UNMADE IN IRELAND

- ALL MUSIC STARTS SOMEWHERE - UNMADE IN IRELAND is a collection of intimate and candid photos of musicians in their rehearsal spaces, homes, and workplaces. UNMADE IN IRELAND is just that--musicians who are giving their all but haven’t “made it” yet. In practice rooms, studio spaces, festival side-stages, and self-released albums, they represent the hard-working spirit of contemporary Irish music. Words by Katie Dwyer. Photography by Gregory Nolan.

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Biggles Flies Again, at home, Dublin.

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Conor of Biggles Flys Again

If your idea of ‘making it’ is a tour bus, label deal, champagne and all the rest, you’ll always have that stress of not achieving, not being there yet. If your idea is making good music and being able to sustain the lifestyle, then it’s possible and life gets a lot more enjoyable. You can focus on the cool small experiences. A gig in the middle of nowhere to 20 people can look like a failure, or it can be an experience—you can learn something or connect with someone or just be happy with where you are. Writing a song sometimes you’ll feel like you just nailed it—you get close to the full idea of what you’re trying to say. You don’t need other people to know that something’s good. All this can be anxious—I worry that maybe I should have a 5 year plan, or whatever. But there’s no sense overthinking it. The more you chase your own thing, the more you get it down, the more people will enjoy it because you know what you’re about and what you’re doing. That’s what I’m looking for.

“Come on Eileen” was the first song Conor Deasy remembers liking. He said, “My parents made me and my brothers go to piano lessons starting when I was seven, and I was the worst student. The teacher hated me and I would never practise but always tried to fake it. There was this other student after me who was completely perfect and my teacher would always say ‘just be more like her.’ When I started playing guitar at twelve or thirteen and for the first time I got into making my own music.” With college, he started writing songs, and joined the band the Gandhis, which saw some significant success including playing on TV, touring the UK, and actually getting paid to record an album. He said “it was steady and a really, really good time. We were great friends and basically spent all of our time together.” Conor then turned his attention to working on his personal project, Biggles Flys Again, which he had been working on, somewhat on and off, since 1999. He said “I worked on arrangements, recording in layers. That early stuff was probably dire, but I was learning about creating my own music. It was always in the background of whatever other projects I was working on. When I put out the first album it got good reviews and I started playing shows and adding more members of the band.” When asked about the creative process of writing music for Biggles, Conor said, “I write the songs, then the group arranges together. When we start playing live it all changes again.” Conor spoke quite a bit about the experience as an unsigned artist as opposed to his earlier experience with the Gandhis. He said, “This way you’re not relying on someone else to do the work. You’re in control, which is good because you can never be sure of what someone else is doing. But the trade-off is that you can only focus on one thing at a time—you can either write or book shows. It’s hard to be in both states of mind.” Ireland When asked about being a musician in Ireland, he immediately said, “I’m a big fan of Dublin. I identify with it. It’s a good place to live with an interesting history—a mishmash jumble of old and new. I love walking around town, bumping into friends. It has a common identity and sense of humour and intelligence. I’ve gotten some of the best things for my music from the community here.” Despite this, he also described his feelings about the Irish music scene as a love/hate relationship. He said, “Some of those same positives can be problems. It can get to feel really small. That humour can turn negative and you can sometimes feel mocked for trying to start something new. It’s easy going but things don’t get done, and don’t change. There’s a feeling of ‘don’t get too big for your boots.’” For all that, he said, “People help each other, and there are loads of people here putting out their own music and doing quite well. It’s such a resource.” Day Job Balancing a day job with music has been a challenge for Conor. He said, “Some people are OK about balancing a day job with music, but I’m not really. I come home tired and it’s hard to be creative. I need that feeling of available time, to know I can spend four hours writing something shit to get to something that might be better. If you’re working, especially full time, there’s no lightness to your creative time.” He manages this by working part time, which he says has been “OK, especially since I work in a guitar shop and get to meet interesting people all the time. I learn about the instruments, the different sounds and styles. So that’s going pretty well.” “Making it” 

