A Lazarus Soul are Brian Brannigan, Joe Chester, Julie Bienvenu, and Anton Hegarty. They released their fifth album The D They Put Between The R&L last month, launching the record with a joyous, replenishing show in the Grand Social. They released the single ‘Long Balconies’ on June 14th and they have shows coming up with Damian Dempsey and at All Together Now.

Steve Wickham plays on The D too, as does Vyvyenne Long, whose cello contributions to ‘Funeral Sessions’ and ‘Lemon 7s’ add further richness and profound beauty to a couple of the greatest songs I have ever heard. Brian Brannigan told me that the band arrived in Long’s house in the mountains of Wicklow on a stormy afternoon. They showed her the songs, he said, and “She was like ‘Holy fuck, this is dark!’—then she got really into the stories.”

Vyvyenne Long’s reaction to The D resonates with mine. The moment I knew I was dealing with a masterpiece was when I felt the shiver of the closing couplet of ‘Lemon 7s’: “Pills ground down like powder, ’til your problems are no louder than / A little infant whimpering for Ma to come and help“. But the same song is at its heart a love song, the lead character “A lady with a love so fine and genuine that only few could know“. Brian Brannigan calls ‘Lemon 7s’ a “love story in darkness”, and that captures something essential about The D: these are songs of love for home, family, and community, in hard times. The songs are deadly serious, with themes of social exclusion, addiction, alienation, and abuse, but they are suffused with compassion and elevated by humour and a battered but hardy hope.

This is a conversation that I recorded with Brian Brannigan on June 10th. We covered a lot of ground. The themes and origins of The D provided plenty of raw material, including enjoyable excursions into musical inspirations like Nick Cave, Nyabinghi reggae, Mark Eitzel, and The Idiots. Brian spoke warmly about his formative years in The Attic in the 1990s and about his friend Dave Carroll, of Wormhole and E+S=B, who had died the week before. Brian messaged me the day after we met to say “We rambled – I forgot we were doing an interview”. I felt the same way, and I hope that ease and unguardedness comes across in the piece.

NC: Congratulations on the album. I am curious what it must be like for you now. We met at the album launch, and that was an amazing celebratory night. But even since then, the reception for the record has been incredible. What is it like to be on the receiving end of all of that?

BB: It’s a bit strange. We’ve been making records for twenty years as A Lazarus Soul, and we haven’t had that reception before, so yeah – it’s a bit odd to begin with. But it’s kind of something that’s happening in social media, really, to me, you know? Because we’re not playing, we’re not out there all the time, and then I’m just back in work after two weeks or so. I kinda feel that people’s relationship with the album is theirs now, the album is theirs. Bar playing gigs, it’s someone else’s now. But it’s nice. It’s good to get that positive feedback.

What do you think people are connecting with in the new songs?

I haven’t got a clue. The only thing is they’re more song-based, like ballads, and maybe that’s just in our DNA. And maybe people were waiting for a record like this. I don’t know. People that like A Lazarus Soul can’t understand it (laughs). People that like the other records can’t understand it. They’re wondering like why people are attracted to this record. It’s not really for us to say, you know? It’s just for us to put them out there and we’re just happy that we’ve had a positive reaction. It is, it’s strange.

Something that I think runs through the album, like in ‘Lemon 7s’, ‘Metal Railings’, and ‘Funeral Sessions’, is the attention you pay to the social forces at play in people’s lives that dictate what happens to them, often more than choices they make themselves, and that we don’t really give enough credit to.

You know, I’m probably going to ruin this by saying this, but, the album wasn’t written as a piece. So it was very much an album of circumstance. It wasn’t meant to fit together and at one point it really didn’t fit together. So before we wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and ‘Long Balconies’, the album wasn’t gelling basically. We had it in a different sequence and it wasn’t working.

There was no agenda more than any record that we’ve made before. On past albums, we had a really strong idea of what we were doing and there was a title hanging around and all that. This record seemed to just come together itself. It wasn’t forced. Them social issues and themes: it wasn’t a grand plan. It wasn’t like me going, I’m going to write this record about what’s going on now. And it wasn’t a big statement that we were making.

