The SONNY SIDE of the STREET

HE WRITES music. He sings songs. He’s partial to faded blue boiler suits. And he has to sing for his supper even when he’s ‘off duty’ – and even if there’s a taxi meter tick ticking downstairs. And the amazing thing is – he takes it all in his stride, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to put a halt to his exiting gallop so that those mad party animals could be entertained for a further (blissful) five minutes.

Let me explain. Sonny Condell bears his talents lightly, shuffles them even, from shoulder to shoulder as he glides from gig to gig. At numerous parties he smiles valiantly when a friend insists that he don a guitar just as the rest of us are slithering into oblivion under the weight of unseemly doses of drink – and he delivers a pitch perfect 12” extended remix of ‘Carol’ for our delectation and delight before he exits at the behest of an unusually patient taxi driver. And – you can bet on it that even if that taxi driver went by the handle of Travis Bickle, Condell’d transform him into a slobbering puppy dog by the time they’d hit the ’Rock road.

Which just goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover – because beneath that seemingly quiet retiring flyleaf lurks a wizard with a weird and wonderful imagination and a vocabulary for everyone’s mind pictures. Barns aflame; frost-bitten hitchhikers and toothless Scottish truck drivers; voyeurs; sideways glances in shop windows that startle; and that bottomless pit, emigration, its pains and frustrations captured meticulously on ‘Cooler At The Edge’.

Sonny Condell’s freeze-framed more than his fair share of everyday images. And the camera’s still clicking as we talk, images floating in and out of focus as he searches and falters to find the precise word he’s looking for.

For a man who’s been around the haggard more than once he’s remarkably stoic in his attitude to success, success of the monetary kind, that is. Then again that dubious yardstick that we all tend to rely upon, the elusive record deal, is hardly an apt measure of the inroads Condell has made over the last 20 years, both at home and away.

But first, a little history. That bruised and battered guitar that might easily be mistaken for a fifth limb, so integral a part of his body by now, was not his first love. Truth is, the strings played second fiddle to Condell’s first love, the drums. Drums, mind you, that were derived from a canny marriage of assorted canisters capped by wily fertiliser bags tied with twine – for maximum vibration, you understand.

Yes, our man wasn’t short on ideas when it came to making noises. And when it came time to pick up the guitar he’d already honed a finer rhythm method than the entire Catholic Church could muster at a SPUC convention.

Trouble is, and always was, that inordinate talent and an embarrassment of fine material does not a platinum seller make. As Condell has found out time and again. The frustrations of searching for that ever-elusive break are keenly felt.

“I’d describe the feeling as one of intense frustration, cringingly frustrating even,” he declares without hesitation. “I’ve found myself so many evenings sitting by the fire and thinking: ‘what the hell can I do?’ I do believe in this music’. I get encouraged by doing a good gig, yet getting it all to come together has been so hard.”

Still, now that he’s in the happy position of releasing his own album, Someone To Dance With, he’s content to wipe the slate and refresh some memories in the process. The engine’s revved, the automobile’s in gear. All he needs now is to be heard.

Only the seriously hard of hearing will ignore Someone To Dance With. Anyone else who lets it past their tympanic membranes is likely to experience an unholy caressing of the cochlea that will guarantee immediate addiction.

And though a bigger budget would’ve allowed him to hire an entire orchestra for the odd verse here and there, Condell’s still a very proud daddy and happier with his recent arrival than many a novice on the delivery ward.

“We were dealing with the reality of budgets and the time constraints of a studio,” he explains, “so we had to keep it as simple as possible and yet do as much as we could with what was at our disposal.”

The process of songwriting (for all of you waiting for the A-Z, disengage here) is one that Condell can’t altogether fathom, although the craft has become easier over the years.

“The inspiration is what is hardest,” he observes. “I try to let the ideas come out, to give them free reign, and that’s why they’re illogical perhaps. It is like the outpourings of the unconscious, I suppose.”

As to whether he gains an insight from songwriting, by virtue of making concrete something that might have remained below the surface is a moot point and one that he ponders dubiously.

“I think it must be like speaking in tongues – or dreaming,” he suggests, “because to write a song it’s almost a question of going into a dream, ‘Old Kowloon’ (a track on Someone To Dance With) was actually about a dream, and parts of it were actually remembering Hong Kong. So in writing songs I have that same sense you might have – of not having control over how a dream goes.”

And dreams, crazy as they are, sometimes come true. One of the joys of the last 12 months for Condell was the news that Stevie Winwood had chosen ‘Forever Frozen’ when he accepted Davy Spillane’s offer to contribute to Spillane’s last album. It’s a song that Condell has ably christened on his own, but Winwood’s decision to cover it was more than a welcome valediction. It was the ultimate compliment coming from one of Condell’s longtime heroes.

