Paddy Casey: This Is Your Life

Flashback: the band have temporarily departed and Paddy Casey stands on his lonesome, facing a packed house of expectantly sweaty faces in Galway venue Cuba.

Maybe he’s just tired but, for whatever reason, the singer doesn’t look like he’s having a particularly good time up there. In a barely audible mumble, he announces that he’s going to sing ‘Sweet Suburban Sky’ – one of the standout tracks on his double platinum selling debut long player Amen (So Be It) – and the crowd roar their approval. It’s a maudlin folky number, deserving of a respectful silence, and an anticipatory hush descends as he strikes the opening chords. Unfortunately, they’re the wrong ones. Realising this, he quickly stops. “Sorry about that,” he grins impishly.
He starts playing again but screws it up almost as quickly. “Ah, fuckin’ hell!” He shakes his head and laughs and the crowd laugh along with him, everyone enjoying a typically chaotic ‘Paddy-moment’. Then he gives it another go.
This time he manages to make it to the opening lines before something goes wrong. Oops! “Youse are puttin’ me off,” he complains, jokingly blaming the audience. He’s still smiling, but beginning to look a little panicked – like a stand-up comedian in the process of dying.
A hysterical fit of the giggles scuppers his fourth attempt at the song. Somewhat scarily, it takes him at least 40 seconds to pull himself together. By now, even the die-hard fans are getting impatient. “Get on with it, Paddy!” somebody shouts up from the back. Others hiss and boo – only half-jokingly.
Your hotpress correspondent is standing halfway down the hall by the sound desk with Naked DJ Des Free (who’ll be entertaining this very same crowd when Casey’s gig is finished). Neither of us is particularly impressed by the amateurish antics we’re witnessing on stage. “This is like watching a fucking slow motion car crash,” Free comments. “Do you reckon he’s bombed?” I ask. “Probably!” comes the reply. “Sure look at him – he can’t remember the bleeding words!”
Back up on the stage, Casey steels himself, realising the joke – if ever there was one – is well and truly over. His face is all serious now, all business, no fucking around. He takes a deep breath before closing his eyes tightly and, brow furrowed in obvious concentration, giving it one last shot.
Fortunately, there are no screw-ups this time. When he’s finished, he gets rewarded with an extra loud cheer. It certainly wasn’t his best ever live take on the song, but at least he managed to play the fucking thing. A moment later the rest of the band troop back on and the show continues hiccup-free till the end.

Readers who attended Casey’s rocking Galway show at the beginning of this month can hold their outraged e-mails. The gig I’m talking about sometime in late 2000 or early 2001.
I mention it because I experienced a strong sense of deja-vu in Cuba last week.
But also a strong sense of relief… There was Casey on stage, looking pretty much exactly the same as he did on his last Galway visit. There was me and Des Free, halfway down the hall, standing by the sound desk (though both looking a couple of years older). But Casey’s 2003 rendition of ‘Suburban Sky’ was infinitely superior, showcasing a performer comfortable in his own skin and truly back on form.
Of course, it’s easy to talk with the benefit of hindsight but, when I think back to that earlier shambolic gig, I’m not particularly surprised that Casey’s follow-up album Living has taken until now (four years!) to be released. Today, looking fresh-faced and sipping mineral water, the singer admits that maybe he was partying a little too hard around that time.
“I can’t even remember that one, to be honest,” he says, in his slow Dublin drawl. “I wouldn’t say I was pissed or stoned or anything though cos I never really do that at gigs. What happens sometimes is I get fed up playing a song so I just take the piss sometimes. But Galway? I can’t remember that particular time. Maybe… maybe I just forgot the words.”
Does that happen to you often?
“Yeah, I suppose it happens every so often, like,” he grins. “You know the way yourself, like, when your head just wanders off sometimes…”
Even in the often weird pantheon of Irish singer/songwriters, Paddy Casey is one of the stranger characters treading the boards. But, hey, don’t just take my word for it. A couple of weeks ago, he was a guest on Ray D’Arcy’s morning radio show. When he was plugging some dates for his upcoming Irish tour, he said, “Yeah, I’m playing on the 28th and 29th of, em… whatever month this is.” He wasn’t posing as an artiste with his mind on higher plains, he just genuinely didn’t know. Following his departure from the studio, several texts from listeners came in saying ‘Paddy’s a bit mad, isn’t he?’
