The inside dope

Dope aficionados will undoubtedly be aware that Charis is the champagne of Indian cannabis – one of the smoothest, strongest and most surreal strains available. When John Conneely, 27-year-old lead singer of the Galway band of the same name, innocently explained this to the local press there was quite a bit of controversy. So now he has an alternative explanation…

“Yeah, there was a bit of trouble when I explained that Charis translates as ‘hashish that has been hand-rolled on the thighs of young maidens’,” he laughs. “But it also comes from the Greek word meaning ‘charisma’ or to ‘hold power over’. So depending on who I’m talking to, I usually give that as the meaning.”

Truth be told, the second version makes more sense – as anybody who’s attended one of their mesmerising live performances can attest. This writer first encountered Conneely a decade ago, when he was the teenage frontman of Aravnik (the backwards spelling of his native Kinvara), one of the better Galway bands of that era. He was pretty cool even then. Aravnik eventually broke up in the mid-’90s, around the time that Conneely became a father. He took a year out of music, but continued writing songs.

“Then one day I spotted an ad for a singer in the Galway Advertiser, which is very unusual,” he explains. “It turned out to be with Eoin [McCann, Charis’s guitarist]. They were looking for a singer with a band called Jinx. I got the job and we played together as Jinx for almost three years, doing a little bit of recording here and there. The drummer and bass player eventually decided to follow their own career paths, so Eoin and I stayed on together doing the whole acoustic thing under the name Charis.”

The duo played together as an acoustic two piece for a couple of years – doing memorable support slots to the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and ex-Door’s keyboardist Ray Manzarek – before becoming frustrated with the limitations and deciding to put a full band together (currently Luis Asturias is on bass and Bruno Staehelin on drums, but the rhythm section has changed once or twice).

Their 2002 debut album Desert Dark Sky was extremely well-received and when a visiting Boston promoter heard one of their tracks on Jon Richard’s Galway Bay FM show, he got in touch and invited them out.

“It was crazy – full-on! We were over there for 23 days and we played 25 shows between New York and Boston. I think the high point and the low point – if there can be such a thing – was doing two four-and-a-half hour gigs back to back on Paddy’s Day. After the first week we got into the whole rhythm of it. By the end we were fully into it and would easily have done another month.”

Musically the album is impressively diverse, superbly seguing together r’n’b, rock&roll and world beats.

Lyrically, meanwhile, Conneely seems obsessed with oceans, love, war and the apocalypse – though often in a humorous way.

“I’m not particularly tortured. I’d like to think I’m self-aware and know what my place is in the big picture. The insignificance of it all. I’m a big believer in let’s get our kicks before the whole thing ends. I have met people who tell me I’m wasting my time. Grand! But I’ll meet people who work for the County Council and tell them, ‘you’re wasting your time!’ Go back into your job, sit at your desk and do your thing. If you can get up in the morning and justify doing that then that’s entirely your problem. When I feel bad I climb a mountain or sit by the ocean with a guitar in my hand, because that’s what I do. And I love it!”