“It was amazing to get that news,” he smiles. “Especially since I had always loved his earlier work with Traffic and Blind Faith, and later what he did on Arc Of A Diver. He made some great pop songs then.”

Having served his apprenticeship with Tir Na NOg (though in terms of commercial success this partnership with Leo O’Kelly yielded copious fruits, most of them into the collection baskets of their record company, mind) and later graduating to the rarefied heights of Scullion, has he noticed a change in his audience? Are they older? Greyer? More – or less – discerning?

Condell pauses and pictures his last gig in his mind’s eye. “You see,” he says with all the understatement of a ballroom chancer who’s economical with the truth, “I’ve had a quiet existence, played small gigs. It hasn’t exactly been a fanfare operation, not a lot of people know about my music. And that’s what I hope will change with this album: that I can introduce my music to a few more people and then one could make a living out of it perhaps – which I dearly want to do.”

Yet it would appear that he’s someone who’s shied away from the PR machine that’s now part and parcel of the music business. Condell doesn’t see his absence from the back pages of the Sunday rags as an oversight on his part though.

“I don’t feel that I shy away from that side of things,” he insists. “I enjoy a situation like I have now, where I have an album out and I have actually something to shout about, something that I’m proud of. I enjoy that and I haven’t had that for a long time. I do believe that Someone To Dance With is a good album and I do feel that it merits attention. If I didn’t then I would feel shy.”

As for any thoughts of relocating to London or mainland Europe to bring himself within arm’s reach of a wider audience, Condell dismisses the notion on the grounds of faltering wavelengths: his sojourns in Holland and London taught him that audiences are fickle in a way they never were here.

“It was as though people could flick a switch,” he recalls, “and expect to be entertained, and then, just as quickly, turn themselves off from the music. It’s just a different culture, whereas here there’s a spiritual bond between people, and an understanding, a humour that doesn’t exist in other countries.”

Someone To Dance With is co-produced by Condell and Máire Breathnach, who he describes as the ‘conscience’ of the album, and there’s a whole gamut of contributors who lend their own particular hues to Condell’s tunes, not least, Máire Ní Bhraonáin, whose backing vocals on ‘Almond Skin’ colour in the gaps with almost a trademark sound. Condell was particularly pleased with her contribution.

“It was inspiring to see the way Máire worked. You’d think that such and such a cluster of notes just wouldn’t work, they would almost sound discordant, but then when she put on another line it all balanced up and she created this lovely thick chord that works!”

Recording a solo album must have been a completely different experience to sitting in the studio with either Leo O’Kelly or the collective consciences of Philip King and Greg Boland. Does Condell view himself primarily as a team player or is he more content to go solo, without the burden of compromise to sully his vision?

“I suppose in a sense recording an album solo is easier,” he nods, “because you don’t have to fit into other peoples’ ideas – not that that was hugely problematical with Scullion. In fact most of the time we knew instinctively how a song was going to go.

“You still need someone to bounce ideas off of. I would miss not having anyone, even if I had all the gear in my back room. Somebody has to be there to say: ‘You can’t do that!’.”

And it’s this very collaboration and melding of ideas that breathes new life into the live performances. Left on his own, Condell believes that gigging ultimately becomes a chore, a battle almost, against the elements. And since he’s no warrior in search of laurels he’s far from enamoured with the notion of ploughing his own furrow ad infinitum. Life takes on a rosier hue when there’s Someone To Dance With.

“Without the album coming out,” he remarks, “there would be a feeling of ‘here I go again’ – when the next gig comes round. There has to be a feeling of movement in it, the sense that something is happening, a sense of momentum. Being part of an industry is reassuring in a way!”

Listening to Someone . . . it’s also reassuring to hear that Condell hasn’t plunged into a colour-by-numbers approach to songwriting. Tempting as it might have been, formulaic writing (even if it does hint at some kind of guarantee of commercial appeal) hasn’t seduced him yet.

“I think that that’s been one of the benefits of playing with the likes of Philip and Greg and Robbie Overson, and also with Leo,” he says. “I was aware that you could do a type of song – for the rest of your life. But little hints from people, like: ‘You’ve done that’, or ‘You’ve painted that picture before’, have helped me in weeding out the poorer songs. You have to stretch yourself a little bit.

“It’s very important to look and listen to what other people are saying. An audience are a mirror of the song, and watching an audience listen to a song for the first time, I can tell whether there’s any communication going on or not.”

So, armed with instinct and clapometers, Condell is poised to set forth onto the dance floor to give it a twirl. Time will tell whether he finds enough able dance partners to fill his card. But if last Sunday night’s creaking rafters in the Béal Bocht are anything to go by, he’d better keep his shoes polished and his tux pressed. No shortage of takers there!