Conor O’Brien, the lynchpin of Dublin’s most hotly-tipped musical act for 2009, Villagers, bears a jarring resemblance to Nebraskan angst-folk outfit Bright Eyes’ singer Conor Oberst: all choppy black hair, boyish magnetism and nervous, but earnest mannerisms. The similarities end at physical appearance however. Whether it be a masterful control over his soulful singing voice or his discomfort with talking about anything so cringey as his feelings O’Brien is a living, breathing antithesis to our culture of first impressions. Rather than the rampant egoism and self-involved musings expected of a man who admits he “doesn’t really want any input from anybody outside the band’s core members” O’Brien invites dialogue, jettisons cliché, and, most importantly, makes jokes about his own ego-trips.
“I remember when I was a kid of about 3 or 4 I used to draw lots of pictures,” he muses as we talk about whether or not critical recognition is a motive. “When I got a bit older I realized I was quite good at it and people would remark on it. There was a period from when I was around 8 and onwards where when I met anyone that I knew that hadn’t seen my drawings I’d get really frustrated. I’d bring stuff with me so I could just leave it on a table and wait for somebody to say ‘Did you do that?’ – ‘Yeah, actually!’ I think I’ve still got a bit of that in me. I don’t like to admit it but… Well, I just did.”
If O’Brien’s creative engine runs on praise, then he has enough fuel to fill a Trans-Siberian train. Cathy Davey cherry-picked him to play guitar on her Choice Music Prize-nominated Tales of Silversleeve, and accompany her on tour, while everybody from the Irish press musos to Jape’s Richie Egan have praised his myspace demos to the highest heavens. The hype machine, however, is no new technology for a former member of The Immediate, the band that defied all high expectations of them by prematurely splitting three years ago just as their gravy train seemed to be ploughing full steam ahead. Aware that he might not want to dissect the past, or be The Guy From The Band That Almost Made It, I only tentatively offer the subject up. Rather than shy away from it, however, he’s more than happy to identify The Immediate in Villagers’ genetic make up.
“I think we were starting to get caught up in the hype a bit. We hadn’t moved on as much as we thought we could have, and we started thinking “Oh, we’re playing another gig in Whelan’s. Why are we doing this anymore?” We had stopped progressing. Once the album cycle finished and it came back to the time of starting to work again we found me and Dave were forcing ourselves to keep stuff going, which it had never been like before. Dave was getting better and better at painting, he was spending more time at that. He sent me a lovely message on myspace today, actually, after watching Other Voices, saying “amazing, brother. Keep it up”. I know now even when I write I still feel, at the risk of sounding incredibly sentimental, his influence on me. I can imagine what he would have said, what he would have liked and where he’d have said “No man, that’s complete bullshit, don’t do that.” The same for Peter, the same with the rest of the guys. It just had to end because we’d end up being horrible to each other. You can see that facade on so many bands, trying to keep it up. What are you producing of value that’s worth keeping it up?”
Money?
“That’s what lots of people said to us,” he sighs in exasperation “‘Why did you break up? You were just starting to make money!’ I can see if they’re in the music industry why they’re saying that. But when I’m 85 I want to be proud of what I’ve done in my life.”
A true trundle wheel result for how far Villagers have come in such a short period of time is the recent set for RTÉ’s acoustic-guitars-and-Kerry-churches show Other Voices. The performance (hunt it out on the RTÉ website in between updating your Twitter) shows remarkable confidence and equilibrium on its feet for an act only recently born, and defies any expectations you have from the off. You switch on the TV, you see a man gently plucking an acoustic guitar to minimal instrumentation and crooning the words ‘For a long, long time I’ve been in pieces’ and you think “Just what the nation needs: Another Damien Rice”. But before long the song has progressed into a soulful almost-shouted segment with a shimmying lounge backbeat. And just as soon as you’ve carved out another pigeonhole, ‘Pieces’ flies the coop, exploding into a Bends-era Radiohead-like shred-attack accompanied by lycantrophic howls from O’Brien. By the time Elbow come back on the screen you’re a little bit exhausted, and Villagers have left an indelible imprint on your consciousness and shattered your first impressions, suitably enough, into pieces.
One of the other striking aspects of Villagers is a carefully-constructed visual and sonic identity already in place. All sepia-tinted artwork and fuzzy retrograde musical production, there’s something yearning, romantic, and otherworldly about the Villagers identity. This, O’Brien ascribes to “keeping things in-house”. His forthcoming EP, Hollow Kind, was recorded on 2-inch tape in guitarist Tommy McLaughlin’s Donegal studio, and the artwork created by Conor himself. When we meet he is taking a well-earned break from creating his first meticulously animated video ‘The Meaning Of The Ritual’. Another nuance of the Villagers style is the relative roughness around the edges of its output.
