The Enright stuff

Listen to songs from Mundy's second album, 24 Star Hotel
July: regular quality high quality
Rescue Remedy: regular quality high quality
Healthy: regular quality high quality
Anchor The Sun: regular quality high quality

It’s Friday night, and we’re heading to Oxmantown Hall, a small, modern amphitheatre in Birr, Co. Offaly’s old Gothic town hall building. To get there, you follow a miniature road away from Birr’s main square, duck behind the church, and then walk, crunching on the gravel path, down a green bough-hanging lane lined with cream-coloured Georgian houses on one side. If you don’t count its bucolic, quietly breathtaking environs – nor the fact that there’s no drinking or smoking and that the gig doesn’t begin until after everybody is dutifully shown to their seats and the doors closed.

This, after all, is a homecoming gig for Mundy, who grew up on the square five minutes from here; and it’s a kind of hometown ‘release’ party, in more ways than one, for his long-awaited second album 24 Star Hotel. The mood, inside and out, is electric with excitement and anticipation, if not exactly rock ‘n’ roll.

When Mundy does take the stage, in aural counterbalance to huge and sustained applause from this houseful of people young and old with whom he would have grown up, there is, hilariously, a squeal of high-pitched female enthusiasm from the upper house. Rangy, grinning and cowboy-hatted, in his increasingly-trademark ensemble of plaid shirt and denim, Mundy, accepting this hero’s welcome, is good-natured downhome bonhomie personified. An athletic, outdoorsy, rude-health physicality – in conjunction with his Western stage attire, tremendous grinniness and mischievous high spirits – puts you in mind, in the best possible way, of Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy. “Sorry about the hat,” he grins. “It’s for the album.”

It’s for the album: 24 Star Hotel, the collection of songs written between 1997 and 2000, during the increasingly bleak period when his old record label was falling out of love with him – and that was subsequently trapped, as the record sleeve has it, “in my bedside drawer for two years” until Mundy formed his own label (Camcor, named after Birr’s local river) and released it himself. As of tonight, the record is at number 7 in the Irish charts. It has sold 4,000 copies and has been out for two weeks. “Halfway to gold,” Mundy’s PR says excitedly.

“The best thing I ever sussed out,” Mundy will tell me over cups of tea the following afternoon, when (monstrous) hangovers have been dispatched via a constitutional through Birr Castle Demesne, “is that everything is possible. Anything you want, you can have it. If you really… really… work at it, like,” he emphasises. “Work is the whole secret.

“The whole reason that this (makes a vague gesture apparently encapsulating record sales, chart placement, etc) has happened, is that I got up off my ass, and invested my own money, and decided to put this out. I think you have to spend money to earn money, and I think you need to try. I think you have to work hard to – you know, to live better.” He smiles. “It keeps all the demons away as well. Basically, you need to have a little bit of risk in you to get through this life.”

In person, up close, Edmund Enright is much larger-than-life, literally and metaphorically, than I expected him, for reasons that elude me, to be. He has the kind of physical presence that speaks of a childhood spent largely outdoors (as photos of a teenage Mundy on horseback, dotted round his parents’ guesthouse, attest). What’s more, he exudes the lightness of spirit and easy confidence of a person who is used to being the apple of everybody’s eye – which, over the time we spend here in Birr, it becomes clear that he is. Miraculously, he has somehow avoided becoming spoiled by what is actually a quite incredible intensity of doting attention.

The impression, moreover, is that his unaffectedness is not a result of having been taken down a peg by his ex-record label, but is what he was like in the first place. At his ‘after-show party’, a knees-up at his parents’ pub and guesthouse to which, seemingly, the whole town has been invited, he opts not to sing and play in the pre-designated singing corner (where his mother, before leaving for the gig, has hopefully placed a guitar, just in case) but spends the whole night talking to his family and pulling pints. (The morning after the gig, after the walk to Birr Castle and the interview, he says as we leave: “Is there anything else you need? Because I’ve gotta do the stock-take.”)

He’s based in Dublin these days, but it’s evident that Mundy’s close ties to his family in Birr – not least with his No Disco-watching dad, who gives him “guitar tips” and thinks Mundy should draft in a female violinist “so that the boys have something to look at, too” – are a lot of the reason why he was strong enough, after being dropped, to start again. He’s part of another family, as well, of course: the sprawling extended tribe of Dublin-based songwriters, with many of whom he shared The Frames’ formidable bill at Green Energy, and who are all gradually emerging on their own steam into independent careers. Many of them have similar record-industry wreckage behind them. Two – The Frames and Damien Rice – have preceded him with independent releases into the Top Ten. So it’s a cheerful thing to consider: 24 Star Hotel is being born into a musical climate where record company contracts like the one that, ironically, paid for much of its recording – and nearly broke his spirit in the process – are almost considered passé.

