Patrick's Day

Patrick Kelleher lives in a house/venue called the Box Social with three other music fans. It’s a big old terraced red-brick building with a large practice/performance shed in the back garden. The decor seems pretty bare except for a few music posters. Elsewhere, a rota of sorts is pinned on a wall outside the kitchen door. The rota turns out to be a recording schedule for Kelleher’s other musical project, Children Under Hoof. Patrick Kelleher is living the music, and has done so from a young age.

“Yeah, we used to play traditional music when I was much younger [he grew up in Glendalough, County Wicklow],” he says, “myself and my family and my dad. Then I got into rock-and-roll. I was always messing around with recording as well. I had a really great recording machine when I was young. It was this Fisher Price tape recorder and I started recording myself and pretending to be a radio DJ. I loved it. I started getting really into it.”
Many of Kelleher’s reminiscences and anecdotes seem to end with him finding, buying or being gifted a piece of esoteric musical equipment, a sound system, or a music collection.
For example: “I did the Credit Union Quiz in primary school. We got to go to the All Ireland final. There was one guy who was a genius and the others were pretty good. I don’t remember answering too many questions at all. But we won. And we won a big stereo system each. I still have it upstairs: my first ever CD player.”
Even a period of self-imposed exile in Edinburgh was marked by a music collection newly acquired from sonically-literate friends. “Lots of stuff... Gang Of Four... Kate Bush... I got really into that music and wanted to emulate it,” he says. “I was working in two pubs in Edinburgh. The first was this phoney-baloney Irish pub. It was so cheesy. Then I worked in this metal/biker pub which was quite cool. That’s when I started putting the album together. I was by myself and I didn’t know too many people. I bought a four-track and started recording. When I first four-tracked I wasn’t too sure what to do. But then I got into Daniel Johnston because I went to see the film [The Devil And Daniel Johnston] in Edinburgh. Then I got into the Moldy Peaches and loads of lo-fi stuff. I realised that you didn’t have to make music sound amazingly clean. You didn’t need a proper studio. You could just do it and put a bit of soul into it.”
When he arrived back in Dublin he continued to record, this time in a house in Blackrock, before he and some friends decamped to The Box Social on South Circular Road (“our only priority was finding a place with a practice space”) where they proceeded to put on gigs.
“I think Dylan Haskins [the man behind the Hideaway House] was cool for starting all that stuff and I think that’s where Ger [bandmate and flatmate Gerard Duffy] got the idea for doing gigs here.
There was already quite a big DIY scene happening. There are already a lot of cool places out there doing things like this. Hopefully more people will start doing it.”
And in this heady communal musical environment Kelleher continues to produce. His bedroom is a junk shop filled with synths, squeeze-boxes, drum machines and assorted musical oddities, and, as the recording-rota suggests, his life generally is filled with musical plans and aspirations.
Kelleher’s band Children Under Hoof are due to release a record on cassette (we have a discussion about the merits of tape-hiss, in which he reveals that he listens to a walkman whilst cycling around the city).
He is also planning an album of remixes of his songs, with contributions from the cream of the music scene (Jape, Thread Pulls, Hunter-Gatherer, Katie Kim), is a temporary member of The Jimmy Cake, and continues to work on his own material.
“I’ve learned a lot more about recording and EQ since the last time, which means everything’s taking a lot longer,” he says. “And it’s a little bit quieter this time because I often work into the morning and don’t want to keep anyone awake... so a lot less cymbal crashes!”
All in all, Patrick Kelleher makes economic recession seem like a good backdrop for devil-may-care creativity.
“Maybe it’s good to have a sense of impending doom,” he says, before laughing. “Okay, it’s not good to have it, but the impending doom definitely brings out the need to create art. And I don’t want to be pretentious about creating art but I think when things are going too well and people are telling you you're good all the time it’s not always great for creativity. At the end of the day you need to have troubles in order to talk about your troubles.”