The answer is yes. He is.
I first met him back in the late-nineties, when musician Liam Coade introduced us in the International Bar one boozy evening. I’d seen him at the singer/songwriter night upstairs a few times and had been pretty impressed – but I was decidedly less taken by his manner.
As a rule, teenagers with record deals can be a bit snotty, but Casey – who signed to Sony in 1998 and is looked after by Paul McGuinness’s Principle Management – struck me as particularly rude and aloof, and barely said a word all night.
When I mentioned this to Coade later on, he told me not to be offended. “That’s just Paddy,” he said. “He’s always been like that. He’s actually a really sound bloke. He just acts a bit weird sometimes and doesn’t really talk much. To anybody!”
Which is true. Our paths have crossed on a number of occasions since, and if I had to sum Paddy Casey up in one word it would have to be ‘Abstract’. Which is why (a) I’m hugely surprised when Casey walks in the door of the Temple Bar Music Centre to do this interview at 3pm on the dot, and (b) not surprised at all when, having waved over at me, he promptly disappears again for ten minutes.
When he finally comes back, he’s friendly but, somewhat alarmingly, winces in pain when I shake his hand. He explains that he’s been moving house all night (to the rock star haven of Rathfarnham) and has slightly sprained his wrist lifting a box. “I’m rehearsing for the tour in a couple of hours so I hope it’s nothing serious,” he says, massaging it methodically. “That’d be a fucking pain in the arse!”
It’s too noisy in the bar so we decide to go down the road to the Clarence. On the way there, I mention that Galway County Council are trying to ban busking in the city. He snorts derisively. “That’s just fucking ridiculous – the government should be fucking paying people to busk!”
Creation Records founder Alan McGee is sitting in the bar when we enter. He waves over to Paddy as we walk by, but I actually have to explain to the singer who he is. Later on, Ron Sexsmith comes over to our table to say hello and, although they’ve played together in the past, it takes Paddy a couple of moments to recognise him. “Shite!” he says, obviously embarrassed, as Sexsmith departs. “Do you think he noticed?”
Unsurprisingly, as soon as the tape is on, he soon reveals himself to be a distracted interviewee. At one point, apropos of nothing, he says to me, “Did you hear you can get text messages from the pope now? That’s fuckin’ mad! What do you reckon he’d say?”
Turns out, he is a bit nervous after all. He’s a musician. He doesn’t understand why anybody would particularly care about what he has to say.
“Interviews are a weird one with me,” he admits. “I’m not really an interviewee, like. I play music. It’s what I can do. But I’m not really a talker, you know.”
Do you talk much to your friends?
“Sometimes, yeah,” he shrugs. “With my best friend or whatever then I talk. Like, I don’t notice because it’s me, but apparently I’m fairly shy.”
When was the last time you were angry?
“I don’t get angry really. Like the last time I got angry was probably the last time I went out with someone properly. And that was just sort of like ‘Bollix to this!’ I don’t know, some people seem to be really good and they have this point to get across about their whole thing but I don’t really. I just know that I made a record and I like it and people will want to do interviews. And it’s a good idea to do interviews and, you know, here I am and…”
He trails off and lights a John Player Blue.
He may be somewhat difficult to get a conversation going with but he’s not without a sense of humour. He tells me that when he flew over to sign his record deal in London, it was only the second ever time that he’d left the country – the first time being an overnight trip to a party on an island off Cork. When I point out that that would still be considered Ireland, he laughs and goes, “Well, whatever you wanna call it. Then again, Cork – they have their own rules down there, like.”
Asked what age he is, he grins and tells me, “I’m 24 – apparently.”
Hmmm… Nobody ever said this job was gonna be easy…

When Paddy was seven years old and growing up in Crumlin, one of his older brothers let him stay up late one night to watch a TV drama about a post-nuclear Britain. He can’t remember what the programme was called, but it had a profound effect on his young mind.
“I think it was based in Sheffield or somewhere around there,” he recalls. “Anyway, at the start of this film, there’s this couple in a car having sex and they’re lookin’ out the window and a bomb goes off – it’s like a nuclear bomb or an atom bomb or whatever – and the film is all about life after the bomb, like the fall out or whatever and then… there was this woman, you know, she was so hungry or whatever she eats the baby’s placenta. All of them images and that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.”