Conor said, “For me, ‘making it’ would be more like it being viable to keep doing music. It would be more the practical side, making a living, rather than massive tours, labels, and having money chucked at me.” “To me,” he continued, “success is making good music and developing as a writer and a musician. It’s creating good songs. Doing something creative and making something is a really good thing—albums all start as just an idea in someone’s head. It’s nothing but an idea, and then a single song, and then it’s brought to other people and there’s collaboration, images or video are added and it becomes something more, and maybe it gets out to the world online and it’s a real, tangible thing that you’ve created. Just you in a room, plus time and work and collaboration. There’s a relationship between the music and images, video, and the scene—it all becomes something else entirely.” “That,” he said, “is a seriously cool way to spend your time.” This idea of creation is what drives Conor in creating music and pursuing an idea of success. He said, “Music is a positive thing, it contributes something and it feels good. You can get anxious trying to ‘make it’ and get on a magazine cover, updating twitter, worrying about who you’re talking to or whatever and not appreciate what you’re doing. But I want to be heard, I have those ambitions. I want to go somewhere with my music.” Goals Conor defined his goals as short term—following a small idea and seeing it through. Specifically, making an album and “making it as good as it can be.” He said, “In the end, that’s all you really have control over. You shouldn’t spend time worrying about the things that aren’t music—just be the best you can be and not worry too much about the things that aren’t music, like industry and image. There’s no sense getting too caught up in that.” He said, “I plan to keep on with Berlin and London. I want to play with people who are on the same buzz, and collaborate when I can. Maybe at some point it would make a difference to have help, like a booking agent to help push things forward. But for now I’m not looking and just keeping on with what’s working.” Would you stop? Conor answered with a simple, “Nah, I’ll always play.” Fair enough.

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Joey Gavin, work, Dublin. 

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Half of Me, studio session, Dublin.

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Rocstrong live at Whealans, Dublin.

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Otherkin

Possibly my favourite moments as a musician so far have been driving to gigs, all of us together—being with my best friends, listening to music we wrote in the kitchen at our gaf that we didn’t know if anyone would ever like, but knowing we were on our way to perform to people who were coming to see us play. It’s not massive success. It’s not “making it” yet. But I’m happy—the good times keep coming without us ever compromising.”

“I’m at the college of surgeons,” Luke Reilly said, “but I don’t intend to go into surgery. I really hope we can make this music thing happen instead.” 

I spoke with Luke as the representative of the four-piece Dublin-based band Otherkin, so the majority of this article focuses on his experiences as a musician. However (spoiler alert), if you stick to the end you’ll hear a bit from everyone. 

The band came together in 2010, when three members—Luke, David, and Conor—went to Toronto for a summer of “jobs and antics abroad.” It proved to be a transitional moment in their lives: “We would sit and jam on the porch, write acoustic songs. We found a drummer on the internet in 2012, so that’s when we properly formed and played quite a bit. We did some recording as well as playing live from early on. Conor and David were in another band which saw some level of success. I was working on 4 track recordings on my own, but didn’t have any experience of playing with others or being part of a band. But we started to gig often and moved on from there.” 

Luke’s start in music didn’t come from parental encouragement so much as a passion that arrived out of the blue. He said “I first got turned on by The Strokes. I made multiple failed attempts to learn guitar, but then I had a relaxed year in school and just became obsessed. I would spend hours every day locked in my room, playing in front of the mirror and thinking I was a rock god.” 

These days, Otherkin gigs frequently in Dublin and has recently gone on a tour around Ireland. Luke said, “We’re being methodical and making plans as a band. We know nothing will fall in our laps, and that anything that’s going to happen we have to make it happen for ourselves. So far we’ve done it all ourselves with our manager, everything from directing music videos and designing album covers. But we’re looking to get bigger soon, since we feel like we’ve reached what we can do alone. So now we need to find how to push forward while retaining our autonomy.” 

Stopping 

Like our other Unmade in Ireland artists, Luke is not interested in stopping his musical ambitions. “It’s rooted in my psyche. Maybe I would find different specific ways of doing music, but I wouldn’t ever stop.” 

Ireland 

“There’s very little industry infrastructure here. There’s a lack of indy labels and a small population to build from. But there are so many talented musicians—there’s 7,000 acts registered on Breaking Tunes (an online community for Irish bands), and I’ve heard a stat that 1 in 36 Irish people are in a band. So it’s competitive on top of the lack of support structures for new musicians.” 

Luke said, “we’re making OK money now, and we could maybe even eke out an existence on the band alone, but that wouldn’t be easy. In the beginning it would have been impossible—so many promoters ask you to play for no money, offering ‘exposure’ and nothing else. It’s not easy for starting bands.” 

Luke said that they’ll probably leave Ireland eventually, probably moving to the UK for the music industry potential there. ‘But,” he said, “we would want to get to a point where we weren’t starting over completely with a move. We’d want to build a more solid fan base and then find some entry point, whether that means a label or another facilitator. We would want to build from a strategic start.”  

Day Jobs 

Luke and David are both medical students. The other two members were working for a while, and have now returned to school as well. 

