Hard Fi’s rise was of the cliched, meteoric variety. From playing pubs to supporting Green Day and appearing live on Channel 4 on the same day, a few months in 2005 changed their lives forever. Frontman Richard Archer, no longer ‘Living For The Weekend’, is currently building up to revisiting the ‘Stars of CCTV’ record around its 20 years anniversary, and remembers a particularly wild experience.
“The album cost £300 to make. We’d been playing to 200 people in the back of pubs when we got the Green Day gig [in Milton Keynes Bowl], and suddenly we were in front of 60,000 people. It was terrifying, a completely different experience. There were no walls, and we were used to the sound bouncing off a back wall. But so many people have come up to us since and talked about that show, it was such a big deal to us.”
“We were backstage going ‘they’ve got three tour buses, and one’s got a smart car that comes out of the back’, it was incredible. But then we were booked to do T4 on the Beach. The only way we could do both – and you had to keep Channel 4 sweet – was to blow the entire fee on a helicopter. So we had these tiny helicopters, and got choppered in. People thought it was Green Day coming in. Good times.”
Things would explode and then fade from there, and eventually Archer focused mainly on his alternative project, Offworld. Until recently.
“When lockdown started, the singer with Offworld, Krysten Cummings, got stuck here for a month longer than planned, so we did some bits and pieces together. It was daunting at first, but good fun, it’s not like we had anything else to do. The reaction really surprised me, there was a lot of love. People did care. So we explored Hard Fi, too, and decided to take that further.”
“On the new EP, there’s a line ‘too broke to eat, nowhere to dance’. When Hard Fi started, there were clubs where I live, and you could have a good night out with the wind behind you. Those places are all gone now. They’re flats. Those were cultural assets, people came together. The Stars of CCTV album was bleak, but it feels bleaker now, so perhaps those songs still resonate. It’s sad, but there we are.”
“We came back in 2022 and did the London Forum. Off the back of that, we decided to do some shows around the country, but there was still that thing of ‘what are we doing here’? We felt we couldn’t just keep going out playing the same songs, we wanted something different and new. I had never stopped writing, so it made sense to do an EP approaching the 20 year anniversary. It let us be freer, instead of just sitting there looking at an old album. We had some fun with it.”
The result was ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’, which is very much designed for the live realm. “Getting back in the room with the Hard Fi boys with none of the feeling that we can’t screw up, which is what we had back in the day… that dynamic… it’s nice. We should have just enjoyed the ride. I had been in previous bands that were signed and nothing happened. It’s a lot about timing, and we really had that pressure, it felt like we wouldn’t have another chance.”
“Now we don’t need this, but we’re doing it because it feels good, just to be in a room with your mates again. My best memories of it all are before we were signed and just doing it ourselves.”
John Sheahan, noted fiddle and tin whistle player is, sadly, the last surviving member of iconic trad band The Dubliners. Now in his mid-80s, the man with a reputation as the calm amongst a quite substantive storm shows no signs of slowing down. As well as recent collaborations with the likes of Declan O’Rourke and Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Sheahan has been right at the heart of recreating The Dubliners’ tale, delivered through a stage show entitled ‘The Dubliners Encore’, a show celebrating the lives of one of our cities finest music stories.
In this interview, the Gazette take a step away from our usual interview format to offer an extended chat with Sheahan, on his musical life, past and present, and the production of the new stage show. In it, Sheahan happily jaunts from past to present, showing a knowledge of the contemporary Irish music scene we suspect would surprise nobody who knows of his reputation.
“I was seen as the quietest of an unruly mob sometimes,” Sheahan laughs, looking back at his Dubliners days. “I used to refer to myself as the mortar between the bricks, keeping the building steady. They also said I was steering the ship past dangerous watering holes.”
That was then, and this is now. “I released my first solo album at the age of 80,” he says of his recent output. “It wasn’t all that different from what I’ve done before. I became known for writing a song called ‘The Marino Waltz’ that was used on a Bord Na Mona ad maybe 15 years ago. When a tune like that becomes popular you’re almost typecast, like an actor.”
“In the background I’d written 50 or 60 tunes over a long period, and used a couple of them on various Dubliners albums. I only worked with the engineer in the studio on the album, I wanted to keep it to myself a bit. A lot of the tunes have this kind of baroque, classical feel to them, so I’ve had a few arranged for string quartet or orchestra.”
