The Boys of Strummer

Oliver Cole
If you are what you do, then does it follow that you become someone else when you do something else? After more than 10 years as the driving force behind Swampshack and then Turn, Oliver Cole emerged blinking into the light of day, a little bewildered by the possibilities. He knew he wanted to make a solo record, but first he needed to redefine himself as a musician and songwriter.

“I think when I left Turn I wanted to make an album. In hindsight I didn’t have an album yet,” he reflects on a March afternoon in Mulligan’s on Poolbeg Street in Dublin’s city centre. “It was a good long time after leaving the band that I started listening to and playing music the way I used to when I was a kid. I loved being in Turn, but it was a very restrictive thing ‘cos it was a three-piece rock band, and I had started to get into songwriters and the nuts and bolts of songwriting, Neil Young and Tom Waits and Dylan, even listening to Steely Dan records.
“I started to do this DJ night on Sundays at the Globe,” Cole recalls, “and I used to play loads of Fleetwood Mac and ELO, some sort of ‘70s American theme. And my songwriting just outgrew the band, I wanted to do more, I didn’t want to be confined to guitar, bass and drums. Turn was very much a quiet/loud band, and that was our thing, but on this album I was determined to be more subtle.”
The album in question, We Albitri, is certainly that. But tunes like ‘What Will You Do?’, ‘Drug Song’ and ‘Little Bad Dream’ are, despite a breezy pop sensibility not a million miles away from Brendan Benson or Jellyfish or The Beatles, pretty hard on their author. Cole’s lyrics often scan like like letters of chastisement written by his shadow self.
“I suppose on this record I had to deal with an awful lot of fallout,” he admits. “After I left Turn I split up with the same girl I was with for ten years. It’s funny, because in Turn I’d written loads of songs about that relationship thing, but at the time I was really happy and I was kind of writing what it must be like to feel those emotions. It was a very different thing when I actually felt I had to write about them. There’s a couple of songs on there I’m really proud of. ‘Moth’s Wing’, lyrically, is me at my most vulnerable and honest. It was a tough one, because I didn’t even choose to write those songs, they were just fuckin’ coming out of me, it was the record I had to make.”
Interesting that major life ruptures – band break ups, job losses, death, divorce and moving house – seem to happen in clusters rather than sequentially.
“I think we probably make it happen.”
As in, a kamikaze impulse?
“When I look back at that time I think I was subconsciously trying to self-destruct everything. I was trying to leave Turn but I wasn’t going about it right. I’m really sorry now to everybody who was around me at that time, managers and everything, because I was really destructive, it was like I wanted it over, but I wanted them to fire me. Just destroying it from the inside. And myself and Danielle broke up around the same time, so looking back on it... It was just a bit messy around then. I was testing everybody to the limit.”
Did he have some sort of breakdown?
“I can’t pinpoint it and say I had a breakdown, not the way you hear of some people having a panic attack, nothing like that has ever happened to me, but I definitely must have been depressed or something, ‘cos I was living in a house in Stoneybatter and I used to just stay in bed, and whenever I’d get out of bed I’d just come down and stay on the couch. I wouldn’t even open the curtains. Looking back on it now I just needed everything to change. I had to force a catastrophe, throw everything up in the air and see what landed.
“Thanks be to god it didn’t affect too much and it didn’t drag on forever,” Cole continues. “It was probably a circumstantial depression – I was depressed because there were things wrong, it wasn’t unexplainable darkness. But as a songwriter I’ve probably struggled my whole life with the ability to wallow in that. Most people, even after something like a break up, will go, ‘Okay, I’m going to pull myself together and I’m going to get over this’, whereas a songwriter will go, ‘I’m going to explore this, I’m going to go down with a torch and look in all the corners.’ But right now I have this weird contentedness. I do the best I can do at the time, I’m not going to get stressed about singing in tune and playing time and trying to write good songs.”
Accordingly We Albitri is a bright and positive sounding record, as befits the bucolic environment in which it first took shape: Freiburg in Germany. So how did this Kells lad end up decamping to the Black Forest?