Luke said, “As a medical student you’re not really meant to have free time, so I’d say I probably neglect my studies a bit. But I’m not in the habit of failing classes, so I’ve had to keep a balance. This is our final year, and next we have to do an intern year. I’m a bit concerned about the impact that could have on the band, so we’ve got to get as much created between now and then and do more behind-the-scenes stuff next year.” 

When I asked about how much of his time is spent thinking about music, he said “All the time. There’s a constant rotation of songs we’re working on, and I tend to tune everything else out and let them play in my head to work through problems or ideas.” 

He said, “The things I spend time thinking about make it clear music is my real passion. It’s not like I’m thinking of radiographs and symptoms when I’m playing a live gig.” 

Goals 

Luke said, “We’re gonna put everything into our debut album and want to build from there. We want to sell out the venues we play in. We want to reach modest milestones and not rest on our laurels or mine a certain sound. We want to put out another album we’re proud of, and one that’s a 180° turn. And,” he said, “in the near future we’ll want to sign with a label to distribute more widely and reach more people.” 

“Making it” 

As with many musicians I’ve spoken with for Unmade in Ireland, Luke had a hard time pining down specifics for “making it” as a band. He said, “It would mean being able to produce, perform, and distribute our music comfortably. I guess it would be playing Jools Holland or the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury since those have been ideas of success for so long. But we don’t need to play 600,000 cap venues in Nebraska or wherever, but to be content with the band and with myself as a musician.” 

“Ultimately,” he said, “I want to not have any lingering regret for not pursuing the career I’m studying.” 

With that as an insightful conclusion to his idea of “making it,” Luke encouraged me to spring this tricky question on his band mates, which I did over the phone over the next couple of days, pulling them out of their normal lives to see if the band’s idea of success was a unified one. 

Conor Wynne said, “Making it means so much to me—happiness for me, my band, and my friends. I’ve done school and done a Master’s—when college is finished next year we can really give this a go. It wouldn’t be a record deal or a TV feature. But if we could tour around the world and have a feeling of universal communication—not even with a ton of people, but with a feeling of being known and understood. Having a platform. Having a crowd. Creating an album of the highest possible standard. The ultimate would be having people know our music, and knowing that our music helped someone get through their day.” 

Rob Summons’s answer was short and sweet: “If I got to play Jools Holland or one of those US equivalents, that would be the moment when I could think to myself, ‘yeah, I guess I’m doing alright.’” 

David Anthony was the last member of the band to weigh in on making it. He said, “I guess there’s a commercial side and then feeling satisfied with the quality of the music. To be able to quit what I’m doing and just do music. Listening to daytime radio and hearing one of our songs, and then not getting sick of hearing it. It would be great to not feel like we have to hound press to get a bit of attention. To have a huge single, and to be known. To put out a song and say ‘here’s step one and you’d just better be ready for what’s coming next.’”

He concluded, “‘Making it’ in that way would really be to have full confidence in songwriting—to not be afraid that when we put up a song we might not be able to do something that good again.”  

This was a new experience for Unmade in Ireland—the chance to hear from a full band what their thoughts on success would be. And it’s something special to get these different voices from a tight-knit group, and have a sense of ‘making it’ as both ambitious and grounded—the lure of fame alongside the artistically driven sense of creating quality music that moves people. 

I’ll let Luke have the final word: “‘Making it’ would mean being happy, healthy, and getting to rock out.” 

- Words by Katie Dwyer 

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Sive live at Whelans, Dublin. 

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Sive

“Every bit of music experience feeds into every other.”

Sive is a working musician who is supporting herself entirely through various musical enterprises. In addition to her personal music, she does session work, workshops, plays in a jazz duo, and occasionally is hired to play in musicals as well. She said, “I do music full time, and I’m just about managing to make a living that way.” When asked what that’s like, she said, “It’s fine for me. I like the variety and enjoy the experiences. It’s hard to make a living as a songwriter, but with music connections and scheduling around the various opportunities, it works OK.”

Sive has been “doing her own thing” with music for more than six years, plus years before that doing covers and playing with bands.

She got her start on keyboard as a kid, but really got excited about music when she started playing guitar at thirteen or fourteen. “I had a guitar teacher who was really important to me, and I got serious about playing and making music. I started writing my own songs at fifteen. I found some old recordnings recently—I mean really old—and that’s a whole different thing than having old lyrics written down. You hear your voice and think ‘was that really me?’”

Along those lines, Sive said that when she first started with her personal project in college, she would have rather died than be heard singing. But with the support of friends, she started working on it and performing her own music as a singer/songwriter.

