With a little help from my friends

When HP catches up with him, Fergus O’Farrell is hungover and still half on rem-time, but elated from the previous night’s studio collaboration with Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer, who were also among the many guests who appeared at the recent Interference show at Vicar St, Dublin.

Interference were always something of an enigma, ever on the fringes of the Dublin music scene, but of late there’s been a resurgence of interest in the band due to Fergus’s collaborations with people like Maria Doyle Kennedy and Glen Hansard, plus a recent appearance on the Other Voices: Songs From A Room series.

“It’s more fashionable now, the stuff that we were doing before,” he reckons. “When Interference went through a year where we couldn’t get the right drummer, we decided we’d start gigging this other stuff that the full band didn’t do anyway, so we used to do these gigs in the Beal Bocht. That’s where I met Glen Hansard and Mic Christopher and Mannix Flynn. Glen and Mic would play a set, and Mannix would get up in the gold lamé suit doing this amazing ranting soliloquy about trying to get back in his mother’s womb or something. So that’s why I wanted Mannix again (at Vicar St) because I just love those kind of shows.”

O’Farrell has been steeped in music since his childhood, when muscular dystrophy, a progressive wasting disease, prevented him from participating in sports. He’s spent the last few years mostly as a studio rat in Schull, his physical condition ruling out the rigours of the road.

“My big thing for the future is gonna be to try and collaborate and produce a couple of albums,” he says. “I could do three albums immediately, I’ve enough material there. I’m working with a new guy, Paul Griffin, who was a fisherman, and he just bought 505s and samplers bit by bit. I’m getting very into programming stuff now because I can’t play guitar anymore. I can still play piano, but I listen to everything.”

O’Farrell’s classical piano leanings came to the fore on ‘Safe From Harm’ co-written with Maria Doyle Kennedy’s for her debut album Charm. It was a collaboration that opened him up to new modes of working.

“I’m only really using the top third of my lungs to sing, and I’ve discovered a new way of singing that’s working for me,” he says. “But for a couple of years there my confidence was broken and I just wasn’t finishing stuff. And I was chatting to Maria, she and Kieran (Kennedy) used to come down here to stay just for a bit of crack, and I was very precious about my songs before, but I thought, fuck’s sake, there’s no point in me kicking the bucket with 400 song ideas that are never gonna be used, so I said, ‘Give ’em away!’ I got Maria to jam on vocals and got ‘Safe From Harm’ and I loved it, it was the first song I finished in, like, four years, which was amazing. And I just realised I liked working with other people.”