“Basically I sent a girl a Turn album ‘cos she couldn’t get it in Germany, and she asked what I was doing and I told her I wanted to make a solo album but didn’t have any money. She was friends with Philipp, the bass player from Reamonn, who are massive in Germany. She said he had a big house and a studio in Freiburg and maybe I could record there. I didn’t think anything of it, but then he was in Dublin and we had a chat and he invited me over to Freiburg and I had a look at his studio. He just gave me the key and said he’d be back in two months. So myself and Ciaran Bradshaw went over and made the record there.”
Wow. Lucky break.
“There were so many good things that happened to me around that time, a lot of goodwill. Just before I went, a successful musician friend of mine, I won’t name him, I was telling him I had this offer of a studio in Freiburg but I had no money to go, and he just wrote me a cheque for five grand and said, ‘Give it back to me when you can.’ And towards the end of Turn, One Tree Hill used a couple of our songs and I got a few quid from that.”
And once Cole had recorded the album, he was on a roll. Final sessions were completed back in Dublin. Next stop, a major publishing deal.
“I went to see Big Life, a big publishing company in England, they managed Snow Patrol for years,” he recalls. “I went to see them with no appointment, turned up and played them what we’d recorded in Freiburg, just me and the two heads of the company in this little room, 17 songs, for about 50 minutes, with no one saying a word, and me coming out of the speakers. It was so weird, I had the urge to apologise for everything all the time. But as soon as the last song ended, yer man turned around to me straight away and said, ‘Okay we want to sign you – how much do you want?’ I wasn’t expecting that. You feel validated! You know you’re not mad!’”

James McMorrow
Sitting by the window at Malahide’s Grand Hotel, James Vincent McMorrow is chatting about the unreliability of daytime DARTs.

“Sometimes there won’t be one for 40 minutes,” he says shaking his head. “Sorry, I forgot how bad they can be.”
In case you’re wondering, McMorrow is not Noel Dempsey’s successor as Minister for Transport. Instead he’s one of the great hopes of Irish music in 2010; which is why he's having his picture taken and HP are here to interview him, although both slightly later than planned due to the vagaries of Irish public transport.
"Who the hell is James Vincent McMorrow?" you may ask, and it’s a fair question. Granted, he does not have the public profile of Jedward, the YouTube viral fame of Crystal Swing (over 493,307 hits and counting) or even a cabal of dedicated fans acquired on the live circuit.
“I never played a lot around Ireland, because I was always more focused on trying to make a record. I figured once the record was there, I’d pick up the slack. It’s because I’m quiet. I don’t go out that much. I just like being by myself and writing music.”
With the release of his first album all that's about to change. Early In The Morning, written, arranged and produced by McMorrow is a gem, a little bit Bon Iver, a touch of Iron And Wine, but it’s McMorrow’s voice that's the real star, an emotional quiver that sends shivers down your back and if there's any justice in the world, McMorrow’s name will be instantly recognisable in the not so distant future.
“I can’t imagine I’ll start wanting to go to crazy parties or anything like that,” he smiles.
Not planning on becoming a paparazzi favourite then?
“Ha, ha, no, no! Even taking the photos for this, it’s like… I’d much rather be at home playing piano!”
Although he's been playing music since his teenage years, McMorrow only started writing seriously in 2007. His story reads like a musician’s fairytale. Within a year, he'd attracted industry interest, signed a publishing deal with EMI and moved to London to start work on his album.
“I tried working in a studio,” he says. “EMI have a studio and I would go down there most days, but I realised quite quickly that I wasn’t destined to make a record in a studio. It doesn’t really suit me because I play everything myself. I would go in and be aware of the clock. You start at ten and finish at eight and in that space of time you have to make something so you tend to compromise.
“Songs don’t come easily to me,” he admits. “Little bits will unfold over months and months. Usually I’ll start with just a melody and then I’ll go and record it and listen back to it. I never have lyrics. I usually have a fully formed song before I even look at lyrics. I’ll sing over it and listen back to it and hear word shapes. I would go through like, fifty different ideas, before settling on what’s best. I like experimenting.”
McMorrow’s issues in the studio were compounded by creative differences with his record company.
