Spiritus Mundy

If memory is reliable, this witness first cast eyes on the callow talent that was Edmund Enright when he was but a boy of 19 or so, back in the year of our our lord nineteen hundred and ninety five, an epoch stricken by epizootics and epidemics, a plague of repetitive beats that had laid waste to the live circuits of these parishes, and the only remaining players of the gig trade were the odd straggler noisnik combo or raggle-taggle minstrel.
It was against this desolate backdrop that I chanced upon Mundy – as he came to be known – opening for The Mary Janes in The Project, Temple Bar, and in truth, back then at least, I did not reckon him much cop. Mind you, I was in the minority. My learned fellows and friends were all ooo and aaah over the flaxen haired Birr cherub with songs about Gin & Tonic skies and so forth, but your scribe still remained stony-hearted and unmoved, reckoning we needed another one of those stargazing songwriter types like a hole in the proverbial.
Call it a case of mistaken identity. Mundy had been from the womb untimely ripped as it were, a young man barely in the capital a wet day, just beginning to develop his craft, busking and hustling and carving out a name for himself in the various hostelries and taverns of the town.
Success of a sort came early, but it was a false flowering. Mundy scored a deal with Epic and almost before he knew it his first album Jellylegs was recorded and in the shops, and that collection’s most comely tune ‘To You I Bestow’ had graced the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s film version of Romeo & Juliet.
But his good fortune did not last long. A second album 24 Star Hotel was recorded and put on ice indefinitely. Eventually Epic showed him the door, and young Enright spent two years in limbo getting back the rights to his second record. Thus chastened, and like so many of his comrades and contemporaries, he renounced the patronage of major labels and resolved to become the sole architect of his own destiny, and soon enough success of a humbler but more tangible kind came knocking. The rejigged incarnation of 24 Star Hotel – a significant maturation in sound, style and songwriting, containing such fine tunes as ‘Mexico’, ‘July’, ‘Healthy’ and ‘Rescue Remedy’ – made him many new friends on the local scene. A sustained assault on the live venues of the country, plus a series of guerilla raids on the festivals, soon ensured that the great unwashed sat up, took notice and voted with their greasy guineas, pushing the album into multiple platinum status. The 2004 follow up Raining Down Arrows would eventually do just as well, reaching No.1 in the Irish charts.
As for your scribe, well, he had already been forced to revise his opinions upon seeing Mundy deliver a rambunctious set in a tent at Witnness in Punchestown circa 2002, long after the rest of the country had cottoned on that this was no latter day Waterboy wanna-be, but a robust songwriter with an equally robust band capable of marrying heartlands American country-rock – Neil Young, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen – with Offaly vernacular. Mundy, true to the Latin equivalent of his name, was now a more worldly character, a brawny, strapping country lad with his sleeves rolled up, bristling with a willingness to graft, rather than some airy-fairy poet-seer flaneur too delicate to get his hands dirty.
Before today’s encounter, we’d passed each other in various backstage areas over the years, but had never formally been introduced, even though we shared a circle of acquaintances that went back a decade. In person, he proves affable company and a gratifying interview: straightforward, plainspoken, by turns assertive and deferential, but always honest, or as honest as a man can be while speaking in a public forum.
Our meeting is to mark the imminent release of the rather impressive live album and DVD set Live & Confusion, which serves the dual purpose of putting a full stop on the current phase of Mundydom, prior to moving onto fresh musical pastures, as well as immortalising a live band that features such formidable players as ex-Mary Janes guitarist Simon Goode and former Frames drummer Binzer (not to mention a cameo from Sharon Shannon on Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’).
“They’ve all been in other bands as you well know, and I suppose nothing’s permanent,” Mundy observes. “If you’re going to stay creative, you can’t use the same paints all the time, I guess. There’s certain ideas that I want to try out myself, and with the lads in that line-up this is definitely a good snapshot before anything changes. I can’t say exactly where I’m gonna go, but sometimes you’d regret it if you didn’t do that. It’s catching the moment really.”
And an apt time to reflect on this pilgrim’s remarkable progress…
Chapter 1. In which Edmund leaves the hamlet of Birr, makes his way to the city of Dublin and – lo and behold! – is offered a pot of fool’s gold...
