Out on his own

Never judge a book by it’s cover, isn’t that what someone once said? OK, so what would you think the debut solo album from Kíla frontman Ronan Ó Snodaigh was going to sound like? While the odds were probably on an upbeat, percussive little number, he’s only gone and surprised as all by producing one of the most gorgeously languid, achingly melancholic releases of the year so far, one that would sit comfortably next to the David Kitts of this world without a flinch.

“If you listen to it, its real quiet, bedroom stuff”, agrees Ó Snodaigh over a lunchtime drink. “It was developed in sessions, or my bedroom or in people’s flats, so to take it into an album or a gig has been a bit daunting. But I was on a mission to get it done, I thought ‘I’m reaching my thirtieth year, it’s time to just lay this down and get it behind me and carry on and do something else’. Just so it wasn’t always there and I wasn’t focusing on this imaginary album.”

Tip Toe, it turns out, has been something like thirteen years in the making, a work rate that puts even the Stereo MCs into the shade. Except this wasn’t so much a question of inspiration, more one of confidence. “In the end, I hooked up with the guitarist Simon O’Reilly and he seemed keen to do something,” Ó Snodaigh explains “so we started getting up early in the morning and practising and gradually got other people involved.”

These other people, including fiddle player Cliodhna Quainlam and sometime Dead Can Dance man Brendan Perry, all contribute greatly to Tip Toe’s huge beauty. Also present on the title track are fellow band members Brian Hogan, Eoin Ó Dilliún and Colm Ó Snodaigh.

Naturally inclined to maintain some sort of distance from his day job (“It was never going to be a Kíla album”), he nevertheless wanted to add a degree of range and depth to the project without killing it’s original spirit. “I was struggling with the idea of just a guitar and a voice,” he admits. “I reached a point in the mix, when we were doing Tip Toe where I realised that I’d just been steaming into it and I’d narrowed it all down instead of widening anything. I’d left out all these other opportunities, like playing with the lads.” A quick change of gear, and a whole new sense of space opened up, giving Tip Toe a widder resonance.

This is the first time Ronan has written and recorded extensively in English. It was, however, always part of the plan. A different discipline to the Irish lyrics he writes for Kíla? “Yeah, I think in English about certain things and I think in Irish about certain things. I don’t go out with any girls who talk Irish! The love stuff comes from the English side and the deeper stuff from the Irish, because I couldn’t speak English when I was a kid.”

Which does he find the more expressive language?

“It depends on what the expression is. I’m sure if someone studied what I was writing they’d be able to divide it up, but I don’t know fully myself.”

Not only is he writing lyrics for a far wider audience than just those versed in the native tongue, but the words on Tip Toe are amazingly revealing, dealing with both the highs and lows of life and love. “It’s very personal stuff, isn’t it? A lot of the songs are written when I’m looking for a way out of a mind pattern or something, or feel trapped somehow. They’re sort of written from a down point aiming up, so they’re bound to swing like that.”

The stunning ‘Boer Waltz’, an emotional depiction of the soldiers, slaves and civilians caught up in the siege of Ladysmith in the early 1900s is a very different animal.

“A friend of mine Simon Taylor wrote the chords and we were sitting around in Kerry, down at his house one night and he started playing and I just started singing off the top of my head, making up lyrics,” Ronan recalls. “I was back up in Dublin and I asked Simon O’Reilly what the tune was called and he said ‘The Boer Waltz’. Alright, so I thought I’ll write a song about the Boer War. The Waterboys did a great song called ‘Red Army Blues’ and I thought how did Mike Scott know what it was like to be a seventeen year old Russian soldier and I’d always wanted to try something like that so I just took it on. I started watching films about the Boer War,

reading and spent five months grilling people about it.”

Listening to the track without the benefit of the sleeve notes, one might assume that the lyrics (“Which side are we on? The right or the wrong and who’ll be the chief to rule this territory?”) referred to the history of this very island. “That would be the closest war that there’s been to me, so I suppose that was the nearest experience I could draw on. To tell the truth, I’ve been very close to tears singing that song. It just captures something for me.”

So, what next? Can we expect of rash of Spice Girl-style solo projects from the Kíla ranks? “Hopefully there will be. Colm’s working with one at the minute. Brian’s got some absolutely gorgeous songs and he’s got some other stuff that only he likes… Maybe this will have created the space for that. By going out on my tod, whether good, bad or whatever, it might encourage the others.”

For Ronan himself, now the thirteen-year duck has been broken, he’s keen to repeat the experience. On the basis of Tip Toe, let’s hope that he does. And soon.

Tip Toe is currently available on Kila Records