“When you sign with big companies, they have a plan and it’s a plan that’s been well trodden. So if you come out and you have a certain type of voice and you write a certain type of song and there is someone else in the market, they’ll follow that because it’s successful. They’ll say, ‘Oh you should sound that way.’ I guess it was inertia towards that kind of thing. I was listening to interesting bands, not the kind of people they wanted me to be, but you’re in these rooms with these people that want you to make that kind of music. There were a lot of solo singer-songwriters around 2007 that were very successful but I don’t listen to them at all.
“What I wanted to do was make a record that sounded like a Sufjan Stevens record, but that’s not a world that those type of people get. They love it, you could sit and talk to people who work for big companies about that kind of sound until the cows come home, but when it comes to making records, because they don’t sell millions of copies, it’s hard for them. It’s not their fault, that’s just the way it’s geared towards. I realised if I was going to make a record I’d just have to cut myself off from that and go make it myself with zero expectations. I assumed I’d deliver it and they’d go, ‘Oh this is a weird little record, no thank you,’ but fortunately it hasn’t worked out like that.”
McMorrow decided to get off the record company merry-go-round and out of London. Instead he decamped to the somewhat less glamorous surrounds of Termonfeckin to write and produce Early In The Morning.
“There’s a huge amount of talk in music, a lot of meetings, a lot of sitting down and discussing records, and mixes and producers, but not a lot of music gets made. I thought it would go a different way, I thought it would be a different thing.
“I probably had a slightly romantic notion of the music business from the 1960s. I’m a huge fan of the birth of the music industry, like that book Hotel California (Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures Of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, The Eagles, And Their Many Friends by Barney Hoskyns). People like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne were allowed to go into the studio with a vision and make beautiful records; whether they sold or not they still continued to make great records. You go into this business and you think that’s how it is, but it’s not, it’s a different world.
“I was going into these meetings and people were telling me all sorts of great things and you think, ‘Ah, this is going to happen, they are going to help me make the record I want to make,’ and then weeks go by and things change. It’s because they can’t do it any more, they’d love to do it I don’t doubt, but they just can’t and as soon as I realised that I just got out of there.
“When someone offers you money, and you have no money, it’s a nice thing. It’s nice to be able to buy things! That was probably a motivating factor for a while. When someone offers you 'X' amount of money to sign something and then you go and you make a record with them even though in the back of your mind you’re thinking, ‘We’re not on the same page’. You go along with it because you’ve never had that much money in your life, but once you get past that and you realise you have to make music with these people… For me it was very easy because I want to make music. I don’t want to be in rooms with people talking and I don’t want to go parties and get cheques. I would love my records to do well, but that shouldn’t be the goal.”
Although McMorrow mightn't have played that many gigs, he's been lucky to do some very high profile ones, including support for Tracy Chapman.
“That was another huge thing that gave me momentum because it happened right at the end of 2008 and a lot of stressful things had happened with deals and making albums and false starts.”
After three shows with Chapman at the Olympia, McMorrow was asked to join the American on tour.
“It was deadly. I got to play two sold-out nights in the Hammersmith Apollo. I played in Manchester; I played in Paris. That was incredible, seeing the crowds and how they responded to just her and her guitar. I’ve very fortunately gotten to play some brilliant shows with some amazing people at a point where I was figuring things out for myself and every one of them helped me.”
Other support gigs include Bon Iver, Iron And Wine and somewhat surprisingly, Mark Ronson.
“He asked me to come and sing some songs on his tour for three nights. That was a completely different world, sixty thousand people at festivals. Those people are so inspiring. You just look at them and you think, ‘I won’t even get to a tenth of where you are’. People like Tracy Chapman or Sam Beam from Iron And Wine – they're just flawless musicians. Sam Beam is up there with people like Sufjan Stevens for me – someone that makes something that’s much more than the sum of its parts.”
McMorrow may not have trodden the live circuit route that most Irish musicians do, but of course, it has not all been high profile gigs with big name stars.
“I think I’ve paid my dues – I’ve played to twenty people in Whelan’s!” he laughs.
Perhaps so, but it’s doubtful he will have to do that again.