Paddy did his growing up pretty quickly. Although he recalls a fairly happy childhood (“There was nothing too mad, like”), he left both home and school at the tender age of 12 and became a full-time busker, regularly playing Prince and Cure covers on Grafton Street, alongside the likes of Glen Hansard and the late Mic Christopher.
What did your parents say when you left home?
“I suppose they weren’t too happy but, to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck at the time. I was just like, you know… it was just like it was more fun. Anyway I was living with my brother, so me mother knew I was alright.”
A few months before his thirteenth birthday, Paddy and his equally young mate, Colin, headed west to Galway, then a busker’s paradise. They lived in a flat on New Road and did their sex, drugs and rock & roll living far earlier than they probably should have.
It must have been pretty wild, being so free at 13?
“Ahh, some good stuff happened alright,” he grins, nostalgically. “I’ve kinda forgotten most of it. Things pop up every now and then but….”
Were you drinking much?
“Was I drinking? Em…not really. We used to play in the Harbour Bar. No, I didn’t actually drink seriously until I was older, ye know. I smoked spliffs and took some acid, you know.”
At that age, acid must have had a fairly profound effect on you.
“No, it was actually more like ‘this is a buzz’. It was nothing mental, it doesn’t invade your head as much when you’re younger, cos you’re not expecting anything – so what you get is ‘Oh, this is really funny’ or whatever. Yeah, the first time we did acid in Galway, I remember the Macnas Parade was on that day so it was really mad – they used to have all the really strange floats and stuff.”
So it didn’t mess up your head?
“No, it didn’t really, it was just good fun. I didn’t take it that much, I just took it a few times. I think after about my third one I just stopped liking it, and every time I took it I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t like this’. But we were smoking this grass as well and getting it from like a bush and basically drying it and smoking it all night. The first time smoking and the first time taking acid… it was a good buzz, you know?”
But there were some moments of paranoia…
“One day I thought I got followed to the shop by cops because there was this blue car, you know. But I don’t think Galway cops have blue cars. They used to have maroon ones.
“Anyway, I didn’t know at the time and I was convinced that there was a cop following me, so I ran the length and breath of Galway because this guy got out of a car and followed me around the shop – but that was all just fucking fruity cakes!”
Did you lose your virginity in Galway?
“Yeah. 13, I think I was. Yeah.” Then he stops and laughs. “No – change that will ya? I haven’t lost my virginity yet. Actually, I’m still a virgin!” (The fact that he has an eight year old daughter with singer Sinéad Martin somewhat belies that statement.)
So basically you were just sort of hanging in Galway, and living the life?
“Well we always had a place. My friend, Colin, was busking as well, so it was just the two of us and people would stay there. It was just like a communal sort of vibe. I didn’t really drink that much or anything, but I used to play in the Harbour Bar and any night that we wanted to go in, they used to give us £20 each or something, and drink if we wanted it. So we used to drink Guinness. But we never really drank apart from that.”
I notice you’re not drinking today…
“No, I don’t really drink anymore,” he shrugs, indicating his mineral water. “I’m just not into it anymore. I used to be.”

Of course, when he wasn’t drinking, smoking weed, dropping acid and not having sex, the teenage Paddy Casey was getting on with his real passion in life – playing music. Over the next few years, he honed his skills busking on the streets, gigging and joining in pub sessions wherever he could. An early demo of his somehow landed on the desk of Hugh Murray, an A&R man at Sony. After a short, relatively painless courtship, Casey signed to the company in 1998.
Were you excited about it at the time?
“Em, I suppose so, yeah,” he affirms. “It’s hard to remember. I suppose I was in it to make an album, I wasn’t in it to just busk forever or gig forever without making an album… so it wasn’t like a surprise or anything. It was more like ‘Youse fuckin took yer time, didn’t yizz?’”
Sony gave him some money to make professional demos. When he brought them in, though, they were so happy with the songs, that they decided to release them as the finished album, with little or no tweaking. Amen (So Be It) wound up costing a grand total of just over £10,000 in the end.
