Shrine On You Crazy Diamond - Hozier Interview

“Bray? Jaysus, go on outta that! You’re coddin’ me?”

The Dublin taxi driver taking me to Windmill Lane Studios has been humming along to Hozier’s gospel-inspired radio smash ‘Take Me To Church’ for weeks. Given that the Wicklow native sings with no easily identifiable accent, and has most recently been spotted performing the song on David Letterman and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the cabbie is genuinely astonished to learn that Hot Press’ intended interviewee isn’t actually an American.
In fact Andrew Hozier-Byrne is so Irish his birthday – he was born in 1990 – falls on March 17.
“Yeah, I was born on St. Patrick’s Day,” the 24-year-old musician confirms soon after my arrival at Windmill Lane. “It was good when you’re a kid because you always got the day off school. Then, when you’re an adult, everyone always has plans.”
Windmill Lane is like the Tardis, far more cavernous on the inside than it looks to be from the street. We’re ensconced in a random third-floor dressing room. Toweringly tall, softly spoken, long dark hair tied up in a straggly Samurai bun, the eminently likeable Hozier is back on a flying visit to Ireland having spent the last few months touring Europe and the US. With the international release of his self-titled debut album in September through Island Records, his already hectic schedule is set to get even busier.
In fact this interview was done all of two months in advance: today is July 15 and Hozier is in the middle of a run of summer music festivals, taking in Glastonbury, Latitude, Longitude, Benicassim, the Newport Folk Festival, Lollapalooza, Indiependence and finally Electric Picnic. Along the way, he also played a sold-out showcase at The Tabernacle Arts Centre in Notting Hill to an audience that included such celebrity Irish admirers as Saoirse Ronan, Laura Whitmore and Danny O’Reilly of The Coronas, as well as yours truly.
"Glastonbury was a really nice gig," he says, looking back over a string of important appearances. "I’m still getting used to big crowds, to festival crowds. I suppose you spend a lot of time working on songs, but I still feel like I’m finding my legs as a live artist, you know what I mean? It’s a different game.”
Which of his US TV appearances was he happiest with?
“I think they were fantastic opportunities,” he now reflects. “Ellen was great. David Letterman was a different story altogether. You don’t have mixing control, so sometimes it’s out of your hands. Somebody else mixes it. You get mixers who may not have heard the music so they come in, have a fiddle, and go, ‘This’ll do, this sounds okay’. So then there’s that feeling of, ‘Oh God, I wish that had gone better’.
“So after David Letterman, I was quite disheartened," he rues. "Certainly, it was a great opportunity for people on YouTube to take a shot at me. I suppose you should never really read below the line comments.”
Truth be told, his Letterman appearance was fine – and it has clocked up more than 182,000 YouTube views at the time of writing.
“I think we fell into New York at 2am that night, got a few hours sleep, and then spent the day at VH1 doing sessions,” he adds. “Then rushed into Letterman’s studio to do a performance. I was tired. We’d been on tour and, before that, I’d been recording the album. I hadn’t had a day off. Some of the new musicians in the band had performed maybe three or four times with us. With the schedule like it is, everything is go go go, so it wasn't ideal.”
It's an occupational hazard, when you're one of the most hotly-tipped new artists in the world. But the change of pace has been a dramatic one for him.
“When I was working on the album I had all the time in the world," he recalls. "I was in an attic in Wicklow, just working on the songs. That was my life for the last few years. And then suddenly – bam!”

We’ll come to the album in a while, but first the background. It might seem as though Hozier has shot to fame out of nowhere (the title-track of his debut EP, Take Me To Church, has to date clocked up almost seven million YouTube views). In fact he’s been bubbling under for some time, and his rapid rise has been accellerated by the fact that he’s being ably managed by MCD’s uber-connected Caroline Downey. When did she come on board?
“Caroline was always very supportive,” he says. “I suppose she would have first heard me performing when I was a student in secondary school. I went to school with her daughter and I sang there.”