Interestingly, it also augurs well that this independent-music extended family is now strong enough, and the various family members (to continue a clumsy metaphor) ‘grown up’ enough, that a bit of almost teenagerish rebellion, a tiny stepping-away, is beginning to happen. While there’s still a great affection for the clan, there’s a new, slight squirminess in evidence these days when you talk about it – and not only with Mundy.

It boils down to a desire among these various, individual, actually quite diverse, musicians to be seen as just that. This is no sinister married-to-the-mob scenario, either: it’s classic family psychology, and – for anyone who cares about music in this country – it’s an extremely healthy sign.

It must be great fun, I venture, to be making the kind of music that you make in Ireland at the moment, and to be a part of such a strong family of musicians. There’s that squirmy pause, where Mundy is very evidently thinking things and not saying them.

“Yeah. Well, em – He thinks some more. “I definitely like being a singer-songwriter, or a musician, in Dublin because we are like a little family,” he agrees. “And you know, we don’t talk about how to write songs or whatever, but hanging out with people, with Paddy [Casey] and Glen [Hansard], and Damien Rice and Kittser, you get to see that they’ve got a different slant on things, and you learn from each other, and it’s great. It’s very enlightening to get somebody else’s wisdom,” he concludes. “Their angle on life.”

So. Things we love about Mundy’s current angle on life, or more specifically, about 24 Star Hotel. We love the plangent finger-picked acoustic guitar sound that wends its way through the album, lending it a wayfaring, sun-dappled folkiness. We love that Mundy’s grown into his voice, or it’s grown into him: the early boyishness is still there, but now it’s both stronger and rougher, a bit disheveled, his Birr accent gloriously undisguised, slouching momentarily off of a note one minute, lurching full-throatedly upward to a swingy melodic peak the next.

We love that several of the songs are, either obliquely or actually, about the disintegration of the artist-A&R relationship, and that at least one of them – the blustery, tautly-written, well-nigh-flawless ‘Rescue Remedy’ – is radio-poptastic enough to have his ex-jailers snivelling into their clipboards. We love the fact that occasionally his melodies have a gentle, almost Irish-trad saudade to them, as if you could play them on a fiddle equally effectively (say, ‘Drive’ or ‘Rainbow’); and we love that, lyrically, Hotel is very much in love with life, understands the importance of seizing the day, of being brave, and of recognising one’s own good fortune.

Things that frustrate us about Mundy. Well, one thing: an occasional propensity for obvious rhymes, to take easy paths lyrically, to use awkward analogies because (it appears) they’re to hand, when a bit of extra soul-searching or brain-wracking might have turned up something worthier of his melodic gift. It bears mentioning however that, upon repeated listens, any lyrical naivete on Hotel loses importance: the album is terribly warm, summery, candid; more complex than it first appears; full of optimism borne of difficulty; friendly. You become fonder of it with every listen.

Anyway, any quibbling probably has something to do with the fact that he’s shown us more than once how good his songs can be. ‘Rescue Remedy’, excellently skiffley party single ‘Mexico’, and current fan-fave ‘July’ aside, his 1996 single ‘To You I Bestow’ – his albatross and golden oldie, his ‘Creep’ and cash crop, his ‘lucky song,’ as he calls it in Birr and at Dublin Castle – was the sound of a youthful imagination writ large, an over-the-top teenage romanticism gone positively lunar. Written when he was 19, its child-prodigy ambition – all star-crossed minor-key fatalism and ardent first-ever-lover urgency – made it a perfect candidate for the Baz Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet film soundtrack it famously ended up on.

It must have been difficult to have done something that good, and that made that much of a splash, that early on, record company entanglements or no. But if it was, Mundy isn’t showing it – and anyway, the mammoth success of ‘To You I Bestow’ helped pay for 24 Star Hotel.

He’s already full of ideas for album number three, but Mundy’s new responsibilities as a label mogul have kept him from the recording desk. The songs are already in the bag (“They’re a lot more mature then the ones that are on this,” he declares buoyantly. “They’re more personal as well”). He gets very excited when you ask him about the production in particular: he’s brimming with very specific ideas about combining raw, basic arrangements, old-school recording techniques and the judicious use of a tiny bit of weird science. Of which, more later.