“I’m not so conscious about how people perceive me, more conscious of the fact that if I can’t keep doing this the way I’m doing it then I’m not going to be getting my kicks, and then there’s no point in doing it. I remember making the Immediate album, and as good as it sounds, I think it could have sounded more rough, and raw, and how we sounded live, which was a little bit all over the place at times. So now I’m conscious of keeping mistakes in, keeping it raw and unpolished. You can get really bogged down when you try and make everything perfect.”
When it comes to inspiration, Conor O’Brien’s black rook is not a fleeting one. Whether Renaissance-era woodcuttings of UFO sightings over Nuremberg or old soul concert footage his tree of influences stretches far beyond its musical roots. “My big thing at the moment is watching lots of old music footage on Youtube,” he explains, eyes widening a little in animation. “If I ever want to get in the mood I’ll just watch bits of an Otis Redding concert. He was such an amazing musician and showman. Music, books, and people are the three things I suppose that are catalysts. I’ve been getting really into Herman Hess, the author. I’m reading Steppenwolf by him, and also he has this book called Narcissus and Goldman which is one of my favourite books ever, and I was reading it while writing most of these songs and it linked in with loads of stuff I’d been contemplating and…” he stops himself for a second, groans, and puts on a spoilt American brat accent- “things that had been going on in my life.”
Why are you so ashamed of saying that?
“I hate talking about… stuff!” he exclaims. I think we have a headline for the article, there, I tell him.
It is this self-awareness of just how cringeworthy his role as the acoustic guitar-wielding troubadour can become that keeps O’Brien on the right side of the singer/songwriter trench. When The Immediate were at the height of their wave of hype the two-a-penny heart-on-sleeve solo act was the most harangued breed of musician in Dublin. An oversaturation of Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley-inspired blokes emoting with their eyes squeezed together as if hit by a bout of chronic constipation were as critically acceptable as a Darkness reunion gig. In 2009, however, the meat-and-veg Topman-styled indie four-piece are the current pariahs of the music scene, and Villagers may just usher back in a wave of richly-accompanied and arrangement-conscious songwriters. “I was a bit worried before I put the myspace page up, which I did on a whim just to get some songs out there. Just before I did it I thought ‘Is this really what I want to do? I don’t want to come across as another weepy singer-songwriter.’ So I’m focussing a lot on arrangements. To me the challenge is to test the imagination when writing a song, rather than test your emotional skills, or however you’d put it. I don’t want to focus on that – It’ll happen on it’s own. What I want is to make more colours happen in the music, stretch imagery as far as possible. I’m not interested in making emotional statements at all.”
Just before meeting I spot a comment on this year’s Choice Music Prize nominations: ‘Villagers will be tough to beat next year’. Having only been on the musical radar for a few months, and with his debut EP only being readied for release now, surely the Choice deadline of the 31st December 2009 will be a little too close to be thinking about having an entry ready on time?
“Oh no, I think we have to put out an album this year,” he enthuses. “I mean the stuff is all there, it’s all ready. It’s not recorded but I have it all down. More than an album’s worth actually. I’m happy with it. I think if I spent the next couple of months on it it’ll be what I want it to be – It can’t be six amazing songs, and six not-very-amazing songs, which I don’t think it will be. I think it’s going to be called Becoming A Jackal, which is one of the songs on it, and it’s going to be about change. Whether that’s physical change, or emotional and spiritual change, it’s based on that. It’s going to have peaks and troughs musically, I want it to be quite theatrical, to have sections, maybe segways, songs going into other songs, a musical journey without becoming like, The Wall, or something. Actually, no,” he muses, “I kind of dig that album. Everybody else hates it. What’s wrong with The Wall? It’s really good. Basically it’s going to sound like The Wall, then.”
Artful, ambitious, non-egocentric, and as soulful as a static-drenched Otis Redding record, Conor O’Brien and his Villagers project are rightfully adorning the pages of half the city’s magazines right now. He says he can feel “something in the air” in the city right now: “It’s starting to feel like something exciting is going to happen. People are going to have to retreat and make something of worth instead of depending on advertising and pay-outs to make viable what they do”. O’Brien should know: he’s the main source of that precipitating electricity in the air.
Words by Daniel Gray