When I’m writing, it’s very much, I’m writing a sentence and then the next sentence. I don’t ever stand back to examine the songs when I’m writing, and the next song is completely separate. So it just so happened that when it came together, I didn’t even realize it, but it just so happened that when the album came together, I didn’t even realize it until people started listening to it, that there was all these things going on that people were talking about. I didn’t see that at all. I work in a very small way. I didn’t see the songs fit together. And then there was definitely a time where we felt that it wasn’t even sounding like a record at one stage. Then we wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and ‘Long Balconies’. ‘Long Balconies’ went on to the album after the album was finished and mastered.

Did it.

Yeah. And that kind of changed the whole – you know, I had a sense when we wrote the song, that’d be a great second song. But when you’re writing a song, you can’t tell what anybody’s going to think of it. You have a very different relationship with a song when you’re writing it than does someone listening to it. And you can never imagine what anybody will make of it – nor should you care. You’re just writing the song. So a lot of things that people are saying about this record, we were completely oblivious to.

One of my written questions is “Did you come at the album with an initial overarching vision like a novel” and what you’re saying is that you didn’t.

No, absolutely not. On other records, we have, but on this record, it seemed to write itself. There was loads of little accidents that happened that pushed us in particular directions. You know, I didn’t even realize that the Black & Amber was so close to O’Devaney Gardens. I’d found photos from Last of the Analogue Age, where I’d taken pictures of the Black & Amber and I didn’t even realize it. So there was something subconscious hanging around in my head.

Then I was in Gmail one day and I found the photographs I’d taken five years earlier. Then I wrote ‘Long Balconies’, which was inspired by O’Devaney Gardens plus some early memories of flats where my granny lived. I only realized when I wrote ‘Long Balconies’, and knew it was going to be the second track, that the two things were really close. It’s only up the road. Strange things happened like that.

I didn’t know ‘Long Balconies’ was inspired by O’Devaney Gardens. I had visualised Dolphin House. There are lots of long balconies.

Yeah, completely. It was initially inspired by a short documentary by a film-maker called Joe Lee, who spent a lot of time in social housing complexes and he was filming. But it was inspired by early memories as well of Granny Brannigan in the flats in Ballybough. Those barrelled stairwells are some of my earliest memories.

I wonder if some of what people are emotionally connecting with in the songs is compassion. You are telling stories of people who have difficulties for which they are punished – disproportionately to put it mildly. People for whom things are set up so: you are born into difficulty and struggle, and then we punish you for being born into difficulty, thereby creating further difficulty for you. And you don’t hear these connections being made much in songs, do you?

No. Maybe in Jinx Lennon or Damien Dempsey’s stuff. But yeah, there’s a huge divide in this country, and it’s getting worse. But again, this wasn’t a big statement that I was making. To me, they were very small stories that I was focusing on.

So you take ‘Lemon 7s’ for instance. It was a couple that lived out beside me in Maynooth. They begged for cans outside the shops. I was just telling their story. It’s mostly a true story. A little bit of drama added, but mostly true. And it just so happened that they were sleeping in a tent, which is what’s happening all over Ireland at the moment. But you know, I was just writing their story and that’s what it is. And there happened to be addiction and there happened to be homelessness in the song. But really I was telling a love story in darkness. But what really struck me about that relationship was, they seemed to be madly in love, even as, as I say, they were on the bottom rung. And they had nothing. Actually sleeping in a tent.

So, you know, to me I was just telling a sad, tragic love story. Both of them died in the end. One had died when I wrote the song. Like you’re saying, people don’t tell them stories and that’s my place, to tell them stories.

I’m thinking about homelessness and addiction and the role that we don’t really acknowledge that a person’s circumstances play in their addiction. We treat addiction as if it’s a decision that individual makes.

Yeah, completely. You know, one of, one of the big struggles I had with this record was ‘Funeral Sessions’, and it was using the word “junkie”, which I hate. [“All the drunkards they stay local / All the junkies go to town”.] It dehumanizes people.

And I went to great lengths on Last of the Analogue Age to tackle this on the last song, which is called ‘Last of the Analogue Age’. And I was rallying against people like that who use the term “junkie” or write people off, you know, so they almost become invisible. It’s like homeless people or people with addiction and how people just completely ostracize them.