“I got signed when I was 19, without even looking for it. I met an English woman in the International Bar who wanted to manage me, and she got me a publishing deal with Warner Chappel and a deal with Epic Records within two months. I had a band, none of the members are with me now, we were only prickin’ around – like, we were just playing Slattery’s of Capel Street at that point. But I’d only done five gigs and a few demos, and was sent out on a UK tour with Alanis Morissette. I was like, ‘What the fuck’s goin’ on?’ It all happened in a couple of months, literally. We were doing the odd arena, she hadn’t quite gotten to as big as she did later, but for me it was a bit odd to be sent out on the road with a big act like that. It was good crack but I was completely… you were basically saying that you didn’t get it back then, and I suppose I didn’t get why I was being signed back then either! I had certain songs like ‘Gin & Tonic Sky’ and ‘To You I Bestow’, that’s probably how I got signed, with the potential that I would write bigger songs than that again. But it takes a while to develop and hone your trade.”
2. In which Edmund records his first album under the auspices of a very peculiar Youth…
“We did the first album in two and a half weeks in Wales. Youth was the producer, I’d met him in his studio in Brixton. He was like, ‘Love your whole vibe,’ y’know, the whole stragazing thing you were talking about – which I didn’t know I was. I just thought I was a fuckin’ songwriter. I didn’t realise people saw me a certain way! So he was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve given up smoking weed and stopped taking acid and I think we could work on a great album’. So we ended up in a valley in Wales and the first thing he ordered was a bag of grass and a few trips, and I’m like, ‘Aw no – here we go’.
“So that was a risk, obviously. I had to ask the sound engineer, ‘What do you do?’ and he said, ‘I’m the sound engineer’. And I was like, ‘Well what does he do?’ ‘Well, he’s the producer, but that’s a good question!’ He’s getting all the money and lying on the couch. There was a snare left off a song and stuff, ‘And he’s like, ‘Aw no, sounds great without it’. He was very easy-going, but a bit spacey and kooky for me. But he did get a couple of songs really right, I thought. He did a great job on the Romeo & Juliet song, ‘To You I Bestow’.”
3. In which Edmund opens for Neil Young and Crazy Horse at The Point and is thereafter granted an audience with the great and powerful Shakey…
“I used to have Neil and Bob Dylan’s agent in England – he gave me the gig in The Point, and obviously it was an amazing thing for me to get. And I said to my agent, ‘I have to meet Neil and say thanks for the gig’. So we went looking for him and he was on the stage, lugging gear with the band and the roadies. They had little Cadillacs and mad skulls and candles, like a kid’s bedroom on the stage, but with weird shit.
“And he came over and had a good old chat and he said, ‘Yeah, I heard your set from the dressing room. We’re going to go into the bar’. So me and the agent and him went into the bar and he had a pint of Murphy’s. We were all just sitting around normal as pie.
“He was intense in a way, ‘cos I remember someone in a band – it wasn’t one of my lads – said they’d put a trip in his pint, messin’, and he got really fucked off about it. It was just a fuckin’ stupid thing to say. Y’know when somebody says something trying to be funny but they didn’t really think about what they said? And he’s goin’, ‘I don’t want that fuckin’ drink’. It’s funny, the gig he did in Vicar St, he was drinking pints of Smithwicks on stage. He is a normal guy at the end of the day. Seems like a gentle giant.”
4. In which Edmund embarks upon his first major UK tour and promo campaign – but soon starts to feel like the spare prick at a Britpop wedding.
“When you’re 19 or 20, you’ve nothing to compare it to. A lot of people who are in bands, and have been through it, don’t tend to want to talk to you, because they’ve already been dropped and they’re either scared or jealous, and so you’ve no one really to share this odd success that you’re going through with. In hindsight now, because I’m running my own label, I know they put an awful lot of money into their ad campaign, and I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t have that support in the first place. They gave me a profile, put ads in magazines, posters, I mean they spent an awful lot of money, so I think they did a good job. It was unfortunate that Britpop was taking off and I was an Irish dude in the middle of this British music fashion that was going on.”