What was the school?
“St. Gerard’s in Bray. It was good there, especially when a new music teacher came on board. We'd have a music festival, a day where the students could perform any song that they wanted. That’s where I found my legs as a solo performer. I used to play blues stuff and sing in the choir. That’s where Caroline first heard me singing.
“She was very supportive and put me in touch with people like Mark Crossingham at Universal Ireland, just handing in demos, because I was already recording as a young teenager. I kept writing and sending my demos to whoever would take them. Caroline gave me a lot of advice, pointed me in the right direction. But it was only in the last couple of months, really, that she came on board officially as my manager.”
Born and raised in Wicklow, he and his older brother spent their early years in Greystones.
“I went to school in Bray, but I didn’t actually grow up there,” he explains. “We moved out to Greystones when I was about three years old, to Rathdown Park, and then I moved from there to Newcastle in Co. Wicklow. It was quiet, you know, kind of rural, very countryside farm stuff. I went to school in Bray, though, when I was about seven years old.”
His family are all Irish, so where does the name Hozier come from?
“I thought it was of French descent, a Huguenot name or something like that. It’s on my mum’s mum’s side,” he says. “It’s a long story because my mum promised her mother that she would put the name back in – because my grandmother was supposedly related to or came from a line of Hoziers. The name was changed or something like that. I don't know all the ins and outs of the story.”
Is that what he was called in school?
“That was my nickname in secondary school, yeah,” he affirms. “It’s Andrew Hozier-Byrne so, of course, I was just Hozier. It’s a lot less of a mouthful.”
His mother is an artist, his father a former musician. Although his parents had been brought up Catholic, they chose to raise their two sons as Quakers.
“I guess my parents wanted to instill some kind of sense of spirituality. They were from Catholic backgrounds, and they didn’t want to raise us as Catholics. They turned their backs on the Church as early as they could, I think. I’ve nothing really to say about that other than it was nice going to Sunday school.”
Is that where the Gospel elements in his music might have come from?
“I wouldn’t say so, no. The Gospel elements are more from an interest in African-American music.”
His father was a huge blues fan and introduced his son to the greats at a very young age.
“A lot of ’50s, ‘60s Chicago blues. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. As a kid, The Blues Brothers was my favourite movie. I used to watch that next to Disney films. Then, growing up, I gained an interest and a fascination with blues, looked into Delta blues and Texas blues.”
Has he been to these places?
“I haven’t – yet. Texas is as far as I’ve gotten. I’m looking forward to it. It’s always been a bit of a dream to head to New Orleans and Mississippi and soak it up. But especially for my teen years, that was a big education. I was fascinated, very hungry to know more about it and more about Gospel music. That’s when I started learning guitar, teaching myself blues. At the age of 14 or 15, I picked up an electric guitar and started trying to figure stuff out. Just listening to blues, John Lee Hooker and stuff like that. Started with open tuning.”
He wrote his first song when he was 15. He was doing a BA in Music when Universal offered him a chance to record some demos. So when did the realisation dawn that he wanted to be a professional musician?
“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “I think the solid decision was when I was about 18 or 19. I mean, I made the decision to depart from Trinity College – and I think that was the kind of no-going-back moment. I knew that I wanted to do this and I didn’t want to finish the course I was doing.”
How far into the degree was he when he bailed out of Trinity?
“I was in my first year. I had an exam timetable which conflicted with a demoing opportunity with a label. I asked if I could go off the books for a year. In first year you can’t. They can’t hold your place, so then I just thought, ‘Look, I want to do this no matter what’.”
How supportive were his family of his decision to drop out of college?
“I’m not sure what they thought at the time,” he smiles. “They were supportive but concerned, you know. There was many years of a lot of skills being learned and many years of nothing happening. Slow years living at home, you know, writing songs and not a lot going on.”
What does his older brother do?
“He’s a filmmaker. He was studying film and gender studies, and he’s just kind of moving now to doing his own stuff. He’s great. He’s always a second opinion on music videos and things like that, which is very, very helpful.”