“I look at it as kind of a compliment, but there are some things I would have done different,” he says now. “It was all kind of hand-made or whatever, so it was like every little bit of it was mine, I suppose. So I was glad that they wanted to release it.”
Round about the time Sony expressed an interest, Paul McGuinness and Susie Smith of Principal Management took him under their expansive wing. How did that come about?
“Jaysus, when was it? Em, when I was signing the record deal, they came to that gig. And Paul had already come and asked me and I said ‘No, I don’t really want a manager, you know’. Then I started realising that I really needed someone because there was a lot of shit…”
Hold on. Paul McGuinness had asked you could he be your manager and you said ‘no’?
“Yeah – well, no, it wasn’t quite like that,” he laughs. “I just didn’t really want a manager. I didn’t see the sense because so far I had done it all myself. I ran the gigs and I ran different nights in different places – nothing spectacular like – so I thought I had the head for it, but I didn’t know how much was actually involved in the whole bollix.
“So then I kinda realised, yeah I’m gonna need someone who deals with that, these are meant to be the best in the business, so why not get the best? You know, it’s a compliment to be offered.”
Have you met any of his other charges – Polly Harvey and U2?
“Yeah, I met them all at various stages. They’re all cool enough, like.”
Have you jammed with any of them?
“Ah no, I never jammed with any of them, no. I met them in here [the Clarence] a few times, talked to them and they seem to be interested enough in what I was at. I don’t know, the two don’t seem to link if you know what I mean, cause they do their thing, and I don’t support U2 at gigs or whatever, but I do like the band.”
He may not have played with U2, but Casey has done more than his fair share of impressive supports since 1998. The two years after Amen’s release saw him travelling the globe, playing both his own headline gigs and support slots with everyone from REM and Ani Di Franco to Ian Brown and The Pretenders.
“I played all over Europe, I did Australia and I did America a few times,” he says. “I did my own small American tours but I did have tours with other people, you know. My own gigs were mainly in Whelan’s sized venues.”
Were you initially intimidated by it at all?
“No it wasn’t particularly scary or anything or weird because I expected it, to be honest. I expected somebody to want to sign me and to make records with me.”
He didn’t really get to know any of the acts he was supporting personally.
“After every gig when I was on tour with The Pretenders or whoever, I would go and try and find somewhere to play,” he says. “Like in Washington I would go to a place called Madam Zorgan’s – a blues club. So every time I went back to Washington I went there. It was this all-night place where you had to get a taxi out into the suburbs and you could climb in over a back wall and climb over like a fridge and then go in this door.
“It looks just like a house, like a normal house in Crumlin or whatever, but there was a basement and you would go down into the basement and there was a bar and pool table and music and so on. Mad places that you don’t get in Dublin or whatever, and we would have sessions and I was playing with some of the blues guys over there. I was bluffing like fuck, but it was brilliant craic.”

So finally, out of all of those years of experience and mad touring, comes Living – his long, long-overdue second album. You’ve probably already heard first cut ‘Saints & Sinners’ but the overall album showcases a much more sophisticated and mature Paddy Casey – with the help of string sections, horns, keyboards and a full band line-up.
It’s definitely no Amen Part II. Some of the tracks are almost dance tunes!
“I think it’s more interesting dynamically,” he says. “It’s a much better album; more upbeat. I wanted to make an album that went more for the rhythm end of things, using percussion and beats.”
He hasn’t over-stretched himself lyrically (“Living in this age / We’re so full of rage / You’re trying to say I’m crazy? / Well, I just call it living in that age”), but the album’s strengths are in its heart, not head. Before we get into talking about it, though, there’s the little matter of the four year delay. Earier this year, following the departure of his point-person Susie Smith to London, the word was that Principle Management had decided to call it quits and drop him from the stable. His distinct lack of productivity, whatever the underlying causes, was rumoured to be a factor. And if Principle withdrew, then surely Sony would follow.
Whatever discussions took place, and however forthright they may have been, Paddy plays it down now as a non-event.
“I’ve heard that rumour and it’s just not true,” he insists. “I was never dropped from anywhere and nobody ever threatened to drop me. There might have been a bit of partying, but it’s been blown well out of proportion. I haven’t really been drinking for ages now anyway, so that’s got nothing to do with it.
“The album took ages just because of the way things panned out.” he adds. “But I was writing new songs all the time.”