“‘Marino Waltz’ was recorded in Marino casino among friends, including Colm Mac Con Iomaire, of The Frames. We did some gigs together. So there were a lot of ideas to bring into the studio, and I was very pleased with the results. I’m still working on notions of maybe doing a few more tracks, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m not in any great hurry to get a second album out but I am working slowly towards it.”
The broader scene, including several of its key protagonists, still inspires Sheahan, who references acts including Cork rock icons Whipping Boy alongside rising trad stars when he talks music. “I think trad is very strong at the moment, with some marvellous players, people like Zoe Conway and Maura Branock,” he says, acknowledging that the progress of women in the scene is a stark and welcome contrast to his earlier days. “They can both play on the trad scene or with an orchestra. I see music as an international language, a universal language, so I don’t really categorise it too much. I think quite often the style in which you play a tune counts for more than anything else.”
“For the craic at parties sometimes, I have played ‘Hey Jude’ with a tin whistle and traditional embellishments. There are some lines in there that are quite similar to a couple of lines in Mná na hÉireann, which I find quite interesting. I’m working on some ideas to combine the two.”
Taking a step back to glance at The Dubliners’ legacy, Sheahan is both modest and proud. “We get portrayed as the godfathers of Irish folk,” he laughs. “The first time we became aware of that kind of compliment was from The Pogues, who cited us as a huge influence on what they did. We never took ourselves that seriously or analysed what we were doing, it just came naturally to us, but it appears a lot of groups took our layout and our instrumentation as the defining way that trad music should be played. It’s nice to hear these accolades come back now from various sources, including the likes of U2, who we played with a couple of times.”
Not that Sheahan is set in the ways he helped to establish. “It’s nice to experiment a bit and try out different takes on tunes, as long as you don’t stray too far from the well. I think trad music has a natural internal rhythm of its own, which some of the old players were great at. There’s no need to force a rhythm on it. Old solo tin whistle players had this natural rhythm in the way in which they played.”
“I’d probably cite Planxty and The Chieftains as the very good groups, they were very tasteful with nice new arrangements that never lost sight of the original flavour of the tunes,” he says. “When I was growing up, some of the old musicians had very narrow viewpoints about what you could and couldn’t do, and shunned other styles of music. I remember I got caught playing a bit of a Beatles song on the fiddle, and told me not to mind that foreign jazz, to stick with my own style of music. Some people back then saw music as traditional Irish music and everything else.”
“I remember being down in Tipperary playing at a parochial home, and the hall had been opened early in the afternoon, just to set up. This guy came over to us afterwards and was obviously impressed with what we were doing, and said ‘do you read music, or are you gifted’. Which was a nice way of looking at things.”
“I’m often asked about my best moments on the road, and people expect you to say ‘I met Mick Jagger’, or something like that, but for me they’re little moments. Nothing to do with the stage production at all. About 60 years ago we were doing a gig in a little hall in Wexford, and after the gig people were coming to the dressing room looking for autographs. This couple came with a little girl, about four, and I went down on my hunkers and had a chat with her. I asked her her name, and where she lived, and she said ‘Sarah’, and that she ‘lived next door to the Murphys’.”
“She defined her world by the people next door, and I found that beautiful. Little memories of things like that just stay with you.”
“I miss them all every day, things like the Barney-isms,” Sheahan says of his bandmates. “Barney [McKenna] was once told on tour in Australia that it would be 100 degrees in the shade, and he said ‘Jesus, I’m not standing in the shade’.”
While The Dubliners have been gone for over a decade, though, Sheahan hasn’t stood still. “I’ve loved playing with the new generation of singers, like Glen Hansard and Imelda May. I did a tour with Damian Dempsey and Declan O’Rourke. We called the tour ‘The New Triangle’. Declan O’Rourke dropped by a couple of months ago and my wife had him cleaning cobwebs from the ceiling and changing light bulbs.”
Of course, those earlier days will never be forgotten. “We finished touring as a group in 2012, and a lot of people were nostalgic about it and bemoaning the end of an era, the soundtrack to their lives kind of thing,” Sheahan says. “Shortly after that my daughter came to me and asked if we couldn’t recreate that excitement and that talent from the original group, a kind of ‘true story’ live event, with songs and stories, and the craic, as well as the history.”
That idea would become ‘The Dubliners Encore’, the new stage show that announced its first dates in recent weeks. “We decided to do it with archival footage and a proper group, so we went talent scouting about the country for singers capable of reproducing the original Dubliners. We came up with five original guys, each quite capable of reproducing the sounds of the original group. Then we got Phil Coulter in to produce it musically, faithful to the original.”