But ‘Funeral Sessions’ came and that line came to me and I thought the best way to say it was to use the word. I struggled for six, seven months with whether I should put that song on the record just because of using that term. But I think in the greater context it worked. It’s a striking term and I was writing from someone else’s point of view if you like, so it kinda made sense to use it. But yeah, I definitely think that society ostracizes these people. They dehumanise them in a way. A lot of the time it is probably a product of circumstance or area or whatever.

‘Metal Railings’ touches on the same thing: how a person’s chances of going to prison depend so much on circumstances of birth and and on social forces for which they’re not responsible. It makes me think about how individuals can represent more than just who they are. You’ve got an individual judge passing down a judgment on an individual person but really what you’ve got is two quite different worlds meeting represented by those two people.

I think you hit the nail on the head. People that are in charge of people that are making them decisions can never fully understand or, in my opinion, don’t care about the people they’re passing sentence down on. They’re part of the problem because the system that we have is fundamentally flawed. Poverty makes money for people and I don’t think there’s any great appetite in this country to fix that.  

Those people can never understand jail. They can never. It’s a different story if you’ve come through something and gone on to something else. If you’ve been there and you’ve moved on, you can look back, I think you can understand it. But if you’ve never been there, you can never understand it.

I mean, I grew up in Finglas. My family went on to get social housing. I was the youngest of nine so I used to go with my sisters who were a lot older and stay with them while their husbands were working, in fledgling estates like Primrose Court out in Darndale, and in Tallaght. I loved these places and I’ve seen them grow up and I’ve seen what they’ve become. Fettercairn out in Tallaght as well. So you grow up seeing them and you can understand how they work. Someone in the system can never understand, I don’t think. I don’t think they care.

When you say you love those places and you’ve seen what they’ve become, just explain that to somebody who maybe doesn’t know what that means.

It’s very hard to come out of them places. To me, social housing should be mixed with private housing. You know, you take people who are not well to do, you put them all together, and these places get stigmatized. It’s very hard for people to get jobs. Accents even stop people from getting jobs. They’re neglected.

You take Ballymun for instance. Not only did they leave thousands of people living together, there was no bus route out there. When they started there was no bus route or buses would go out very seldom. It’s almost cutting people off. Until something becomes real estate, there’s no real appetite to fix them problems and they just let the places run down.

But in saying that, what happens is that people in them places band together and you get an amazing community. People help each other out, you know, people share, help each other to the next bill, so you get an amazing community as well. But there’s so much social problems around these places as well that ultimately they’re gonna fail. So I think you need to mix up social and private housing.

OK. Can I ask you about Elvis Costello? I believe you were not thrilled about his accepting an OBE [the day before this interview – NC].

Oh, me and Joe [Chester] are just like [sighs dramatically]. It’s like, I grew up a huge Morrissey fan and a massive, massive Smiths fan. And we were talking about how your heroes eventually let you down. Joe mailed me some piece on Morrissey last week and it was appalling. He’s a mad Elvis Costello fan so I mailed him back, he’s like – it’s not quite as bad (laughs), but, yeah, we were both really disappointed. Joe actually adores him. So yeah – it’s just sad when people let you down like that.

What did you think of his explanation?

Rubbish. It’s rubbish. It’s like Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel, you know.

What was Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel?

I don’t know – it was so rubbish (laughs). It was about music –

Transcending something or other.

Yeah, yeah. And I’m a huge Nick Cave fan as well. So.

I am in the middle of reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and a band that keeps coming up as an inspiration to the 1980s generation of American post-punk hardcore bands is The Birthday Party.

I loved, I was absolutely mad about The Birthday Party. Yeah. Just the power and energy and the violence and everything about that band, I was fascinated with.

Hardly at the time?

No, no. I got into Nick Cave on Henry’s Dream. I heard Henry’s Dream outside Freebird on O’Connell Street and I was just completely smitten by it. And I went back and I love The Good Son, Your Funeral My Trial, you know, all them records. Not so much after that. Let Love In is a good record, but to me, Henry’s Dream’s the pinnacle. But sometimes when you come to people, the album you come in on is the one. Like I know a people that came to Nick Cave later, and they love albums that I think are dreadful. But that’s their experience with him.