How does 24 Star Hotel hold up for you now, after so much time?

“If I were to record the album now, it would be less shiny, if you know what I mean,” Mundy says. “More rough and ready. But I did it under the reins of the corporates, you know, a lot of the songs were recorded to be put out under Sony. So the songs are still developing, really.

“I’d like to re-record the whole thing again,” he says, qualifyingly, “in a way, because I play ‘July’ a lot better now, and I sing it a lot better, and I play ‘Linchpin’ a lot better… But you know, the whole thing for me is, this album is exactly how I was in that time. It’s a photograph of that time. And I wasn’t ashamed of it, cos I thought it was a beautiful photograph. And I was like: well, it has to be put out there, cos in reality it’s the second album I made. And now I can move on, and it’s out of my system, and I’ve had that baby, and I’m goin’ on to the next one. I can’t believe how well it’s been received, to be honest.”

That night, onstage in Birr, excitingly, some of his newer ideas appear. Near the end of a solo take of ‘July’, he constructs, via a guitar pedal, a collection of samples, one by one, keeping the rhythm all the while. He ambles over to the drumkit, sits down, plays a bit, records it. He raps on the guitar, adds that. To the audience’s infinite amusement, he sings directly into the guitar pickup. It’s a bit kooky to watch, but it sounds great. Then he sings the last half of ‘July’ over the spooky-sweet, layery loop he’s made. It’s easily the highlight of the gig. There’s an audible sigh of disappointment from the crowd when he finishes, and presses the pedal again, erasing his accompaniment forever. He grins up at the audience’s distressed reaction, laughing. There’s plainly more where that came from.

Rewind slightly. Mid-gig. ‘July’ hasn’t happened yet. Mundy is introducing oldie ‘Pardon Me’. Things have gone amusingly anecdotal.

“This song is about a girl. A barmaid,” he says, and something in his tone lets us know this tale is not going to end well. “She brought me out on a date with her boyfriend one night,” he deadpans. People titter appreciatively. “So I decided, instead of getting all miserable about it, I’d try to make a bit of money out of ‘er instead.” The giggling increases. Mundy grins expansively. “Well, you know,” he says by way of explanation. “You have to channel all these things.”

The next morning I ask: How does a person know when things are beginning to go pear-shaped with a record label?

“I think gut feeling is the key to – well, the key to life,” Mundy says. “You can feel when something’s up. With anything at all.

“I went through my demos recently,” he considers, “for what would have been the second album. And it was very very rock, very full-on electric. Very angsty. I really wanted to take on the world…” He stops and returns to the question. “Well, first, the guy who signed me ended up getting another job, so I was stranded all of a sudden at the label. And then I just ended up hitting all these walls.

“I ended up being told that my songs weren’t good. All the time. And after a while, this became… kind of very annoying and started chipping at my confidence. And then, I was told I wasn’t looking well, and all this type of stuff. And then, I had two managers at the time, and one of them pulled out. And it just started becoming really ugly. Right around then I knew.

“Meanwhile, I was living in a flat in London with my girlfriend and my guitar player – because that’s where the label was, and they thought that I should be there to go round, and shake hands with everybody, and go to silly old gigs, and… It was nothing about creativity. They brought me to London, away from home, and they surrounded me with all this bullshit.

“You know, I made up all this thing [sic] in my bedroom when I was fourteen, I used to look out the window, play the guitar, and dream of music, and travelling, and beautiful things, and all of a sudden… You know how people say, ‘Oh, the difficult second album,’ but… it was difficult, like. People were just making up fences, to get over, that weren’t even there. D’you know what I mean? And em… so I ended up writing this stuff.

“This album is completely different to what I imagined it to be. It became like: you know, I was hurt, and then I kind of… was wounded, and then I got fixed. I went through all that shit for it to get to where it is.”

“So,” Mundy says to Oxmantown Hall. The room is still slightly electrified from the total unexpected strangeness of ‘July,’ which has just finished. There’s only one song left to do, and the room is quite sorry to see him go. “Thanks for comin’ out to play. I hope I’ll be back soon.” He stops, grins up at the audience from under his hat, seems to pause a moment as if thinking of whether to say the next thing. Then he does. “So,” he says, almost confidentially. “I’m really happy with the way things are going with me right now.” The Birr faithful give up a huge cheer. He beams, hugely, winningly. And we can’t but think: so are we.