“The guy, James Kelleher, who plays Luke [Kelly] in the show is very close to Luke’s voice,” Sheahan says. “We didn’t want to get an imitation, more a natural similar voice, and he’s the closest I ever heard. Similarly with Kilian O’Flanagan, he has the low pitched voice, and the guy who plays Barnay McKenna, the banjo player, has the same mannerisms and looks as Barney. The fiddle player, like myself, is quiet and gentle, a bit like myself. He’s a school teacher.”
“I sat in the rehearsals and gave them tips I’d picked up, techniques for accompanying songs,” Sheahan says of his involvement in the show. “We spent months on and off rehearsing and getting the shape of the show, and trying to recreate the original arrangement. Phil was a good man for the job as he produced five or six of our albums in the 70s, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. So that worked out very well.”
“We have a definite storyline running through it all. Maurice Sweeney did a documentary, and we got him involved. He’s familiar with the various aspects of the Dubliners from the documentary.”
“We took what we thought were the salient points, starting off as four individuals, then I joined about two years after the group started. There are clips of Luke leaving for England, with people getting on the old boat to Liverpool. He was gone for a couple of years. This was interspersed with songs and stories.”
The result is perhaps the closest thing to The Dubliners we’ll ever see again, and fittingly, shaped by Sheahan’s hand. Having been previewed on the Late Late Show recently, it’s all set to hit the road. Sheahan will be watching on proudly.
Experimental and self-propelled, Skinner is a Dublin DIY musician who explores the world of experimental textures in sculpting a sound that sits far outside what is typical of our city.
Carrying elements of rock, experimental jazz and the New York no-wave scene of the 70s and 80s, Aaron Corcoran intentionally sets aside what is currently succeeding in Dublin, but nonetheless is drawing attention in the build up to this new EP ‘Geek Love’.
“I think my style came out of a need to find music that no one else is listening to and to get reinspired, looking at things differently,” he says. “I don’t think what’s popular or relevant at the time matters. I want to dig out things that nobody else knows about. A couple of records have just blown my mind, they sound like nothing anyone is making today. Stuff like experimental freeform jazz. I find that stuff very inspiring and very refreshing.”
“My music isn’t for everyone. My favourite music is unlistenable, and the weirder and more distinct it is, the more I am drawn to it. I like to deviate from the norm,” he explains.
“I see myself as both a live act and a recording act, as well as a songwriter. I can’t pick one of those over the other. I particularly enjoy the live shows, and I think they represent the true spirit of what music should be. Records are great, but live music is where you separate how good you are on record and what you are really like. If a live show is really bad, it puts me off the band. Some people thrive in the studio and some fall apart.”
“What I do is very DIY. People push that idea now as almost a promotional thing, but realistically it’s born out of necessity, I didn’t know anyone growing up who played music. I had to learn all the instruments myself, and then I wrote all the parts myself, too. Recording is extremely expensive, ridiculous, so it’s about that necessity. I can afford a €100 audio interface and teaching myself, so that’s how it was born.”
“I moved to studios as I got older, and professional studios and engineers showed me a lot of techniques. There was no school for this stuff, so the only way to learn is to do it yourself. The only thing that matters is how it ends up sounding.”
“My new single ‘Tell Me Ma’ is based on an old folk song (‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’). I thought it was funny how badly things like that can age. It’s kind of a song you sing to your kids, and it’s not intentional, but I was finding the humour in the jovial tone and the dark themes. So I wanted to almost shout it, to reiterate the side of it that is quite grim.”
“I’m a product of my environment, so that means I’m struggling, despite having a full time job. Everything that I make from music goes back into the band, and I do it for the love of the art and the experience. There’s only one good studio space in Dublin, called Yellow Door, and it’s the only place I have 24/7 access. Everywhere else is day rates. The environment has become crazy for bands.”
“An album’s definitely on the way, but I won’t say when. That’s what I’m working towards. I think creating singles and creating successful songs can lead to expectations that you do the same thing over and over again. I don’t like that. I think you should always be doing different things, and exploring different styles. So a body of work, for me, is a snapshot in time.”
Pinhole are an avant garde act from Cork, and the product of a life in music. Taking in an incredible blend of grunge, Georgian folk music and Irish trad, Ciara O’Flynn and Mark McLoughlin blend experiences from their youth with freeform jazz, and cover topics ranging from the war in Gaza to treatment of the elderly. The resulting album is called ‘Sweet Spot’.