Ireland

“Ireland is mixed. It’s a supportive music scene, and you get to know great people in different places around the country. But it can be hard to sustain a starting music career as there isn’t a culture of paying for live music and so you can end up losing money on every gig you play. There’s money in cover music and sessions, but less for bands making their own music, and especially singer/songwriters.”

Despite these shortfalls, she was quick to return to the positive, saying “But it’s an incredibly supportive environment nonetheless.”

This environment is important in Sive’s latest venture, which is enrolling in a Master’s program in Community Music in Limerick. She said, “the program is a bit hard to describe, but it’s helping train people in bringing people together around music—that music isn’t exclusively for people with training (or even a sense of exceptional inborn talent), but rather is for bringing people together with creativity, confidence, and communication in that way.” More specifically, she said, “It also enables improvisation and the ability to be silly, rather than focusing on formality and music training. It’s not clinical like music therapy, but rather encouraging music as a social thing.”

One of the reasons this program seems to be so appealing is that it is a return to a more authentic experience of music. She said, “Ireland used to have more of a scene of people coming together around creating music this way. It’s almost a community vs. elite thing, where now many people feel like they might have to be able to read music to participate, or that somehow they might be graded on any effort at music. But music is part of all human cultures, and everyone has the right to participate.”

“Making It”

“‘Making it’” is a strange term,” Sive said, “Since it suggests that it’s something like an end point, like ending up in the charts or being famous. Those are common assumptions about musicians. As a songwriter, ‘making it’ would mean to continue to write music I like, and which sounds interesting and is true to myself (as cheesy as that sounds). As far as ‘making it’ for a career, it would mean continuing to do music full time, and hopefully including a community music aspect. The money has to come from somewhere, and I want to do music full time, not just write every now and then.

Goals

Sive’s goals were even simpler and more articulate than her response to her idea of making it. She said, “I want to keep getting better, and to explore new sounds. I want to record good albums, and tour outside of Ireland.”

Even with her return to university, Sive is continuing to perform regularly, both with paid gigs and her own material. She plays with a backing band of various sizes, depending on the venue and the group’s availability.

One challenge she’s experienced arises from the necessity of self-promotion in the modern music scene. She said it’s particularly hard when it’s her own material, rather than a band, since there’s something “embarrassing and difficult in turning yourself into a product, saying ‘Hi, I’m Sive. I write songs. Come be in the Sive gang.’ It’s easier with a group, and the diversity of stories that arises that way, plus it gives you the chance to talk about the band, rather than yourself.”

In a similar vein, she said she sometimes encounters resistance and assumptions about the genre of singer/songwriter, including presumptions of ability or quality. “It’s not malicious,” she said,

“it’s just easier sometimes to put people in boxes, even when they don’t fit.” These ill-fitting boxes include ideas of her aspirations to fortune and fame. She said, “My family has never said ‘go and get a real job,’ and they seemed to recognise early on that this wasn’t just a passing fancy. They’ve been supportive and grounded all along. But people in general ask sometimes ‘have you got a job yet?’ or (even better) ‘but what if you fail?’ The thing is that I’m already doing what I want to do. I’m making it as a musician. People see fame as the goal because that’s what’s talked about in the culture. But it’s not my goal.”

Stop?

Sive concluded, “I’ve wondered sometimes if I might be happy not with stopping music, but in finding something else for the full-time part of my job. But I don’t know what else I could do with my time that would fulfil me in this way. I won’t ever stop making music.”

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In the studio with Otherkin. 

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Oisín

“This isn’t how you’d run a business—the hours and the chaos of it all. But it’s about making music. Getting it done, and ultimately feeling better for having created something.”

Oisín developed an awareness of music as self-expression at young age. So when he first started learning the guitar he saw no reason to learn other people's songs when he could just as easily write his own.

He said, “Dad's a writer, so I think that gave me an appreciation for spending time on something fictional, and getting that fiction has a real and important place in life. That there’s a need for it.” While the rest of the family left the house Oisín's father would start at eight or nine in the morning and work all day in his study. Just like anyone working nine-to-five. But the work was all contained in the family home, there was no outside interference, and it was definitely not what other dads did for a day job.

“And there's my mam, who's this super enthusiastic teacher, and she's all about sparking interest in other people. If you can make someone interested; you can share something. This combination of fiction and teaching, for sharing something which isn't fact but is no less important than fact, that's the space I like to live in.”

Then there's the day he tried to leave school to spend all his time working on music. He just stayed in bed until his parents were satisfied it wasn't the usual lie in. “I was only sixteen and I really didn't like school. We had a big talk and I didn’t quit school, but I’ve never lost the feeling of that ideal. Being free to stay in bed, or getting up to write songs.”

