Maverick Sabre on his rise to stardom

Current Hot Press cover star Maverick Sabre has been talking to Celina Murphy about his remarkable rise to prominence.
“There was a couple of moments that were a bit mad,” he says reflecting on the past 12 months. “I was at the Brits and Florence from Florence + The Machine came up to me and was singing ‘Let Me Go’, which was a bit weird, but I don’t like all that celebrity status and all this crack. I’m just a young lad from Wexford that’s writing tunes and making music that he loves to make, and playing with a band that he loves to play with, and wants to say something through his music and wants to show up issues within society that I feel need to be spoken about, whether they be political, social or within myself… and that’s it. I’m a fairly simple lad with a simple thing to do in my mind, in life, and that’s through music, so I don’t really take any of that on board.”
Although claimed Katie Taylor-style by certain sections of the UK media, Maverick is fiercely proud of his New Ross roots.
“I’m an Irish musician,” he states. “The music I write is for myself, a young Irish man, so I will always represent Irish people first within my music. I try and always push that in every interview I do, in every country I’m in, I will always push Irish music and Irish hip hop, because we are, as is the rest of the world, a country that’s going through a lot of issues at the minute, economically and socially, especially as young people. “We don’t really have that many role models speaking out for young Irish people, so any part I can play in supporting Irish youth as a whole, I will do that always through my music.”
Lonely Are The Brave may still be selling by the truck-load, but Mav is already thinking about the follow up.
“If the next album becomes a whole acoustic album, it is what it is,” he ventures. “The music comes out, I can’t change, I can’t force the music out of me. Whatever music that’s recorded, that is on record, has come out of me at some point. I’ve got a fairly romanticised view on making music, you know? I just want everything to come from the heart and not say too much about it.”
Read the full Maverick Sabre interview in the new issue of Hot Press, out now.