Dec 1st. 2024. Dingle. OLIVE HATAKE is coming to the close of his second show at Other Voices, the penultimate date of a tour in support of his BOYS NEED LOVE album. The place is, to put it mildly, jumping. Just as album and set closer ‘PLEASURE PEAK’ is about to reach a crescendo there’s a thud and sudden silence as his laptop lies on the floor with a smashed screen. It’s all beautifully chaotic, punk rock in electronic form.
Nonetheless, his first experience of the Kerry event (having already played OV Wales earlier in the year) was memorable. “Dingle was special”, he says. “Dingle was very, very special. It was such a beautiful experience that I can’t really put it into words.. All I can really say is that I’m grateful to have experienced that, to have played in front of that crowd and just to have been able to share my music with them”. And smash your laptop? “And smash the laptop…..of course”.
That was now, but how about then. When did he start making music? “Around like eight or nine. My sister bought me a guitar. I was a huge fan of Ed Sheeran, still am to this day. I bought it in Smyth’s, but I didn’t know how to play it. So I used to mute the strings, just strum along with whatever song it was. I played video games too much when I was younger, like way too much. So my sister said let’s get you out of the house and she took me to guitar lessons. The teacher asked what songs I wanted to learn. I went Ed Sheeran, like every Ed Sheeran song”.
This would lead to his first, albeit reluctant, performance. “My guitar had this Simpsons flame on it, it was so cringey. I still have it to this day. I remember I was nervous about it. I was like, no man. I don’t wanna perform, I don’t want people to see my Simpsons guitar. It’s so embarrassing. But, yeah, I did that”. It was only the start. “I started using GarageBand on my iPhone and I would just record songs, covers. But I didn’t know what I was doing”.
Soon he would become exposed to the kind of music that would inspire his sound.”I was a huge EDM fan on the low. Nobody knew about it. deadmau5, Martin Garrix, Afrojack, DJ Snake, Diplo”. That wasn’t just it though. “I grew up on Michael Jackson, so much Michael Jackson. I listened to a lot of pop when I was younger like The Vamps, Hannah Montana, JLS, Jason Derulo, 5 Seconds of Summer, Big Time Rush because I watched a lot of the Disney Channel.
I feel one thing with Americans is when it comes to entertainment and music, they do it at such a high standard. That’s where that mentality formed now as I’m getting older in terms of writing music”.
There was to be one formative moment when he was seventeen, studying for his Leaving Cert and preparing to study medicine. “Someone told me about Eden. I had no idea who he was, they were like, bro, you gotta go listen to this album Vertigo. I think I was like one of the last three or four people left in Maynooth University library. I put in my earphones and the first song I listened to was ‘start/end’. I still remember to this day how that made me feel. I can’t describe it in words, but something switched within my mind. I didn’t want to do medicine, I wanted to do this. So I changed my CAO and for months I didn’t tell my parents. I thought it’ll just come out, however it needs to come out”.
There was another artist who had an effect on the young OLIVE, the classically trained electronic musician Stephan Bodzin. “I watched a video of him performing on this huge mountain and I was like, what is this? That same year he was coming to Belfast. Somehow I convinced my mom and I got to see him live. It changed everything. I started making electronic music. It was the most difficult switch I’ve ever made because electronic music is actually really, really hard to make”.
If it is hard, he doesn’t show it. BOYS NEED LOVE (his second full length project, released in October) is a mix of euphoric dance music and personal emotion that was rightly given a warm response – as was last month’s expanded version BOYS NEED MORE LOVE. Recorded over two years, it went through a number of iterations before it finally arrived.
What was missing from those earlier versions? “Myself”, he replies succinctly. How so? “I think it was only when I came back from (a trip to the Superbooth producer’s conference in) Berlin that I said, okay, stop. Let’s really write about what’s going on”.
Which turned out to be some dark nights of the soul. “A lot of trauma that I’ve experienced, throughout my life and when I was younger. I feel like a lot of it healed. It’s not that I conquered my demons, but I spoke with them. In the beginning stages of the album, I wasn’t doing that”. There were further events that influenced the record, such as the end of a relationship and the passing of a close friend.
“I was actually speaking to Daryl (stage and musical partner Daryl Bengo) about this this morning. It’s amazing to have another best friend who is also awake at five in the morning and we’ll just talk as if the day started. It was 6AM. I was in the gym. He had just come back from a run. And I was saying, I feel like my trauma has healed. I had to go through BOYS NEED LOVE to do that. It was a therapy session that I just so happened to have released too”.
The approach seems to have worked, not only for those who have connected with the record but for OLIVE himself. “I’m at a point in my life, in this very moment where I feel bliss. It’s that feeling when you’re on a plane above the clouds, you can see the clouds and you can see the sun. That’s exactly how I feel internally”.
For a moment he returns to his seventeen year old self, listening to Eden for that first time. “I guess this is what I’m in. This is my purpose. This is what I’m meant to be doing”.
BOYS NEED LOVE is out now on Hidden Hill. OLIVE HATAKE plays Whelan’s Ones To Watch Jan 9th – 11th.
Feature Image OV OLIVE HATAKE Shoot by Enda Burke