As a former musician, was his father encouraging?
“He never pushed me into being a performer or anything like that," he smiles. "When I was growing up, academic success was really what my family’s priorities were. My father went to Trinity to do his masters, so me leaving Trinity – there was disappointment there, I think. But they were supportive.”

His decision to go for broke as a musician shouldn't have come entirely as a surprise. Hozier played and sang for a time with avant-garde Dublin group Nova Collective and also performed with the Trinity Orchestra. He was a highly-regarded member of Irish choral group Anúna from 2009 to 2012, and appeared as a soloist on their 2012 release Illumination, singing ‘La Chanson de Mardi Gras’. He toured and sang with the group internationally, including performances in Norway and the Netherlands.
“I actually joined Anúna when I was 16,” he recalls. “I did a little bit of touring with them. It was great... just to be around voices in harmony. I always loved the sound of voices singing together, whether choirs, congregational singing, shanties. It was a great education to be around textures like that.”
The choirs and congregational singing undoubtedly inspired him to write ‘Take Me To Church’. What really drove the YouTube views on a viral level, however, was the powerful video referencing the repression of homosexuality in Russia through the dramatic story of two young gay men subjected to brutal homophobic violence. Directed by Brendan Canty of Irish film production company Feel Good Lost, it stirred a lot of online debate.
“I didn’t think it was overly controversial, apart from maybe the last scene,” he muses. “It says a lot if people worry more about two lads kissing than about a man getting kicked to death at the end. If it challenges people, if people feel offended, or have to face their own prejudices or their own bigotry, however subtle, then job done.”
For the record, Hozier isn’t gay himself but the controversial storyline was his concept.
“Brendan Canty and Conal Thomson of Feel Good Lost had some visual ideas. I threw in the narrative idea. I wanted to reflect the song – but not for it to be literally about the Church. I wanted it to be about an organisation that, in a similar way, would undermine humanity and undermine what it is, to just do something that in a way is very natural as a human.”
Sinéad O’Connor’s new single is also titled ‘Take Me To Church’.
“I don’t know what to say," he offers. "I’ve heard it. You know it’s an interesting title... It’s fine, and it’s nice to see her continuing to make new music. She’s an iconic artist and a very important artist. She’s always been a very, very strong opponent of church doctrine and of the church's more odious activities.”
Hozier was produced by Rob Kirwan, who has previously worked with the likes of PJ Harvey and Delorentos. While the album doesn’t feature another song as immediately striking as ‘Take Me To Church’, its brilliant, slow-burning blend of folk, blues, gospel and rock has much to recommend it. And it looks like he has an international hit on his hands.
Lyrically, it’s quite dark at times, with recurrent themes and images of sex, death and decay. On ‘Like Real People Do’, he sings, “I had a thought, dear/ However, scary/ About that night/ The bugs and the dirt/ Why were you digging/ What did you bury/ Before those hands pulled me from the earth?”
“There is a lot of decay,” he admits. "I'm looking at death in different ways. There are a lot of things to it. In blues and Gospel, there are themes that bleed into the music. I’m not a very religious person – but the way Gospel music looks at death and looks at spirituality and at God is very beautiful.
“So there’s a lot of sex and death on the album,” he continues. “Death is something that I would have thought about as a quite macabre child. And even with some Irish writers and stuff, Seamus Heaney and the like, there’s a lot about the land on it and just decaying. I spent a few years thinking about what it is to die, what it is to return to the land and return to the earth.”
The song ‘In A Week’ is about the corpses of two lovers rotting side by side in a field, slowly devoured by Mother Nature: “I have never known peace/ Like the damp grass that yields to me/ I have never known hunger/ Like these insects that feast on me.”
