Sittin' on the dock of the Bray

Location, location. All the best records inhabit a psychic as well as geographical space. Exile On Main Street will forever occupy the sweltering basement of a chateau in the south of France, Music From Big Pink a clubhouse in the Catskills, Bitches Brew a gypsy-cab infested neon New York City.

Bray Head on a Sunday mightn’t be as glamourous or exotic as any of those locations, but it is nevertheless the place where the songs on Fionn Regan’s The End Of History took shape, hence our bumbling around the strand in search of the perfect portrait shot.
It’s a mild afternoon in the early off-season, and Bray’s promenade of penny arcades and cafes is still thronged with strolling couples and sprawling, squalling families. A diminutive, messy-haired Dylan-circa-66 urchin in black velvet jacket, drainpipes, Chelsea boots and shades, Fionn Regan grew up here, and that maritime atmosphere permeates his debut album, a collection of nuanced and impressionistic nu-folk (or anti-folk, or non-folk, or whatever you’re having yourself) tunes that eschew narrative ballad formality and windy rhetoric for a fragmented stream of consciousness that’s closer to the true skewed nature of Clarence Ashley or Mississippi John Hurt – or more latterly, the gnomic pronouncements of Will Oldham and Nick Drake, albeit with a twist in his sobriety.
So, The End Of History evokes the same shambledown melancholic airs that permeated Bruce Robinson’s wonderful The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman, a book whose musical equivalent might be a weave of wound-down calliope, weeping musical saw and groaning harmonium. This is the sound of a seaside childhood recollected in, if not tranquillity, then solitude. A key line on the album: “I have become an aerial view/Of a coastal town that you once knew.”
“I see that like a flash over the top of a small town, almost dream-like,” Fionn says, after the photographs have been taken and we’ve adjourned to the dining room of a local hotel. “I think there’s a sort of a slideshow feel in songs like ‘Put A Penny In The Slot’ – reflection in a very fragmented kind of way. It all becomes interwoven into some sort of fabric that represents a certain time. It’s part of you, but also it feels like it’s somebody completely different. Even coming to Bray today feels like walking onto a set for a film that you made a long time ago, there’s a bit of The Truman Show about it or something.”
And there’s nothing quite as evocative as a summer resort when September comes.
“Definitely,” he nods. “I’ve spoken about this before, but there’s a sort of intense activity in the summer where it’s densely populated, it’s a destination and a magnet for a variety of different types of characters, and then in the winter it’s completely sparse, locked doors. I think anyone who comes from a place like that, it always stays with you, but maybe not in a way that you can put your finger on. Anywhere that’s a destination always has a different energy to it than somewhere that’s a passing-through place.”
Did he spend his whole life in Bray?
“Pretty much, yeah. I lived in Brighton for a couple of months about two and a half years ago. It’s really funny, everybody keeps calling me ‘Brighton-based’ in The Guardian and papers like that – like they’re trying to claim me.”
Well, Brighton’s another boardwalk town.
“It is, yeah. It’s like the mecca, like the big version of this place. Like it’s the feature film and this is the trailer.”
Cinematic allusions pepper Regan’s conversation (one of his previous jobs involved working as a special effects technician). Consequently, The End Of History has the sort of interior monologue/film-reel feel that suggests the work of a kid who grew up in his head.
“I was lucky enough to be surrounded by fascinating characters,” Regan proffers. “There were musicians and poets around all the time. My dad plays guitar and he’s a composer, and my mother’s an artist, so you can imagine. I suppose I did all the things that kids do, sitting around for a day trying to move things on the mantlepiece with the power of my mind, that kind of thing. And we had one of those bay windows – it sounds very posh, but it wasn’t – and curtains, and I used to have this waistcoat and hat and a walking cane, and my brother would do the curtains and we’d put on shows. That was my first experience of…performance is a strange word, but y’know what I mean.”
Without wanting to spin some it-were-all-green-fields-round-here-when-I-were-a-lad riff, such anecdotes do serve to highlight the difference between the pre and post-90s generations. Childhood amusement is now big money for the TV and computer gaming industries. One can’t help but wonder if the spoon-feeding of entertainments stunts the creative instincts of kids who might otherwise have to create their own distractions. Many artists will admit the reason they wanted to create in the first place was because they imagined something that didn’t exist, and the only way they could bring it to fruition was make it themselves.
“Absolutely,” Fionn agrees, “and sometimes it’s a bit of an escape from reality.”
Graphic novel genius Alan Moore has stated that he believes there’s a inversely proportional relationship between imagination and money. Pre CGI and digital trickery, filmakers had to improvise and innovate in order to create alternate realities. When Jean Cocteau wanted to depict a man disappearing into a mirror, he used mercury for glass, shot the scene horizontally, then turned the image on its side. If you can’t just throw money at the problem, you have to think laterally.
“I’ve a song about that as well, climbing through a mirror,” Fionn says. “I completely agree, I think it’s almost scary in a way to think that at some stage I might be in a position to have more money. Because the limitations were there financially, I think it worked to my advantage, it made me really think about each thing I was doing; it had to be concentrated and potent. Everything on the record was done live; I’m not one of those people who can do a guitar and then do a vocal.
“That was another restriction which drives some people mad, engineers and stuff. People had asked recently to use just the music without the vocal for film stuff, and when I went and talked to one of the engineers, he said it couldn’t be done because of the spill. So my aesthetic has saved me from millions of advertisements and what-not! But I’d really love to do something for film, something like The Squid & The Whale. I see the songs like little films that run together.”
Fionn Regan, this is your life.