“‘Sweet Spot’ is our latest body of work with some slightly older songs,” O’Flynn says. “So really it’s tracking us as artists over the last four years or so. We were due to launch our debut album two weeks after the lockdown was announced, and it was really hard because we had to just sit on it. We continued to write during lockdown and because it was very much limited to Mark and I as a duo the new songs started to take a new direction, so we scrapped the old record and made ‘Sweet Spot’.”
“Personally, I use creativity to understand the world better,” O’Flynn continues. “Mark and I are campaigners at heart, so most of our songs are attempting to understand or express feelings on many contemporary societal issues, rather than just the personal. The songs are about gay rights, the malignancy of social media, treatment of the elderly, societal apathy, parenting… and so forth.”
“I think our art careers and my time in Windmill Lane have been the biggest feeders of what we do now. Then from a more lyrical point of view, our mutual passion for human rights feeds in and out of the lyrics,” McLoughlin adds. “The vocal is also treated as an instrument and like our instruments we push it and find creative ways of using it such as singing through the violin pick up, etc.”
The pair use stream of consciousness as an unusual element of their songwriting, adding unusual quirks in the process. “What I love about that particular process is that the feelings and topics around the songs organically bubble up,” O’Flynn says. “I rarely start to write with an idea of what I want to write about. That brings in a stiffness that just doesn’t work for me. I much prefer to listen to what Mark brings to the table first in terms of a few musical sequences, turn off the left hemisphere of my brain and just see what emerges. Usually it’s something I’m concerned about but not necessarily consciously ruminating on. For me it brings a genuineness and depth of feeling to the process.”
“There’s definitely a low-down, dirty blues aspect to some of the music with influences from Tom Waits through Nick Cave, Beth Gibbons, St. Vincent etc,” McLoughlin adds. “It’s important for us to keep a raw and feral aspect to it.”
‘Sweet Spot’ is partly the product of the Basic Incomes programme that supports some artists, something which has played into the sound. “We are really grateful for the opportunities we have had from that fund, because there was no way we could have afforded to make this album and videos without that support,” they explain. “It made all the difference. Making albums is expensive, so really it made the difference between being able to do it or not. Playing music costs at every turn: rehearsal spaces, renting venues and sound engineers for gigs, travel, accommodation, recording studios, graphic design, etc.”
“We’ve put decades of experience and years of creative wandering into it,” O’Flynn adds. “I’d be so delighted if it catches the ears of people and brings joy. Other folks’ music elevates me when I dig it. And we’re always open to new opportunities, the idea of writing for other art forms like theatre and film interests me, too. Making bags of money we can send to Gaza would be great.”
At the time of her big breakthrough, Vonda Shepard was not quite an unknown: she was performing with Jackson Browne, and having been signed and dropped by Warner, doing small shows of her own. One day, along came David Kelley and his wife Michelle Pfeiffer. After seeing Shepard perform, they asked her to write the theme tune to their new project. That project was Ally McBeal.
Years later, Shepard was a character on the show in her own right, and responsible, as music producer, for more than 500 tracks used on the cult drama series. She worked with Sting, Bon Jovi, Al Green and Tina Turner. She penned, and adapted, four albums worth of tracks herself, in amongst what would ultimately become nine of her own records. The lates is called ‘Red Light/ Green Light’.
“It felt cathartic to get the latest album out of my system, and when I perform I get lost in the song, she says. “I focus on the song, even playing live. It took my two years of the pandemic to write and record the album, and the discipline it takes to write is so intense. You have to push all the distractions out, and while I don’t want to do it again, the pandemic was very helpful in that way.”
“I work with MItchell, my husband, which is an incredible experience. He sits in his chair and nods his head and listens. He says play it again, and then he plays it back for me, exactly the same. He’s a brilliant guy. Then we work together to rearrange and add notes, change chords here and there. It goes through a lot of iterations that way.”
That slow and precise work contrasts strongly with the rapid pace of old. “I used a lot of energy doing Ally McBeal, often working until 3 in the morning, or filming at 5am,” Shepard recalls. “Then I’d tour in Europe for a few weeks then I’d do it again. It was very, very busy, but it was a great time.”
“The truth is that David Kelley chose all the music, but the lyrics and feel were so much a part of his vision for the scene. It’s a great feeling to have brought in people like Al Green, Gladys Knight… incredible artists.”
“When I look back on it, I was really ready for it and comfortable as the producer of the music. I felt like I belonged, which was great. I had been dropped from Warner Brothers, and it got me back into the vision of being a front person again. The strength and courage of that. I had an apprenticeship and learnt so much watching people like Jackson Browne relate to an audience.”
