“My first musical memory would be hearing I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats when I was about two or three. I remember just going ape-shit for that song, the next one after that was Heart of Glass by Blondie. I didn’t start playing music until I was about thirteen or fourteen, I was always drawn to music but there was no one really playing musical instruments in the house. It was something I was always drawn to, musical instruments. My folks were a little bit oblivious to all of that because they weren’t musicians themselves but eventually I asked Santa for a guitar and it snowballed from there, like coral building up.”

First Guitar

“My first guitar was an old Karina acoustic guitar that was £60; my dad bought it for me in Dempsey's Music Shop, which is long gone. It was an amazing place just on Parnell Street. I wanted an electric guitar but someone told my dad “Get him an acoustic guitar first”, which is probably the best piece of advice, but I wanted a horrible ZZ Top style guitar that attached to my belt and spun around. I don’t have it anymore; I gave it to a little cousin of mine years ago. I was down in their house a little while ago and it’s obviously been thrown out, he never took up the guitar. It's probably in some bedroom or dumping zone.”

“My first electric was a Marlin, I can’t remember what it was but it was an Eddie Van Halen looking thing. It was Sunburst and the pickups would pick up every taxi company in the Stillorgan area for a ten-mile radius. It was a heap of crap; I sold it to my neighbour.”

“Gramophone broke up after we were dropped and everyone got disheartened. We all went back to our day jobs, but I kept writing and working on stuff at home. I saw this documentary on The Band when I was at the height of the depression from being dropped. I’d no job and that made me go back to all the old Bob Dylan records I’d listened to growing up. The first time I heard The Band I thought, “That’s what I want to be doing, that kind of music.” I was starting to get into recording myself and was building up a modest home studio.”

“We were in Germany for a year and I’d learned a lot. I pretty much lived in the studio. We had a house, but I stayed on the couch in the studio and experimented with the gear there. So I started toying with the idea of singing the songs myself. I couldn’t get a singer to do it so I went solo then.”

“For my first venture, I was really into folk, a big Radiohead fan and I was into electronic music at the time. It was definitely a “first album”, home produced, it was a good little calling card but I hadn’t developed what I was about . The rootsy stuff and Americana didn’t really come out until The Holy Shakers record in 2007."

“There’s elements of it on the first record but when I made the second record I said “No samplers, all the sounds had to be the actual instruments, no replicas.”  I wanted to make a very old school sounding record. Franz Ferdinand and all these real angular bands were all the rage at the time and it wasn’t really, where my vibe was at.”

“I use a Gibson ES347, the blonde one. That was a present. Soper from Hot Sprockets used it on Soul Brother & Comin' On. They gave me the Epiphone when they finished Brother Nature, Soper gave it to me and said "Here you go man, rapid, thanks a million, you're gonna love this guitar" and I did. I put a set of flat-wounds on it and I get this really warm '60s sound, George Harrison, very Beatles kind of sound.”

“The twelve-string and Baritone Danelectro, I use a lot for different textures with bands. They're two guitars that not a lot of people would have and a lovely thing to use for colour. I'd use them on my records, but not live. The next single that I have coming out, the main melody is driven on the twelve string. It was all over Cathy Davey's song Silhouettes.”

“I’d say I play about thirteen to fifteen instruments off the top of my head, from guitar, piano, mandolin, banjo, dobro, organs, so mostly any string or key instrument. I played my first violin track recently but I don’t really play any classical instruments. I’m the world’s worst drummer, but I’d be quite vocal with drummers when producing them about what I think they should play. It’s just I wouldn’t be able to play it.”

“I started playing the Dobro about six years ago. I was playing with a guy called N.C. Lawlor, who was the king of anything with a slide in Dublin. This was used on The Faces cover I did for the Meteor ad.”

“I learned how to play piano when I was in Germany, and by that, I mean a couple of chords. I learned Let It Be and then when we got dropped I ended up taking a gig in a piano bar, as it was the only work I could get. They said “do you play piano” and I was like “…Sure I do” but I could only play Let It Be, so I’d play it like six times. I eventually got better and better and it really helped my singing, as I hadn’t really sung live before.”

“This was in the Viper Room, I used to play there four nights a week from 11pm to 4am, I really had to get good fast and they had this limiter on the PA, because somebody lived upstairs, so if people clapped too hard the whole PA would shut down. Sometimes people shouting from the bar would trigger it, so I had to learn to sing above the PA so I didn’t have to rely on it, I could do it all acoustically.”

“My voice and playing changed as a result of that, for the good and the bad, I guess. When I started playing guitar and piano with Lisa Hannigan in 2008, I had to learn to play really quiet, whereas I had learned to play really loud and drown out people. I toured with her for five or six years, touring all over the world, it was amazing to do.”

“I did an album in Eastwood Studios in Nashville, while I was on tour with her, I’d go there at the end of each tour. It was run by Eric Fritsch, he has an in with a load of guys from Wilco and Black Crowes so he was able to get these amazing session musicians to come down.”

“It was a great studio and pretty much inspired me to get my own place together. I thought, “Why the fuck am I spending $7,000 over here when I can do it myself and it would be a better investment.” So I was always hoarding gear for the studio.”

“The first decent amp I got was a Vox AC30 which got stolen two weeks later. I bought it for my 21st out of money I got from my folks, friends and family. I did a charity gig out in the Cat & Cage in Drumcondra. We were lifting the gear down, I brought it down first and went to give the drummer a hand, turned around and it was gone.”

“Someone with a van had fucked it in and made off with it. It had an amazing custom reverb tank put into it, it was like a small plate with a spring on it. Every Vox that comes through the workshop here I look to see "Is that mine?"

“I put an ad in the Buy & Sell to see if the person who robbed it was stupid enough to answer and some guy said he'd a Vox. I went down to see it, he was looking £800 for it because it was a 1964, and I told him my story and he gave it to me for £200. He had stopped playing guitar and was glad it was going to a good home. If I ever met him again I'd certainly buy him a pint, that's for sure.”

“I also like to use smaller amps, like the Fender Junior, that you can really crank, but not be so obnoxious that you're gonna loosen the fillings in the bass player's teeth because the guitar amp is so loud. I like Twins, I really like old ‘70s Deluxes, they're pretty hard to beat.”

“Live, I still use the Vox AC30 and sometimes I might have it with the Fender Junior in an old Marshall cab with the speaker taken out so I have it in stereo. That's only for big rock gigs; I tend to keep it smaller and smaller live now.”