Living was recorded in Grouse Lodge Studios in Westmeath and co-produced with “lunatic Frenchman” Fred de Faye. When I ask him what else De Faye has done, he shrugs his shoulders.
“Oh, I haven’t a fucking clue to be honest. All I know is he got patted on the ass by Boy George and that’s it! That’s all he ever told me. Oh, he did a session with Prince and that was it. But he has engineered a lot of albums.”
The recording took a whole month, compared to Amen’s eight days. By Paddy’s standards, that’s still a long time.
“I think it’s far too long myself, I think things could be done a lot quicker than that. You’ve gotta keep the im-peet-us… is that the word? Impetus, yeah.”
Are the songs particularly personal?
“Ah, less so, I think, you know,” he muses. “One or two would be personal and the rest would be just…”
I’m thinking of a track like ‘Want It, Can’t Have It’ where you sing “You are truly intelligent / You’re beautiful and elegant / but this is irrelevant, baby.” Are you singing about someone in particular there?
“No, I try not to write about people – it’s bad manners, I think. It can be sort of dangerous, as well. People go ‘Is that about me?’ or whatever. So I just don’t.
“Some of them would’ve been lyrics from years ago,” he adds. “Some of them I just kind of leave in the back of my head for a long time and then they just kinda fall out.
“I recorded about 100 tracks, you know,” he continues. “And some people picked up on certain tracks and they became pets, you know. Most of them were tracks that I would’ve picked as well, but there was a little bit of a compromise involved. You never fully get your own way with a record company.”
Maybe not fully, but Casey did put his foot down on certain things. He did insist on co-producing the album, arguing that it was his work, and, if it fucked-up, he wanted it to be his responsibility.
“The reason I wanted to make the album on my own at first was because I wanted it to be a situation where if it was a bomb, I wanted it to be my bomb – and no one else could get the blame or whatever. Or if it done really well. If I got a producer, it’s like I draw it in black and white and then somebody else colours it in. No painters did that, why should I have to let somebody else finish my painting for me?
“I used to paint. But I was never Van Gogh or anything, ya know, but that’s why I wanted to do it myself . Now that I have done it with somebody else, I’m glad I did because I go off on tangents that I don’t know how to rescue myself from. Having said that, though, now if it bombs I’m kinda going ‘well, what if I hadn’t done it with him?’ But it all comes down to the songs really.”
He says he got on well with his French co-producer, but made most of the important decisions himself.
“I’m a bit of a stubborn fucker when it comes to things like that,” he smiles. “In the long run, people kind of come around to my way of thinking. I’m right, they just have to realise I’m right!”
Do you like the music business?
“Em… honestly? Not really. I like playing music and I always will play music regardless of what happens. If Napster – or whatever that Internet thing is called – eventually makes it so people never spend a penny on records. I’d be pissed off ‘cos that’s how I make my living and I’d have to figure out another way of making my living. But I’d be kinda glad too.”
Are you wealthy from music yet?
“Nah, not at all! Although I wouldn’t mind being wealthy. I don’t know if I’m a socialist or a capitalist or what the fuck I am. I haven’t quite sussed it out yet. I don’t like the idea of making money off music but if someone’s doing it – if the record company is making money – I might as well make money too, you know.
“It’s really funny. Like with music – everything I learnt I learnt for free. You have to ask the question: ‘why am I doing this?’ And I know its not the money or making money that’s pushing it. Because I always try and keep the gigs as cheap as possible and I always try and keep everything as cheap as possible. I don’t want to rip people off.”
Was it your fault Living took so long to make?
“Not really. Well, some of it was me and some of it was just…”
Was there a point where you just thought, ‘Well it’s not gonna happen…’
“There was a point where I was kinda going, ‘OK, I don’t understand. What’s the point in trying out another guy’? They might go ‘Well, we’re happy with two of the tracks you’ve done with this guy so why don’t we take these and do the rest with someone else?’ But there’s only so long you can sit around recording for. But anyway, it’s done and I’m only getting excited now about the whole thing. The next few weeks will be the real test. To me, it’s everything.”
Paddy Casey lights up another cigarette and ponders that last statement. “Well, maybe it’s not everything,” he concedes. “But it’s half of everything!”

Living is out shortly on Sony