“With my new music, I start from scratch sometimes, which is the hardest thing I do. I throw out songs all the time, or pieces of songs. You can’t be lazy, you have to edit, that’s the most important part. I take out all the junk and just go with the good stuff. When I release an album [currently due in 2026], it’ll be the product of a lot of grind.”
As for touring, Shepard says “three or four weeks is my limit. But the life is so awakening. Your senses and inspiration are so awake. I sit in a cafe alone in work out clothes, see the architecture and the shops. It’s a lovely way to live. For four weeks, anyway.”
And the show? “It’s an all star band, we sound tight,” she says. “We’re going to do songs from the new album, a party bit at the end from Ally McBeal. It’ll be a ‘best of’ the albums, all of the albums.”
When Wunderhorse first dropped in on Dublin, it was to immediate acclaim. With a cutting guitar vibe and tracks that see them explore love, loss and a sense of eerie distortion of reality, Jacob Slater’s band were the unheralded support act for Fontaines DC when they played the Iveagh Gardens a couple of summers back, at the time the band’s largest show.
That show has proven a platform here: Wunderhorse now headline Vicar Street themselves, with sophomore album ‘Midas’ widely acclaimed as one of the best guitar albums of 2024 so far. On it, Wunderhorse became a band, as opposed to the previous ‘Slater and friends’ type set up.
“‘Cub’ [the debut album] seemed to steadily grow, so we’re hoping for the same thing with ‘Midas’. It does feel like it’s all heading in the right direction,” Slater says. “There’s a natural chemistry now to the way we play together, and Wunderhorse has become a lot bigger and better than me on my own. It makes sense that it’s a band. I’m still writing the bones of the songs, the chords and the lyrics, but Jamie on drums, Pete on bass and Harry on guitar all write their own parts, rather than my old place as a kind of musical director.”
“Most of the tunes on ‘Midas’ we recorded on the first couple of takes, which is how we wanted it. The things I like about guitar music, rock music, has been lost to this modern idea of chasing perfection. A lot of my favourite records sound a bit scruffy in places. I think there’s a charm to that.”
“I listen to tracks back and notice mistakes, and that’s part of it, but it is what it is. The band is forged out of playing live, and we wanted the record to be ‘warts and all’, a representation of that side of us. A lot of people got into us from coming to see the live gig, so we wanted to give a bit of that.”
“Recording in Minnesota came from Craig, our producer. We told him the kind of record we wanted to make, and he picked out the studio based on that. The place in Minnesota was near the top of his list. I thought it was a surreal thing that would never happen, but it did.”
“We feel quite blessed. Of course there are some hurdles, and some illusions are shattered. You do lose that naivety, and I realised that most people in the industry might have a different motive to what you think at the start. You get wise to it. Our position is very good, the label very supportive. It’s night and day from some of our situations in the past.”
“With my last band, Dead Pretties, we weren’t prepared for a big record contract. It all went wrong, which was nobody’s fault but ours. The wheels came off a lot quicker than I thought they would.”
“Now, we played Kentish Town Forum, selling it out, which was great, and we packed the Woodsies Stage at Glastonbury, which was a real shock. I wasn’t expecting many to come and see us. At the other end of it, you start to go a bit loopy when you tour the States. It’s like driving around in this tin box watching the world go by across a whole continent.”
Wunderhorse will see ever more of that world, with newly launched ‘Midas’ already taking off, and looking likely to propel them into the upper echelons of the growing dingy-rock scene. Their Vicar Street show on October 16th will feel, to Irish fans, like a euphoric return.
By some measures, you might describe The Kates (Eve Clague, Liz Clark, Mary Beth O’Mahony, Míde Houlihan and Paula K) as a side project. Made up of five women who all have their own careers in music, the band, now around for the best part of a decade, are essentially a different outlet for the members. That said, they’re also loaded with meaning.
Slow moving in their releases (despite years of live shows, a new EP is only emerging now), they prefer to do things well than quickly, and with a single track penned by each member on the upcoming release ‘Pictures Here of Dreams’ (out September 20), have created what is a surprisingly coherent piece of work.
“We each wrote a song for this EP and it’s been a really interesting process,” they say. “We all have shared in each other’s life experiences anyway, so one person would bring a song to the table maybe about 80% finished and the rest of us would collaborate from that point. We decided to name the EP ‘Pictures Here Of Dreams’ because that is a line from Mide’s song. We really feel like each of our songs was putting out a little piece of our dreams and our emotions and our vulnerabilities. So we felt that it perfectly summed up collectively our little dream of making music together.”