The Boatman’s Call? You wouldn’t rate that as much?

No, not at all. I’m kind of baffled by people’s love of that record. I think I can understand people liking the first half of the record but I think the second half of that record is dreadful. I think it’s actually really weak. Even if he had have spaced the songs out, do you know what I mean? The first half of it is great. And then just like ‘Green Eyes’ and ‘Black Hair’, I think they’re really poor songs. Where Henry’s Dream is a masterpiece. Henry’s Dream had a huge, huge impression on my writing.

Did it.

Oh yeah, huge. Probably on this record.

Just talk a bit about that cos that’s not something I would naturally understand.

Cos he was kind of writing ballads but he was writing them… they were like Western ballads. To me, that was the closest Nick Cave ever came to writing ballads. But in his own way.

As in songs with stories?

Stories, and to me they sound like punk traditional ballads.  I’d say he was listening to a lot of Irish ballads and I think he’s said in interviews, not particularly about that record, but he talks about Irish folk songs. And I think maybe that was a big influence on that record. I can hear folk songs in that record, even though it’s dark and gothic and punk. The storytelling is very kind of folky.

I think ‘Funeral Sessions’ is very much inspired by that record. That record had a massive impact on me, it really did. And then even stuff like ‘Christina the Astonishing’ and ‘Straight to You’. I can see parallels between that and ‘Tar Road’. And ‘Funeral Sessions’. I mean, we do reference, sometimes when we’re playing, we do say “OK, do this Bad Seed-ish”, we’ll use them terms.

Did you listen to a lot of folk songs or are you steeped in folk songs?

Not at all. Absolutely not. And even when I was writing this record, I avoided stuff like Lankum and that. I saw what was happening with the songs and I tried to stay away from it because I knew where we were going and I didn’t want to be influenced by it. Strangely enough, probably the biggest influence on this record was reggae, old reggae records. There’s amazing melodies. What I’ve tried to do, when I’m writing songs in the last couple of years is write these really strong vocal melodies. So when you bring the music to the vocal melodies it complements it as opposed to the vocal melodies following the music. I listened to some Nyabinghi, Rastafarian music where it’s chant music and the vocal melodies are incredible.

Nyabinghi? [writes on hand]

Yeah. They’re a Rastafarian tribe. They play this really kind of simple tribal drums and they sing over with these amazing vocal harmonies and so yeah, I listen to a lot of that. I say I listen to a lot of it, I have maybe three albums, Count Ossie and Wingless Angels are two that I love. Count Ossie was a Rastafarian drummer. He was one of the first drummers to record that music. And that just has a lot of Rastafarians chanting over his drums and it’s incredible.

Is that like the seventies or sixties?

I think he would be mid to late sixties. It’s like a Jamaican folk music in a way. Mixed with a kind of American gospel. So I think what they did was they would take gospel airs and then put their own Rastafarian tilt on it. And then Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bob Marley, old reggae, very organic-sounding stuff. That’s a lot of what I was listening to. And then Joe reckons that makes sense cos it’s Jamaican folk music. But Joe was very much influenced by folk music.

So you know, something like ‘Black & Amber’, I wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and I was playing it on the guitar like it was like PJ Harvey or something. Then when I sent it to Joe I just sang it into the phone. I didn’t know whether the song was any good. I hate playing songs to people when I’ve just written them. And I woke up one morning and just as I woke up I took the phone and sang it. So that’s what you’re hearing is me waking up, that’s why the voice is so scratchy. So I emailed it to Joe on the phone. He lined it up on ProTools and played along with it and recorded it on reel-to-reel tape. And he emailed it back to me and I said: that’s it. We did nothing more with it. And that’s the first track on the record.

Something that I haven’t seen you talk about, I haven’t seen anyone ask you about, is the whole Traveller theme on the record. Several songs refer to Traveller themes, Traveller identity, Traveller ethnicity.

