Sheer art attack

Laura Sheeran, a Galway girl more convivial than her brooding work suggests, is asking me about a pole dance I once witnessed. “Did that freak you out?” she grins. “Most people just think of it as being really seedy. Degrading to women, almost.” Actually, the pole didn’t seem too secure, so I was distracted with concerns for the dancer’s well-being. Oh, by the way, this all took place at a Laura Sheeran gig in Whelan’s last year, as dancer Arlene Caffrey visually augmented her performance.

“Arlene is a total campaigner for overturning people’s views,” Laura explains. “When you say ‘pole dancing’ most people just think of one thing. But her skill is so high that she brings it to an athletic level. We were in school together actually. We hadn’t been in touch in years and she randomly came on Ireland’s Got Talent. I was watching TV and went, ‘That’s fecking Arlene Caffrey!’ So we got in touch.”
It’s all part of Sheeran’s avant garde bent. On record, her portentous sound startles. On stage, she wants to make things multi-sensory. It’s the thinking of a generation of young Irish artists, a community of experimentation in music and performance, throughout the nation. But it’s tough to be heard.
“There's such a strong scene and I wish there was more awareness of it,” the singer sighs. “It’s really exciting but it’s not being embraced by the Irish mainstream. More people need to hear the stuff.”
Even getting records out is a struggle. Thankfully, with second LP What The World Knows, Sheeran enjoyed a relatively relaxed process, emerging with a work that should raise her profile considerably. That wasn’t the case with her debut, released last year after much delay, at a time when her beloved mother was losing her fight against cancer. “It’s been very difficult, the past couple of years. My mum only had a few weeks to live, though at the time we didn’t realise that. She needed full-time care so I was making sure I got down to Galway as much as I could. It really was ‘autopilot’, there was no time to think. But she wanted me to put out the album, she didn’t want me to wait. With cancer, you never know how long it will go on for, so she would say, ‘You just have to do it Laura’. And so I did. The work gives you a separate place in your head where you can forget. And in the writing, you get to deal with everything. I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t making music!”
These days, people ask more about the extended family, namely one Ed Sheeran.
“Ed’s been working his hole off for years at this stuff. Even when he was a teenager, he’s always been doing the music. He’s that type of personality that will be [shouts eagerly]: ‘This is what I’m doing!’ He came to stay in my house in Galway when he was 13 and we were recording out in the shed. He was mad into Damien Rice, so he’d go, ‘I’ll be Damien and you be Lisa!’ as we recorded these duets. I probably have them somewhere, I should dig them out! We’d come into the house and Ed would be talking to my mom non-stop. Like it was the most important thing in the world and everyone wanted to know about it.”
Her second solo effort just out, Laura now plans to focus on the electro-pop group Nanu Nanu she’s formed with her fiancé Marc Aubele. Aubele plays with Bell X1 and occasionally The Walls – finding time to maintain a relationship as two jobbing musicians must be tough? “It has been like that for the past couple of years. A lot of the time Marc is away on tour. But last summer we went into his studio to jam and all this stuff came out. We had a whole album in three days. Bell X1 don’t have many gigs this year, so it’s all worked out perfectly.”