Inside Track: Emmet Scanlan

It’s a scorching Saturday morning in London and Limerick-born singer-songwriter Emmet Scanlan is leading Hot Press to what he maintains is one of the coolest cafes in Tulse Hill. When we get there it seems as pleasant as promised, but there’s a road worker using a pneumatic drill right outside the door.
“Oh shit!” he laughs. “That’s really not gonna work, is it?”
We wind up getting take-outs and doing the interview al fresco at a nearby train station. The fresh air is welcome. Last night, Emmet Scanlan & What The Good Thought launched their new single ‘From The Inside Out’ at a packed showcase in the O2 Academy in Islington. Some drinks were had afterwards.
Something of a re-launch for the 32-year-old, it’s his band’s first proper release since their 2011 standalone charity single ‘A Man May Cry’, written after Scanlan’s stint in Haiti with the Haven charity.
“My brother and I went out twice with them on a building week,” he explains. “What I experienced the first time round led me to write ‘A Man May Cry’. And we released that for Haven, which was great. Being out there and working with the Haitian people, it gave me a great opportunity to talk to them and see what was going on. It was also great to see a group of 250 people who wanted to go over and do good, without making a big deal about doing good.”
Originally from Limerick, he formed the folk-rock band shortly after moving to Galway in 2004. Emmet Scanlan & What The Good Thought quickly became a popular live act.
“We played our own shows regularly in Galway,” he says. “We also did a lot of festivals. We played the Electric Picnic five years ago. We played the Wicker Man festival in Scotland. We were the headline act for the acoustic stage, which was great. We’ve been over to Memphis twice for the Folk Alliance music festival. There were a couple of Irish acts there the second year, but we were the only Irish act there the first year. So all that stuff was really good.”
What’s the biggest audience you’ve ever played to?
“It was probably when we supported Femi Kuti at the Galway Arts Festival,” he recalls. “There was a couple of thousand people there. That was a great gig. It was our home ground. The Arts Festival really looked after us. We’ve done some gigs with the Saw Doctors as well. It’s always good playing the Olympia.”
He has also played some Saw Doctors supports solo in the US. “I played with them over in the States. I supported them in the Irving Plaza to around 1,400 people. It was amazing to play in a completely different country and have people singing back to me.”
Their independently released 2009 debut, Hands, was extremely well reviewed, but didn’t so much as dent the Irish charts. It was a huge disappointment after a lot of hard work and expense.
“I had spent five or six years working towards getting the album out,” he recalls. “But there was so much pressure on it, and our expectations were so high, that when nothing happened I felt a little bit jaded. Even within the band there were tensions because when you’re going around for five years doing work for nothing most of the time it becomes frustrating. In fairness, I may have been a bit precious about things as well. But you live and learn.”
The experience initially proved so dispiriting that Scanlan jacked it in in 2011 and moved to London to study physiotherapy (he’s now fully qualified). However, he still continued to write songs.
“When I came here first, I didn’t really know what I was going to do so I was more focused on writing and stuff like that. Then I met Raul, the guy who recorded the new single, who was from Galway as well. He had come over to study recording and engineering, and we basically just got to work.”
When Raul had an accident, the silver lining was all Scanlan’s. “He had broken his leg and had all this studio time which he couldn’t charge anyone for as he was hobbling around the place,” he laughs. “So he asked me to come in and that’s how we got started. We worked on new material over the course of about a year- and-a-half and got some of the band over from Galway, and some new guys as well.”
They’ve recently started gigging again. “We’ve been thrashing away since January and it’s going really well. I was surprised that it’s actually not too difficult to get decent gigs here in London.”
After his experience with Hands, he doesn’t have any unrealistic expectations about the release of ‘From The Inside Out’. If nothing else, it’ll be a great calling card for getting more gigs.
“It’s actually one of the very first tunes I wrote when I came to London,” he explains. “And essentially the song is about a situation where I saw somebody that was not being good to themselves. As in, they’re feeling they’re worth a million times more than the situation that they’re in, but they’ve kind of come to accept second best. It’s basically about sticking with that person to try and work through that.
“I suppose another take on it, which the video shows, was more of the feeling where you have two people in yourself, nearly,” he continues. “So there’s the get-up-and-go type person and then there’s the person who, in times of pressure, wants to put the sheets over their head and hide away. So it’s about good vs evil within yourself, so to speak, and about fighting your way through that.”
‘From The Inside Out’ is available on iTunes now, and they’ll be launching an EP on 15th May.
“Yeah, there’s an EP coming in May and that will be available from the website,” he affirms. “But I’m looking to re-launch myself with the single and the EP because it has been a long time. I learnt a lot of hard lessons from the first album. I spent a lot of money and all that kind of stuff. And you can get side-tracked as to what it is that you’re actually doing. I think now I’m doing it because I genuinely love it, and hopefully something will come of it.”

From The Inside Out is available on iTunes. For further information visit [link]www.emmetscanlan.com[/link]