Under this record is a story of – I adopted my daughter from Ethiopia. And there’s a story of me moving from Finglas out to Maynooth, only 20 miles, but not really fitting in and not finding the sense of home. And at the same time there’s adopting my daughter, my mother and father died within nine months of each other.

So there was me becoming a father and also having that line cut back to my own parents and a lot of this record is – it was years ago, it was like nine years ago, but I didn’t really write about it then. It was about me finding community through my daughter and finding a home, and the two of us as well because she’d lost so much coming from Ethiopia to Ireland, much more than I’d lost. And her of being in such an inspiration to me to just get on with things and how tenacious she was, and how strong she is and how she just, you know, just made it work for her.

Like she has an incredible energy and, and she just, you know, like for instance, we came back from Ethiopia and she just woke up the next day and just was like, as if this was her home. She met my family and she just jumped into my family’s arms and just was an inspiration to, you know, how to just get on with things.

So all this is kind of going on underneath.

So, and then talking about Travellers – there’s inter-country adoption. Other stuff that was going on, which you would never get out of the album, is the migrant crisis – well, you might obviously in ‘Tar Road’. But you know, becoming a father gives you I think a greater empathy to see that and being the father of a black child and just seeing how those kids were, and families were just left washing up on the beach. That had a massive effect on me.

The picture of that small Syrian child. [Alan Kurdi].

Yeah. It broke my heart. And so, kind of bringing it back to the kind of racism that we have, you know, with Travellers. All of these things, all these strands, were going on in my head when I was writing the record. We grew up in Finglas, so I lived right beside Dunsink, probably the longest Traveller camp in Dublin. We lived side by side for so long with no trouble, just normal day to day. The shop we went to was the same shop the Travellers would go to and they’d get credit, you know. We lived in relative harmony for years. So I suppose all those things are in my head but I kind of see parallels between all these things.

‘Tar Road’ is where do you draw the direct comparison, isn’t it, between the way that we treat migrants, and the way that we treat Travellers.

Yeah. It was actually a John Connors documentary I was watching. They were talking about old Travellers. They were saying when there used to be Travellers all over the country they’d be helping farmers and they were tinsmiths. And they were saying that they’d love a tar road because they wouldn’t cut their feet. And that just started me thinking about the migrant crisis from the east and Africa. These strands just run around my head and end up in songs.

I listened to the album a lot for weeks after I heard it first and I had this feeling as I walked around of being slightly different for having heard it. And this is slightly embarrassing to say, but I found myself, during encounters with some people, maybe trying to be a bit kinder, because of your songs. And that made me wonder about the ambitions that you might have for the effect that your music might have. Are you writing songs so that people enjoy them, and maybe are moved, or is there a part of you going – can’t art influence people to be kinder and more compassionate, and do you imagine that your own art could be having an effect on the way that people treat each other?

On a very selfish level, I write songs because it calms me and it focuses me, and it’s a kind of a meditative thing for me. That’s why I write songs. It focuses my brain more than anything else. And I take pleasure in doing that.

And when I’m writing, it’s about the lyric I’m writing. I’m not taking the weight of the world on me when I’m writing a song. It’s more like it’s a mental thing. It’s like a mental puzzle and it feels right when the right words are in. I’m not always singing. I’m thinking a lot of the time. I’m out walking and thinking. And when I get the right word I can feel it. I’m not even speaking or singing. It’s in my head, and sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing it. So on that level it very much is an enjoyable thing and it’s not, the songs to me don’t seem that dark or heavy.

I suppose if there’s one thing I’d like, it is, like you say, to show the human aspect of these situations. But it’d be incredibly egotistical of me to think that these songs could change anything.

Sure. That’s understandable.

My relationship with music is like: I get up in the morning and even at the weekend I find the reality of life tough. I wake up, and we’re living in a country where it fucking rains, and it’s grey. Even on days off – we work all the time, and on days off you expect to feel differently but when it’s grey out, I find it hard, you know. The realism of life can – you know, it’s hard to actually go, “Oh this is great”. I mean, we should be happy to be alive. But what I find is, especially in the mornings, and I’m not a great morning person, and then I put on a record and it transports me somewhere. So if it’s a reggae record it brings that kind of Jamaican flavour to the house and straight away it lifts me. So that’s my hope when I make a record. If I could do that for one person, to me that’s a success in writing a song.

