Joe Chester on Fergus O'Farrell

"Fergus and I weren't friends although I got to know him a little bit over the years. Interference were such a force on the music scene when I was growing up as a teenager in Dublin that I was always a bit intimidated by all those guys - still am.

To me, Fergus was a giant of Irish music - sure, a lot of his contemporaries became more famous but that stuff's never really about the music anyway. Ireland has a grand tradition of outsiders in art, people like Cathal Coughlan, Fearghal McKee, even Flann O'Brien. Fergus was such a wonderful, eccentric voice that maybe they were his true contemporaries.

The only time I ever worked with Fergus was in 2008, making an album with Mundy. Mundy said he would love to have Fergus sing on one of his songs. The only way we could get this to happen was to send the song to Fergus and for him to send his vocals back, which he very generously did. I opened the folder of audio files and pressed play only to hear, along with some great soul background vocals, about 10 tracks of Fergus doing horse impressions! Now maybe this was Fergus' not very subtle commentary on the quality of the material we were sending him, but I don't think so! He just didn't impose any barriers on his artistic expression and was really plugged into that eccentric, brilliant, wicked sense of humour of his, that he thought, "Hey, why not?"

In a way it's a pity his recorded output isn't as extensive as it could have been but you have to remember what a powerful live performer he was - that was his arena. He had an immense force and charisma as a front man. And then there was that voice...

I was at the Interference show in Liss Ard in 2012 and what a wonderful show that was. I met him afterwards and we shared a can of beer and I told him how brilliant I thought he was. That was the last time I saw him."