Tadhg Williams: "Music is the greatest weapon any of us can hold. It’s the most powerful way we can share our message"

After a few years of putting out well-received singles, Waterford singer-songwriter Tadhg Williams is taking the big leap and releasing his debut EP, This Record Is A Nixer. It will be followed by a launch gig in Whelan’s – and he has big plans.

“I love getting on stage with a band, because the EP is so acoustic,” he explains. “For the live show, I wanted to give people a bigger sound. I want them to come away thinking, ‘I’ve actually experienced something a bit different here.’ Songs have a much longer lifespan than people give them credit for. We’re hopefully going to go record an album next year, and some of the songs on the EP will be on there, but they will sound entirely different.

“That’s the way I like to think of the songs – they’re always progressing, in flux, in motion. A song isn’t finished just because you finished writing it and you’ve recorded it once.”

On a recent single from the EP, ‘Faith Of Old’, Williams – as the file suggests – discusses the idea of faith, with a lot of frustration and anger evident on the track. When I ask about his own relationship to faith, Williams brings up his grandmother, who died when he was 15. Other than her exceptional kindness, the musician recalls, she was a very interesting woman in that she was a complete atheist – a rarity for Irish people her age.

“We used to have these conversations about kindness, decency and how to make the world better,” Tadhg explains. “It’s taught me that faith is being in touch with the world and the people in it. Speaking up for injustice, and doing things that will actively make the world a better place.”

It’s a sentiment that Williams has never been able to find in the Catholic Church.

“I fully believe that organised religion takes advantage of people’s faith,” he says, “rather than trying to help it.”

Another standout on the EP is ‘Frank Edwards’, which tells the story of a Waterford soldier of the same name, who went to Spain during the civil war to fight against Franco.

“He went there because he wanted to make a difference,” Williams says. “That’s what the song was about – his experience with that, and how terrible and gruesome war is. It ties into what politics in Ireland is like today. There’s so much nonsense being thrown around immigration and refugees, when there are fascists rising in Ireland at the moment.

“In my heart it very much is an anti-fascist song, which I think is something that we need in Ireland.”

With the amount of political themes tackled on the EP, I ask Williams if using music as a tool for protest is important to him.

“I always say music is the greatest weapon any of us can hold,” he nods. “It’s the most powerful way we can share our message. I am quite a political person, and I have so many frustrations with the way this country is being run. I do not believe it’s a country for young people. They are being forced out of Ireland and they are not being given the options, the tools or the choice to make their lives in Ireland anymore.”

The cover art to This Record Is A Nixer is a beautifully nostalgic picture of Williams’ grandfather as a child, running on a beach.

“I found that in a biscuit tin,” he recounts with a smile. “There’s so much joy in it. It hammers home the idea of the innocence of a child. Given there’s so much frustration, so much anger on the EP, and given that it’s so political, the cover is a reminder that actually life is a great joy. We’re all privileged to have it and that’s important, because it’s not all doom and gloom.”

This Record Is A Nixer is out on December 6 – with vinyl editions available to pre-order from Bandcamp and his website.

Tadhg Williams plays Upstairs in Whelan’s, Dublin on Saturday, December 7 (tickets), and Luca Records, Waterford on Friday, December 13 (tickets).