Transport somebody.

Transport someone, lift someone, inspire someone – anything. Make anybody feel anything, but changed. To me, music and kids and animals are like an alchemy that makes the ordinary magic. And if a song does that for someone, you know, even one person, it’s a huge success. So that’s my hope because that’s what music does for me. So not so much the content of the song. If I can lift someone in any way.

I was wary of this question because I realize that asking somebody “Do you think that your music is important” is an awkward thing to do and yet you and I and many, many people have all – our lives are different, and we behave differently, because of all the great music we’ve heard.

I suppose, when I’m writing songs, the last thing in my head is “What is anybody going to think of this?” It’s usually when something’s finished. To me, you know, I have a mad idea and it becomes a song and I go with the mad idea. I’m long enough at this to know that a mad idea eventually will turn into a song, or some of them will. Something will click somewhere along the line and the crazy idea becomes a song, but it’s not really until we finish the record that that I start going “What is anybody going to think of this?” And it’s not like, are we gonna inspire people or anything like that. It’s just – I really hope this is not shit.

I want to ask you a couple more things. I’m always curious when I meet people about the music that formed them. You’ve mentioned Nick Cave and those reggae performers. Who else are the big, big people for you?

If you’re talking about when I was getting into music, The Smiths were, Joy Division, a lot of English indie bands. Pixies, Sonic Youth, that kind of stuff. But probably Brian Mooney out of The Idiots had a massive effect on me.

Brian Mooney!

Yeah. His lyrics. He’s a really under-rated lyricist and songwriter. He’s still doing a lot of stuff now that’s absolutely genius. He keeps posting stuff online that’s incredible. Yeah – his lyrics and his phrasing in his placement of words in very, very loud, noisy songs. I was fascinated by his words and his phrasing and the tone of his voice as well. So he had a massive influence. He has a line in the song ‘Pinned’: “I think I’m going to cut thin ice”. And that line alone had a massive impact on me. It had a huge impact on my lyrics.

How?

I don’t know what it was, but that line was always a line that we’re trying to replicate. It’s hard to explain, but to me it was the ultimate. It’s like the Silver Jews, you know, I was talking on this blog the other day and I was saying, “I want to be like water if I can, ’cause water doesn’t give a damn”. That’s probably my favourite couple of lines in a song ever. And every time I write a line, I try and get within four miles of that line, or those couple of lines. Maybe with Brian Mooney, it was the way he said it, it was the delivery; it was, you know, it was what he didn’t say. “I think I’m going to cut thin ice.” Do you know the song?

I don’t. And I feel like I’m really missing out.

They were a really heavy band, you know? It was kind of like a slow hypnotic beat with really heavy guitars over it. And he recorded really lo-fi as well.

And Cathal Coughlan and Fatima Mansions. Cathal’s a big hero of mine. In later years, Vic Chesnutt. I think Vic Chesnutt was the greatest songwriter of our time, possibly my favourite songwriter. Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and the Silver Jews. And Mark Eitzel, they would be who I would consider to be the greats.

Did you say Mark Eitzel? Are you a big Mark Eitzel fan?

Oh yeah. I think Mercury is one of the greatest albums.

Talk about formative. Mercury was not my first album of his because I got Everclear when I was 17. California is probably the album I’ve listened to most in my life. And I started writing about music by writing about Mercury.

And like we were saying, you come to bands on certain albums, I came to them on San Francisco. I think they did a Dave Fanning interview that night before they played the Tivoli. And they played that song on the show, the one with “Mercury” in the chorus… ‘Challenger’. They played ‘Challenger’ and me and me mates were like – what the fuck is this? So we went to see them the next night. And we were just absolutely blown away by it.

When you mention Brian Mooney, that whole period of music in the mid-90s, the Attic scene, was really special. Your Wormholes and Sunbears and so on.

That was my introduction to music. I was 17 or 18 and living in Finglas and I used to walk into town and have two or three pints of Guinness and stand at the cigarette machine on me own and watch The Idiots, Wormhole, Sunbear, Luggage. So that was my introduction to the local music scene and it was probably the greatest local music scene ever.

