Strands Of Time

It’s Strands’ opening night. One-man music machine Stephen Shannon has rounded up eight musicians for one performance only of his eponymous debut album, and I’m lucky enough to be in attendance.

“I’m a bit nervous,” Shannon admits as he greets me. “I didn’t want to play live at all.”
You can see his point – this single outing of the album has taken three weeks to rehearse, with Shannon slogging through each musician’s part individually.
“It’s been really hard work, I’m worried about it all locking together,” he fumbles, “it’s a big responsibility! At first I was really reluctant. I’d sit down and listen to the album and just go, ‘That’s impossible!’. But slowly I came around to the idea.”
Despite the jitters, Stephen happily tells me that he’s never been one to suffer from stage-fright. A former member of electronic outfit Halfset who moonlights as bass-player with Choice Prize-winner Adrian Crowley, Shannon says his role in this makeshift orchestra comes easily to him.
“I’m almost like a conductor,” he laughs, “I play lots of parts on songs but most of the time I’m just shouting at people, roaring out instructions! I did the whole album myself, and whatever instruments I couldn’t play, I wrote the parts and got people in to play them later. I certainly wasn’t thinking about how people would perceive it or how I could do it live!”
While over a decade in the music biz has certainly stood to the production maestro, Shannon admits that flipping roles from producer to composer was no simple task: “Because of all the work I do with other people and because of the band I played in before, I had this really set way of building a song – I ended up rejecting everything I did for the first few weeks! I really hated my whole method, so I started trying to write for clarinets and things I’d never written for before, which made it exciting again.
“You can’t half do something,” he continues. “When you agree to do a record with somebody you have to just completely immerse yourself in it, and there was a huge thing going on around me – a sort of mishmash of sound; things I liked and things I’d worked on and melodies from other people and that was really hard to dispose of.”
How did he manage to transcend the din?
“It took a while. I got quite down and depressed about it, I felt like I wanted to give up and I didn’t want to make music by myself any more. But it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and I’m really proud of it myself.”
But if some fleeting moments of misery preceded the album, its cheery, playful beats do well to hide the gloom.
“I’m in the happiest time of my life now,” Shannon beams. “I’ve got two young children and they’re always playing in the studio and I think I’m influenced by them. One or two of the songs they actually love, it makes them dance. The melodies on a lot of the songs have a kind of an innocence to them and it’s because of my children.
“A lot of instrumental music is supposed to be dark and thought-provoking,” he notes, “but instrumental music is just music without vocals – it can be anything you want it to be.”
There is one trippy little vocal on Strands, though. Shannon explains how he persuaded his wife to step up to the mike on ‘Chow Bell’.
“I just brought out a bottle of wine and got her a bit drunk!” he laughs. “I had it completely worked out and set up. She was thrilled in the end but she was really nervous about hearing herself recorded.” Presumably this level of liquid coaxing is not standard procedure with your average Irish band.
Over the next few months, albums by Spook Of The Thirteenth Lock, Land Lovers and Iarla O Lionard are due to pass through Shannon’s able hands, and he reckons something very big is about to kick off in our little town.
“I’ve been moaning about Irish music for years,” he admits. “There’s loads of bands out there that just copy the London band or the New York band – these guys coming in from Finglas trying to sound like Oasis – but we’re starting to find our own voice. There’s an individuality starting to seep through and it’s really exciting.”
Shortly after my chat with Shannon, I’m privy to a truly unique performance in the sweaty little cavern of Crawdaddy. Clarinet and cello bounce happily along with flugelhorn and guitar, and the quirky symphony’s set goes off without a hitch. Even after a special night like this, Shannon won’t be sweet-talked into a second show?
“I think the document of what I’ve done is there,” he says, plainly, “that’s how the album truly sounds. What I’m doing tonight is just a version of it.”

Strands is out now on Casino Gravity. Hassle him and he may play live again!