5. In which Edmund records 24 Star Hotel and is subsequently instructed not to let the door hit him in the arse on the way out of the Epic building…
“I wasn’t actually allowed to gig between the first record and the second record. They were like, ‘We have to create a mystery, blah-blah-blah’. And I was like, ‘But I’m losing my skill’. ‘Cos you start losing your confidence if you’re not gigging all the time. I had a panic attack in the International one night.
“But I got dropped in January 2000, and one of the reasons Epic gave me was basically: ‘Songwriters aren’t fashionable, we’ve spent an awful lot of money and have to make our money back on the more manufactured Sugababes kind of thing’. And that’s when David Gray took off, and then all of a sudden there were songwriters everywhere. One of the guys who instigated me getting dropped, when he saw that 24 Star Hotel went platinum here, he left a message on my answering machine saying, ‘I always knew it was a great record’. And I was just like, ‘What a cunt!’”
6. In which Edmund retrieves the rights to 24 Star Hotel…
“Epic bankrolled 24 Star Hotel and then reneged on it and I added a couple of different tracks to it and made it my own and got it legally back and decided to put out a double A side single of ‘Mexico’ and ‘July’. That started getting a bit of a reaction and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll press up 3,000 of the album’. I was scared shitless to put it out, to be honest. I mean, the track listing’s really odd, the way it’s put together. That just shows the frame of mind I was in. I could have front-loaded it with ‘Mexico’ and ‘July’, bang-bang-bang, but I said, ‘No, just let it grow’. It was an organic way, it found the street itself. And it’s sold nearly 40,000 at this stage.
“I wrote ‘Mexico’ out of a complete fingers up to the label. They were saying, ‘You can’t write a single’. I went home and threw some simple chord progression around a poem and made a demo and said, ‘That’s a single’. And they were like, ‘That’s not a single’. And it is a single! As single as you can get!
“It’s weird, when I did that double A-side I brought it into EMI and said, ‘Listen, I’m putting this out myself. I’ve no money, but you’re welcome to do a split with it’. And they were like, ‘Two great songs, but we need to re-record them’, and I’m like, ‘No we don’t!’ Immediately they wanted to spend more money. And I said, ‘No, I’m gonna do it myself. Fuck this’. I’d been through all that wasting money on re-recording and re-mixing stuff, and got fuck-all for it.”
7. In which Edmund returns to the live fray and experiences a remarkable reversal of fortune…
“Everytime I got up on stage after getting dropped, I really understood that there had to be a moment that the crowd would remember, I really had to buzz them up and get them going. I thought there’d been enough time wasted. I was lucky, I got onto the wave at the right time. I was in good fettle to work hard, I had the songs, but it was work. You couldn’t go out on stage and have no personality – you really had to rock the crowd. But ‘July’ and ‘Mexico’ were starting to create a buzz and the more I played, the more people remembered the songs obviously. My audience had about a year and a half of knowing the songs before they got a copy of the album.
“I did the café tent in Witnness in 2001 or 2002, about a thousand people, and I packed that. The year after that I got the Rising tent and packed that. And that was the one year I thought, ‘If I fuck this gig up, my career is down the swanny’. The Frames did that tent the year before, and that’s when they went up to another level, and I gave myself that pressure of course. And I got there. And the year after, I got the main stage. When I played that fuckin’ song ‘July’, crowds just came across fields. It’s been amazing to watch that particular song grow, It’s not my favourite song, but…
“Gigs used to be very blokey. I might be wrong, but I think the radio – and Today FM in particular – has a lot to do with that changing. There’s a big listenership on that particular radio station that has supported a lot of Irish bands like Bell X1, myself, The Frames, Damien Dempsey, whatever. When there wasn’t a lot of radio support back in the early 90s, only really blokes and the odd hippychick went out of their way. The fact that it’s boy and girl now has definitely happened through radio.”
8. In which Edmund encounters the venerable bard Bob Dylan in Galway.
“I did that gig with him, I passed by him in the corridor and I had the hat on me, and he’s just like, ‘Nice hat,’ and keeps walking. It’s weird, Peter Aiken told me he got off the stage and never said a word to him, just put a harmonica in his pocket and said, ‘Thanks for the gig’. He looks like a shady character. He’s only a little small dude. He’s like a fuckin’ character now, like an ould lad from down the town. He plays on that too. He’s funny.”