I mean really. Talk about timing.

Yeah, I just walked into this world and at a time where I was just a teenager and I didn’t have a place in the world, and I found this amazing scene. And there were theses incedible people that invited me in. I’m actually starting to see it again now in Dublin. There seems to be that openness in music and supportiveness.  

But back then, you know what, no-one ever thought they were ever going to do anything. Every band was different. It was such great bands. Me and Martin Kelly from Sunbear argue about The Idiots or Whipping Boy. I mean, the Whipping Boy gigs, pre-Heartworm, were probably the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen. There was like eight gigs that I went to where I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that since. There was one particular one in the Project where The Idiots and Whipping Boy played together. And I would say The Idiots were actually better than them. Martin reckons that The Idiots are the greatest Irish band ever. Definitely, The Idiots are up there. Wormhole as well. I was at Dave’s Mass the other day.

You knew Dave?

I  used to go and see Wormhole and I didn’t know them then, but then years later I started going see E+S=B and we used to chat. I used to go to gigs and we’d chat for hours and we had similar kinds of backgrounds. My father worked in the same places Dave’s father worked.

I was working on a documentary that never got made and once we went down to the house where they lived. It’s this amazing footage. We went down and they [Dave and his brother Anto, also of Wormhole] were still staying in the house that they grew up in, in Ringsend. They actually were very naive when they released the first album and they put the home address on it so we were able to find them because they were still there. We went down and did an interview with them and I never met a more infectious and passionate person in my life. We were just, he was talking about music and the film crew and all, when we went outside we were like, holy fuck, he’s amazing. Just the most amazing interview he gave.

So then I used to go to see E+S=B and we played with them in The Joinery one night. And I used to go to gigs and we’d just chat for hours. Just one of the most incredible people I’d ever met. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Life conspired. The Wormholes played two gigs, and we never fucking play, and the two times Wormhole were playing, we were playing. On the night of our launch they were playing. Dave wasn’t, because he was sick. It’s a big, sad loss.

The songs on The D are a hard look at hard aspects of life. Do you generally feel optimistic? Do you think things can be better?

Yeah. I believe in humanity and I suppose I think there’s very human aspects of this record. I think there’s a lot of negativity in the world. The world is in a bad place. But I find day to day human kindness to be very inspiring. I see things around me all the time that I go, all right, that gives me hope. And it’s usually on a smaller level. So you see people helping people. No, I am optimistic. I think there’s goodness in the world and I think if you can find the goodness in these situations, they’re dark situations but I think there’s a chink of light in these songs. You know, the people that find love and find compassion and, you know, in some cases like in ‘Black & Amber’, there’s a little bit of humour in the melody, you know?

“For he comes home legless and he after a fish supper.” 

Yeah. And there’s people surviving this. So I think there’s an inner strength in the songs that in those little things, if you look, there’s little hints in there that the people are surviving. And the strength of the community I was trying to get across in the record as well. So there is optimism in there in those dark situations.

I’ve thought about ‘Funeral Sessions’ in this light. The dad is trying to connect. And that itself is hopeful. The song makes me think of all the times that this conversation doesn’t happen. Where there’s a connection that isn’t made, and not because there’s no will to make it, but sometimes people just aren’t able.

I think in families it’s incredibly difficult to articulate these things. It’s almost like – those channels become dead.  And it’s sometimes very hard to open them up again. Almost impossible. Families are strange units. We fall out with people, we don’t say the things that we want to say. Even though you know you should say them. It’s almost easier to do it to a stranger. It’s almost easier to be kinder sometimes to a stranger than it can be in families. And especially going back.

I think what we’ve come from in the past — like, I’d a good relationship with my Dad, he was a great Dad, but we never talked emotionally. And even though we had a good relationship, it’s very hard to go, Jesus, he never told me he loved me. Where I tell my daughter fifty times a day. She’s immune to me telling her how much I love her. So I think maybe things are changing, from that generation to us. We’re becoming more open as a people. I think we’re learning from our mistakes.