Despite his detailed timetable outlining how his time would be spent each day his parents convinced him to finish his leaving certificate. After school he went on to study music in Trinity College Dublin. But again at college he was happier working on his own songs than working on course work.

“A lot of hard work goes into making a song. The initial writing is fun and spontaneous, but then you have to sift through to find what’s worth working on and getting that right is where the hours go. I don't really have any song that I'd be happy to say 'that's finished', there's so many ways of treating a song, it's always changing. All I ever have is a version of a song, like a photo of a place, the place might not change that much but no two photos will be the same.”

Day Job

Oisin works at a coffee shop, which not only pays the bills but also allows for a small window into people’s day. He said, “For most people, grabbing a coffee is their ten minutes to leave their work and have a break. So I like being part of that, it feels like the playground in school.”

“I work so as I'm able to pay for a rehearsal space and for studio time. Luckily you don’t need all that much money to make shareable music these days—but you do need time. And food.”

Balancing music with a day job means long days for Oisin. He said, “We try to rehearse three times a week. I’ll get up at six, get home at five, rehearse from seven or eight and go on until ten or eleven. We try to do a longer stretch most Sundays. It can be pretty stressful and tiring, but it’s all good feeling it's going somewhere.”

Oisin came back to Dublin before Christmas 2013 and in January he lived out his sixteen-year- old's dream. He just worked on music all day. “It’ll probably get to that point again— I'll work until I have some savings, quit my job and work on music full time. I’m in a situation where that’s still possible—no kids, dog, debt, or whatever. A time might come when I own all the food in the fridge, the fridge, and the kitchen but until then I can keep on going as I am. It’s been a year since my last EP so I really have to get something new out.”

When asked if it’s worth it, he said frankly, “Dunno. What else would I be doing with myself?”

Beyond this most basic of answers, Oisin shared a true love of music and the experience of being a working musician. He said, “There is so much to music—the experience of being part of a group, or being creative on your own. Even the interactions with strangers and the ability to connect. If you travel with a guitar, people feel they have an ‘in’ to get to know you. You connect with other creative people.”

“Ultimately,” he said, “any job with good people is going to be fun. And in music, you’re surrounded by good people.”

Ireland

Oisin has taken full advantage of the collaboration and networking of the open mic and live  music potential in Ireland. Particularly, he said, it helps to perform in the same place over and  over—to watch other musicians smooth out their work and to have the chance to do the same. 

“I don’t get nervous playing live, and I think it’s because of getting that start with sympathetic  audiences and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Well maybe I do get nervous, but it's not an inhibiting feeling, I just feel more present.” 

“I really love playing live. There’s this confluence of senses that you don’t get when you’re  recording—something can actually sound quite bad, but the energy can be great, and your  memory of it sounds way better than any recording ever could. If it makes sense in the moment it  just makes sense, but a recording can make sense the first time and be awful the second time.” 

Oisin would like to see more venues in Dublin dedicated to helping bands and musicians make  money. “It's tough getting a paying gig in Dublin playing original. I was amazed in Leipzig that there were so many DIY venues where it was byob, and pay-what-you-want at the door. It was  this network of people who always had a few events going three or four nights a week. You  didn't get paid much but you'd get some food and a few beers. And you didn't need to worry  about anything. You'd just turn up and play. I think there's probably someway where a funding  website could raise money for gigs. If people paid for a package of seven or eight gigs, different  bands, in different venues it wouldn't take long for some kind or regularity to come about. I think  there's definitely enough people in Dublin who want to see new bands at least once or twice a  month to support that kind of thing.” 

Oisin plans to continue to live in Ireland, while also traveling and seeking a wider audience  online. “Once you get to a certain quality and people want to share your music, you can be  anywhere in the world,” he said. “This is a good place to start from.”

Would you stop?

When asked if he could imagine ever stopping his work in music, he said “I can imagine stopping, but I know I would start again. I imagine I would have regrets, and ask myself ‘Why did I stop?’ and so I have to ask myself now, why would I?”

"Making It"

“I’d like to be able to say ‘I’m a musician,’ and not feel like I’m conning someone,” said Oisin. “Actors, writers, and musicians can work lots but until you've got published work nobody really takes you seriously. I want to have Google proof that I am what I say I am—to have the output to make it real. And that will make it more possible for me to connect and jam, that other musicians will be able to look me up online and get an idea of what I'm about. And having the free time and space to be able to get any idea in my head down. 'Oh this song could really use a trumpet, I'll call Jimmy and see if he's free'.”

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Harry from Carriages at work, running sound at RTE, Dublin. 

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Oisin McCole recording session.

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Oisin McCole recording session.