Wild Thing

“I get really angry when people say college are the best years of your life,” fumes Tiger Cooke, as we discuss our mutual alma mater, DCU. “I enjoyed it a lot, but I didn’t have fun!”

Not when you’ve picked a bogus-sounding course like Computational Linguistics anyway, buddy…
“It was really, really hard work,” he assures me, “The theories behind it are all crazy, you’re going into Chomsky and Piaget and they all wildly contradict each other.”
Phony-sounding name aside, the course brought a young Tadhg Cooke and his guitar to Paris, where he played his first ever show in the early noughties.
“I met two American girls at some party,” he remembers, “and they heard stuff that I’d written and some night we were out, they were like ‘You should play!’ and before we’d left the bar they’d booked me a gig in this place! It was a huge eye-opener because I actually managed it! In France, you go down great if you can sing at all.”
Back home, Cooke found himself fitting into a more selective scene.
“When I started meeting people who were musical, it was a huge deal,” he gushes. “Suddenly I found all these people in Leixlip who knew obscure Tom Waits songs and played them at parties and I thought, ‘This is where I wanna be!’”
One of these friendly Leixlipians was Bell X1’s David Geraghty who coaxed Cooke into his studio to record an EP and eventually, out on tour with the band.
“There was one gig that scared the crap out of me.” Cooke recalls, “It was in an old Irish theatre in Galway and whatever it was about the room, the crowd didn’t want to make any sound. It was just this uncomfortable silence. I went out and was playing and telling a few stories and there wasn’t a single reaction. I came off stage thinking I’d bombed and I couldn’t understand why, but then Bell X1 got the same reaction! I sold loads of CDs and people were going, ‘Yeah, really loved that,’ and I was like ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’”
Since then, Cooke has recorded an EP, an album (2005’s critically acclaimed Wax And Seal), a live EP, featured on two of David Geraghty’s solo albums including the Choice Prize-nominated Kill Your Darlings, and toured the States with the Guggenheim Grotto (phew!).
Then there’s the little matter of his second full-length album Fingertips Of The Silversmith. Explaining the idea behind the title, he muses, “The normal human coping mechanism is always to think, ‘I’m grand!’ but sometimes it’s only a year or two afterwards that you suddenly realise, ‘I was in a really fucked-up place back then’. A friend of mine was studying to be a jewellery maker – they work a lot with acid but you don’t actually see the acid on your hands ‘til a couple of days later. She sent me a picture of this stuff on her hands and it was perfect!”
I mention that one track from Fingertips... caught my attention straight away – an experimental number called ‘There’s An Elvis In Us All’.
“I’d always kind of been bothered by what Kurt Cobain’s mother had called the ‘stupid club,’” he explains. “All these young kids topping themselves or overdosing before they’d produced their best stuff. I started thinking about the guys behind the scenes, especially in Elvis’ case, who basically just became enablers. They could have at any time said, ‘Listen, you need to stop eating deep fried sandwiches!’ But they didn’t. Strangely, we recorded it last year around the time all these Hollywood actors and musicians were overdosing on prescription drugs. Anyone who’s ever been to an American pharmacy can tell you their drugs will kill horses, so you can only imagine the kind of stuff they give to people on prescription!”
Meanwhile, ‘This Isn’t Easy’ deals with the more everyday trauma of social networking.
“I have friends in the States who are on this thing called Foursquare (technophobe translation – a web and phone application that allows “friends” to track your every move) and I find it really disturbing, especially because I know people who’ve had problems with crazy ex-boyfriends and stalkers. Foursquare is set up for these people! This is Ted Bundy’s dream website! We haven’t evolved to cope with that kind of shit yet. With relationships, a lot of people advise you to go cold turkey after you break up, but you can’t do that now, an ex- is only a click away.”
If album number two takes a less conventional approach, Cooke is quick to point out that much of the kudos must go to production whiz Geraghty.
"He’s very good at deconstructing songs,” Cooke beams. “He’s much more ruthless. He’ll say, ‘That’s the guitar part, so we’re gonna rip it out!’ He used a phrase from the title of his album Kill Your Darlings, he said, ‘You may think this is a crucial part of the song but it doesn’t have to be!’ It’s about keeping your mind open.”

Fingertips Of The Silversmith is out now. Tiger Cooke plays the Ruby Sessions in Doyle’s, Dublin on November 2.