beyond what he’s currently doing?
“Yeah, it’s something I’m passionate about. I’ve spoken to a few production companies, here and in the UK, about doing grittier stuff. I’d love to make those Louis Theroux-type documentaries where you’re putting hard information across in an entertaining way.”

In his September 2011 Hot Press cover interview, Niall professed to “having never felt an anger like I felt before I left for London. I couldn’t stomach living here anymore. I had visions of seeing Brian Cowen or Bertie Ahern in the street and killing them.”
Can he believe that having so royally ballsed up running the country before, Fianna Fáil have returned to the top of the polls?
“To be perfectly honest, I can,” he sighs. “We’re great as a nation for standing there with our hands by our side saying, ‘Go on, punch me again!’ Whether it’s Fianna Fáil bankrupting us or the Catholic Church still running our lives, we just don’t learn.”
Hot Press is looking forward to some political rough ‘n’ tumble later in the year when we row in behind Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan’s private members’ bill to legalise cannabis. Does Bressie have a stance on the position?
“I’m absolutely pro-legalisation,” he shoots back. “I’ve never been uncomfortable in the company of somebody who’s high on marijuana. Stress will kill you, cannabis won’t. Saying it can lead to other drugs is the weakest, most pathetic argument. The ‘gateway’ thing has been totally disproved. It makes so much sense to tax and regulate it.”
While adamant that he no longer indulges, Niall recalls a hairy episode with The Blizzards when he did.
“Jesus, the lads would have the weed, which coming back from a UK tour had to be smoked before we got to Holyhead. I went fucking berserk one day when we missed the ferry because of it. To calm me down they gave me a joint, which worked fine until customs pulled me off the bus and gave me a departure card that I couldn’t read. I go to the security guard, ‘Mate, this just isn’t making sense’, and he says, ‘Yeah, that’s probably because you’re looking at the Welsh side. Turn it around.’ I was that fucked I couldn’t tell the difference!”
Another subject guaranteed to raise Niall’s hackles is illegal file-sharing.
“A couple of months back you had all these pro-piracy people going, ‘Aw, poor HMV.’ Fuck off! The reason HMV closed isn’t because the record labels didn’t catch up, it’s because that lot aren’t prepared to pay for the product
any more.”
The counter-argument being that what artists lose on album sales they gain in getting more people to their gigs.
“Unless you’re an established act, this ‘You’ll make it back playing live thing’ is a fallacy. With most gigs you’re doing well if you break even. Here’s another example of there not being money in music anymore – I got a call last week saying, ‘The Asian One Direction want to use one of your songs. But we’ll take 50% of the royalty fee to translate it into Japanese and there won’t be any airplay money. You have to waiver that because it’s going to be used for promotional purposes’. I told them to ‘fuck off!’
“I’m not trying to bury my head in the sand,” Bressie insists. “We’re not going to win the war. This is where the industry’s at and we have to deal with it.”
As a former rugby player, Bressie’s Seasonal Affective Disorder hasn’t been helped either, by Ireland’s pitiful display in the Six Nations.
“Ireland had almost as many injuries as the other teams combined,” the ex=Leinster pro reflects. “We wouldn’t have lost two of those games if we’d had Johnny Sexton. He pulled his hamstring, which is very unusual, so my question is, ‘What’s happening with the conditioning?’ You have to be able to take that impact when you’re a rugby player.”
If Declan Kidney’s days are numbered, as the pundits insist, vwho would Bressie like to see take over as Ireland coach?
“Conor O’Shea, 100%. You only have to look at how his Harlequins side are playing at the moment. It’s probably a job he’d prefer to do a bit further down the line, but he’d be brilliant.”
Probably the best that Ireland’s Six Nations got was that outrageous Simon Zebo back-heel against Wales.
“He’s raw and that’s the best type of rugby player,” Niall says switching into George Hook mode. “He doesn’t over-think what he does. He just runs and takes angles and I love that. He’s not as skilful as Brian O’Driscoll was at that age (23) but he’ll try anything.”

While his Colourblind Stereo album went off in all sorts of musical directions, Rage And Romance is a more tightly focused pop-rock affair that finds the producer being produced, for once, by Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club man Eliot James. Did he find ceding control to someone else in the studio difficult?
“Eliot said to me at the start, ‘There’ll be fucking fights if you don’t step back’, but as it went on we developed an understanding and he was fine with me going, ‘This isn’t working, can we change it?’ Which to be honest wasn’t very often. Recording-wise, it was the most chilled-out thing I’ve ever done.”
Songwriting credits on the album are shared with James Walsh, the former Starsailor man who – last we heard – was living in Belfast.
“Yeah, he’s married to a local lass,” Bressie resumes. “He works for EMI and has done crazy records with crazy artists – Diana Vickers, Beverly Knight, Melanie C, Christina Perri, Athlete, Matt Cardle and now me. It’s one of those happy accidents – he dropped by the studio to see Eliot, who’s a mate of his, we got chatting and found that musically we had lots in common. James isn’t bogged down by the genre thing; if something’s good it’s good, and fuck what the cool kids say!”
A mantra for life if ever I’ve heard one.
“I’ve spent a lifetime being un-hip,” Niall concludes with a smile, “and I’m not going to change now!”

Rage And Romance gets a live airing in An Grianán, Letterkenny (May 8); Radisson, Galway (9); Palace, Navan (10); Milk Market, Limerick (11); Opera House, Cork (12); Set, Kilkenny (16); Academy, Dublin (17) and Forum, Waterford (19).