9. In which Edmund enters the court of Queen Lucinda…
“That was an interesting gig. I’d just done the Olympia the week before, sold it out, and I heard Lucinda Williams was coming to town and I was like, ‘Fuckin’ hell, I have to open up for her’. Cos I kinda fancied her too, and I just loved her songs. No, I didn’t shag her – I was going out with someone, but I would’ve if I wasn’t! And I’m sure we would’ve got into all sorts of trouble, I mean, she seems quite bold. But I called up MCD and they said, ‘You just sold out the Olympia last week. We can only give you a hundred bucks’. And I was like, ‘I’ll give you a hundred!’ I would’ve given them 500 quid to do the gig.
“I hung out with her, went into the dressing room and gave her 24 Star Hotel and she’s like, ‘Y’all know where to go for somewhere to drink? I don’t want to go anywhere fancy, I just want to go to regular Irish bars’. And we took her to The Bank and ended up in Rí-Rá getting hammered and she ended up pulling some randomer.”
10. In which Edmund remembers the recording of ‘Love And Confusion’ from Raining Down Arrows…
“We were in Austin in Texas recording Raining Down Arrows, doing a song called ‘Too High’, which is a very slow Leonard Cohen-y kind of ballad-y thing and the producer was like, ‘What song have you not got on the record?’ and I said, ‘I don’t have a ‘Mexico’, I don’t have a Saturday night song. I’ve every day of the week covered except Saturday night’. And he goes, ‘Okay, think The Clash and The Replacements’ and we just fuckin’ revved it up. That was the way we looked at it; just fuckin’ horse it out.”
11. In which Edmund meets the real life Galway Girl and has a disconcerting encounter with the arch-Duke of Earledom, whose name is Steve…
“The Galway Girl is a friend of mine, the actual girl, Madame X. I was dying to meet Steve Earle and they’re very good friends obviously, and she said, ‘If we go to the gig and he thinks that you’re with me, he’s gonna go fucking mad!’ So I’m sitting in the nearest box to the stage in the Olympia, and we weren’t together at all, but he just looks at the box for the whole gig. He’s mad about her, but they’ve never been together. So anyway, I was in the bar after, and he goes, ‘You’re a good friend of my friend…’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m a good friend of hers’. And he goes, ‘She’s a good friend of mine. You be good to her now’. He was very, very serious about this. And I was like, ‘There’s nothing going on!’ But he didn’t want her to go out drinking that night, kinda thing, ‘cos he doesn’t drink. And I got her out for the few drinks, and there was just a big vibe. He’s a very intense dude. A big dude. But you know he was on the Atkins diet? He’s lost about five stone weight. And you know (tour manager) Paddy McPoland? He says, ‘Jazus Steve, I’d say you miss the shpuds’. Y’know the way Paddy would be. And Steve said, ‘Not as much as the heroin, man’ and walked off.”
12. In which Edmund records the Live And Confusion album and DVD in Vicar St, wherein ‘Gin & Tonic Sky’ metamorphoses from a pump organ ballad into Crazy Horse playing the end of ‘Stairway To Heaven’.
“I suppose what happens towards the end of a gig is I want to have fun and kind of pay homage to a few of my heroes – without ripping them off. If you’ve been playing a song for that many years, you have to take it apart. I’m not a great guitar player, but I can play the guitar, and it does get very guitar solo-ey and it’s fun; you kind of lose yourself. Simon was only playing a few weeks with us when the DVD was recorded. I think we spar off each other. I wouldn’t be an amazing guitar player, but I’ll do something and Simon knows he has to come over that. It’s not wanky… it’s more down to who’s the loudest – or who can be the most out of tune! And I love watching Binzer playing. I do think my songs stand up on their own if the crowd listen, although a band can overplay on them if you let them.”
13. In which Edmund contemplates the road going ever on…
“I look at some people who are on the road all the time and they can play a set without sweating. For me, it’s like blood. I’m not on tour constantly. I love it to bits, but my energy levels and adrenaline are so much bigger probably than someone who does it all the time. We did an awful lot of touring with Jellylegs and there are gigs you just don’t remember cos you’re on autopilot, you just go through the motions. I find now every second of the gig is like a minute long. I remember everything.”