Return of the mack

Right, how do we do this without mentioning ‘the obvious’? You know, that track that stayed at No1 in the Irish charts for an age? ‘Maniac’ by Mark McCabe? You’ve forgotten about it? Good, because it’s about time.

McCabe – the driving force behind the Music From The Fourth Place project – has a far more varied and interesting CV than you might imagine from his teenage disco-slaying pop/dance monster.
hotpress doesn’t bring the topic up in the interview, preferring instead to let the affable McCabe chose his own words. And he does so rather carefully.
“What I’m doing now is something I wanted to do for a while – and I suppose a lot of people would not have expected me to do this after ‘Maniac’,” offers Mark. “Making dance records is one thing – but making an album is another. It’s more personal in a way – and there’s more of me in this record.”
Fair enough. And who really gives a shit about ‘Maniac’ anyway? Dance music is full of people who use alter-egos to pay the bills – just look at Eric Prydz, the Swede responsible for ‘Call On Me’, the Daft Punk-aping filtered version of Steve Winwood’s ‘Valerie’ currently clogging up the airwaves. Well, he’s been making fine, ‘credible’ techno and house under a number of guises for the last few years. You sets out your stall and you deals with the fall.
Anyway, Music From The Fourth Place is a well-rounded debut – it’s pitched somewhere on the horizontal turf between Zero 7 and Groove Armada. And while it’s lacking a killer single that will carry it to a wider audience, it stands up well beside the aforementioned leftfield A-listers. It’s a difficult market to break though – but McCabe already speaks about it in the past tense, preferring to look to Music... 2.
“The album has been in the can for 16 months now, and while I am proud of it I’m also kind of shy of parts at this stage. I really like some of the stuff on it – but some of it sounds a little bit ‘filler-y’.”
One of the highlights of the LP is the appearance of Dublin singer/songwriter Derrick Devine, whose deep, David Kitt-esque voice adds another dimension to proceedings. In anyone’s terms, it was an unusual collaboration but it turns out the pair’s paths have crossed in the past.
“I recorded some demos for Derrick about 10 years ago in Sun Studios in Dublin and sort of forgot about them until this came about.”
Despite all this, Mark hasn’t turned his back on dance. He secured a singles deal with the respected US label Twisted, who release the Digitribe tribal house tracks he makes with long-time pal Jay Cisco. And – unsurprisingly – it’s been a success, with the likes of Pete Heller and Tom Stephan charting and playing them. But dance is very much the side-project these days.
“It’s easy to do – well, not easy, but you can make a track in two or three days and that’s it. But with an album project – or a ‘credible’ project – it’s a lot different. But that’s what I want to do.”

Music From The Fourth Place is out now.