Love Thy Sabre

“I don’t want to make music for this year. I want to be one of the acts that people listen back to in 50 years and it’ll still be relevant.” His accent may be all over the shop but Hackney-born, New Ross-raised Maverick Sabre certainly has his head in the right place.

“I know, you can’t get a more Wexford name than Michael Stafford!” he laughs, “But I didn’t want the same old stupid hip-hop name so I looked up words in the dictionary for my initials, M and S, and I found maverick - someone who thinks outside the box and that’s what I wanted to do - and Sabre - someone who puts on a front to get through hard times.”
Sabre’s rhymes regularly deal with his difficult childhood in Wexford, where he says he let the “British kid” stigmas affect him, but that’s not to say we’ve got a typical self-loathing Eminem-wielding hip-hop fanatic on our hands; “Instead of putting on nursery tapes to help us fall to sleep my Dad would come in and blast us away with a blues song. Growing up we had an old record player and I used to listen to Beatles albums constantly and early Bob Dylan stuff, my favourite song was ‘Stand By Me’, I used to listen to that song every day.”
Having picked up the guitar at the age of eight, the young maverick wasted no time in promoting himself; “I started up a MySpace page when I was 14, I used to flog some CDs in school, I don’t know how anybody bought them but I sold about 10 of them! Then I got in with Rap Ireland and did support for The Game and Lloyd Banks all when I was like 16. All my friends in England that are MCs have to be nearly signed to do these kind of gigs.”
Mixing hip-hop, folk, neo-soul and reggae, the 19-year-old says he developed his uniquely diverse sound out of frustration with the scene;
“I loved rapping and what I was talking about in my lyrics but I was fed up of going on stage and people switching off. If you go on stage with a mike and a DJ behind you there’s a certain percentage of the crowd that are gonna just switch off and also there’s only a certain percentage of nights you can do - you can’t do a folk crowd or an acoustic night. So I just started putting all my hip-hop stuff into my acoustic stuff.”
An album’s worth of songs in the bag and record labels buzzing ‘round like flies, Sabre hopes to complete his debut album in the next 12 months;
“I think there’s an attitude in Ireland towards Irish people, like even when you look back to U2, they had to get success out of Ireland to get recognition in Ireland. But from going to hip-hop gigs in Ireland I can tell you there’s so much talent there, there’s such an opening in America, England, Australia, there’s massive communities of people there who’d love to hear more Irish homegrown music. I’d be as optimistic about Irish hip-hop as I would be about English hip-hop.”
With the likes of Tinchy Stryder and Taio Cruz dominating the charts in Blighty and beyond, that’s quite a bold statement to make...
“Well, you’ve got 50 Cent selling out shows here, Jay-Z selling out here. Why can’t an Irish person talking in an Irish accent talking about things that go on in Ireland, why can’t they sell out? We can only hope really, hopefully we can get the right backing.”