“I think that we were surprised how coherent the album did sound, knowing there were five different authors, and it was a really delightful surprise,” they say. “As far as if this is something we will continue to do, I’m not sure, we just have to see! I think we’re getting more and more comfortable and more and more efficient with our creations and everybody has something to bring to the table. But I don’t think we can commit to some kind of formula because that’s not really how creating works. I do think that you’ll see a lot more songs written by all of us in the future.”
“We had a lot of years to just really get comfortable playing music, being in a band, spending time with each other. When we were playing women’s cover songs, the stakes weren’t as high, so we really only got together to just let everybody in that room have a good time and celebrate women’s music together. When we did decide that we were going to write our own music, that was way more of a vulnerable place. I think having that foundation helped us be more resilient to these new vulnerabilities”
Ultimately, The Kates are in it both to tackle and represent women in the music industry more broadly. “That’s the main aim really,” they say. “I heard of a quote that says “you can’t be what you can’t see” and I think that it’s a really powerful message. To have five women up on one stage all collaborating, all supporting and encouraging each other. We want that to be what people see.”
“You can expect a little bit of a family dynamic on stage. We are all clearly having fun with each other, but also we’re all about connection and we definitely want to connect with all of our Kates Mates in the audience. We’re actually quite lighthearted and make lots of stupid jokes on stage and you’ll feel like you’re one of us.”
“I think our hopes are mostly just that we get to continue to play together.”
A few small gigs aside, it’s been a long time since Gemma Hayes has been a mainstay of the Irish music scene. Around ten years, in fact, which makes her return with ‘Blind Faith’ feel like an exciting new addition in the realm of quirky, downbeat pop.
“I came back because I had this desperate need to create,” Hayes says. “I stopped making music, thinking that it would be that easy, but I didn’t realise how important making art was for my mental health. After a few years, I realised I needed to make music the core of my life, along with my children etc. Creating has got me back in a good headspace.”
“Going without music was a game changer, I had a realisation that to me it’s like oxygen,” she continued. “Handing your music over to the public is the scariest park. You can create stuff, and it can be like an abstract diary. You can understand what you’re saying. I wouldn’t be a natural, Robbie Williams type entertainer, which I think is a massive talent in itself. So I’m always a bit slow to bring music to the public. That said, it’s a form of connection, so doing that is an important step, the final courageous step.”
That brave step comes with a form of acceptance around the public and their taste on Hayes’ part, she says. “Music isn’t for everybody, and that’s something I’ve learnt only recently. Not everybody is going to like the same stuff. You just need to find your own niche of people your music resonates with, that’s a great place to be.”
“With that in mind, my new album is very much a quirky album, but that’s how I intend it. It’s so cliche, but maybe for a reason… at some point it’s out of my control. I’ve done my bit, and after that, some people will like it, and others won’t. And that’s just normal.”
“It’s been ten years since I released music, so I wasn’t sure if there’d be ground for me to stand on. The world has changed so much, and what I had produced felt very much in the past. So I did have an internal battle about whether anyone would listen to it. Is there still a place for me? But it’s been a real joy to carve out a patch again.”
More than that, though, it seems Hayes is comfortable with her niche. “I’ve never had a massive hit song,” she says, “but I’ve put out so many albums over the years, so I think a lot of music people recognise my name. I’m fine with not having that hit, because I’ve never gone into a studio looking to get played on 2FM. I’m not trying to appeal to the masses, so there’s no disappointment there.”
“I’ve been working on little shows with Paul Noonan and Lisa Hannigan recently. It went so well the first time that we decided to keep going, so it was really natural to include them on my album, too. Lisa is my next door neighbour, too, which helps. She’s just across the wall. There’s a song, ‘Feed the Flames’, where she came up with a killer melody for the verses. She gave it a pep when it was quite maudlin, so I owe her for that.”
“There’s a moment in the album where I needed to stretch, and the song ‘Hardwired’ is that, it’s about feeling unsettled in a world of technology, and this idea about living in our phones. All being hardwired, it’s a bit weird being in that space. And it sits in that space because it’ll wake people up from that ethereal, zoned out world.”
‘Hardwired’ represents Hayes’ sense of change and modernity. But the album as a whole, a statement on her comeback, represents a greater sense: one of self-confidence and belonging.