“That’s essentially about returning to the bottom of the food chain,” he explains. “I can’t say why. As I say, maybe it’s just a little bit macabre on my part. The album, for me, is about trying to be as human as possible. If there’s darkness, it’s because I am trying to be naturally human. There are three very important things to do as a human: be born, have sex and make new life, and die. Dying is one of the most important things you can do. as a person, as a human. It’s also the last thing we’ll do.”
Does he have a personal favourite song on the album?
“To be honest, I don’t know,” he says, pulling a face. “I try not to be overly proud because I want to do better all the time. I would put all the songs under scrutiny before they go out. I really like ‘To Be Alone’. I have been proud of ‘Take Me To Church’. A lot of the time, when you’re writing songs, something gets lost on the way or just isn’t articulated properly. With ‘Take Me To Church’, I feel like I articulated everything. That’s why I am proud of it.”
How long did the album take to record?
“I officially started when I left college in 2009 or 2010, maybe. There were a lot of years of me gigging, supporting, writing songs. There was a point it took off creatively. So all the songs on the album are at most a year-and-a-half or two years old. There was a point I felt like I had the skills that I needed.”
Was it recorded in his Wicklow attic or just demoed there?
“It was demoed there, for the most part. We kept huge amounts of the recordings. A lot of the vocals, say, for the first EP. It was a real kick in the dark, let’s see if we can get an EP out of these demos. What can we do, what do we need to change? We thought we’d change the vocals, but I got into studio with Rob Kirwan and, for the first EP, say, we kept the vocals. We redubbed the piano, redubbed the guitars, got rid of the programmed drums and put live ones on, and that was the first time I’d started producing material myself. He made it sound as brilliant as possible. As a producer, he brought a huge amount to the table sonically. Moving forward, we achieved a good working relationship.”
Ho does he feel with the album finally coming out?
“I haven’t had a huge amount of time to think about it,” he laughs. “Probably just as well! I’m looking forward to getting new stuff out to people. There’s a lot of stuff from the first and second EP that remained on the album. I’m looking forward to just getting it out there. You only debut once, you know what I mean?”
People listen less to albums as a complete body of work nowadays...
“Yeah, they pick and choose,” he nods. “It doesn’t really matter, I know that we’re going that way. It would be great if people sat down to listen to and enjoy it. A lot of people don’t have time. I think with the re-emergence of people enjoying vinyl there’s a great ritual to listening to the music... there's something tactile about it. I wish people would, even for their own consumer rights actually, buy physical copies of things.”

As Electric Picnic subsequently confirmed, Andrew Hozier-Byrne has a huge fanbase here in Ireland. And it looks like it's about to get a whole lot bigger.
“Because I’m away so much, it's hard to keep track. It is funny getting home for a brief time. I do notice there’s a lot more activity. I get stopped on the street sometimes, here and there, or in a bar.”
Does he like the idea of being famous? He looks almost embarrassed.
“No, not really. That’s not why you start doing this. If someone stops you and asks you for a photograph, it’s nice and flattering. But it isn't what the whole thing is about.”
With all of the travelling, gigging and promotional activity, is there time to work on new material?
“I’m trying to," he sighs. "There’s not much opportunity. Most days I might get an hour to myself before I go to sleep. The schedule is mental. I’m very much looking forward to working on new songs. What I miss the most is having time to write.”
Of course, when Hozier finally hits the shelves, things are only going to get more intense...
“Yeah, my schedule is already crazy for a long time ahead. Which is great, you know. It’s promising. Depending on how the album goes, I could be on the road for more than a year.”
Somebody from the record company appears in the room and reminds him that there’s other pressing business to attend to. As there will be for the foreseeable future.
Final question: does Hozier have any sort of guiding principle or motto to get himself through all of this?
“A guiding motto or principle? No, not really. I think either way you’ll find an exception to a motto or principle. To live by one line maybe isn’t the best. If you’re going to do something, do it as devastatingly as possible. That’s about it.”
That’s not a bad one.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne smiles confidently.
“Exactly... always devastate.”
Amen to that. Amen.

Hozier is out now. See hotpress.com for more bonus content.