CPI Archive 2010: #120 The Carlene Carter Podcast 

If American music had a royal family, Carlene Carter would be crowned princess. Andrew Hamilton talks to the country legend about her struggles with drugs and a childhood spent with June Carter and Johnny Cash.

Life brings with it an endless capacity for reinvention. Carlene Carter understands this better than most. After spending half a lifetime in the limelight, the Nashville singer decided at age 41 that the time had come for a change. She had money and a family - why not say goodbye to the endless nights on the road and retire? By the age of 50, Carlene had buried her mother and her fiancé and music producer Howie Epstein (who died tragically after a heroin overdose). She was battling her own drug addiction and had even done a stretch behind bars. But the wheel kept turning, and three years later she was back where she belonged, writing and singing. Her 2008 album, Stronger, was a triumph not just for an artist on the comeback; it was a life restarted. “I think at that stage I was trying to get my life back together. I had had problems with drugs, I had some problems with the law - I was in
all of this crap and music had just taken a back seat. It’s what happens when you’re just trying to get through the day. I really thought I was going to be able to retire. I had gotten really burnt out on the road. One year I only spent 23 days at home. I was living in the back of a bus, and I just decided that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life," she said.

#120 The Carlene Carter Podcast

#121 CPI Archive 2010: The Lou McMahon Podcast
Proof at last that it’s not always a bad idea to annoy your parents. When a five-year Lou McMahon taped over her parents beloved Queen tapes, it seemed that only bad things would follow. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Sixmilebridge songstress and discovers the silver lining to her crimes against Freddy Mercury. 
An idea, especially a good idea, can emerge almost effortlessly. Call it inspiration or revelation, but more often than not the seed of something great can flash into existence in an instant, driven - it would seem - by its own invisible engine. Almost as if it was lying there all along, killing time, just waiting to be uncovered. But discovery is just the beginning. A good start, they say, is half the battle - but if all you have is a good start then the battle itself is already lost. Sixmilebridge singer- songwriter Lou McMahon started working on her Delicate Dancer EP way back in 2006. Now, almost four years later, this collection of six songs is finally ready to be heard by the world.  “I think it takes very little time to come up with an idea, but it can take forever to develop that idea. It took all of these years to develop the ideas of these songs to what they are now. I came to the point where  I just had to finish the recording, because it was taking so long. But I suppose that I could easily have carried on with it. They are all still ideas to me, they are still on a bare canvass,” she says.

#121 The Lou McMahon Podcast

#122 CPI Archive 2010: The Paul Brady Podcast

Legendary singer-songwriter Paul Brady has just released the most challenging album of his career. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Strabane songsmith about changing direction, growing old and the freedom that comes when you just stop caring.

Giving up and not caring are very different things. When you give up and resign yourself to defeat, sooner or later you must entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, you were wrong all along. And that can be a bitter pill to swallow. But to just stop caring, to decide that the argument is no longer worth having, and retreat - ethical football in hand - to the safety of your own convictions, well, that can be an altogether more fulfilling exercise.
Over his long and varied career, Paul Brady has never been afraid to experiment. But somewhere between the dulcet tones of 2005’s Say What You Feel and the re-entering the studio last year, something happened. He stopped caring. The freedom that came from finally telling his critics and those who direct his musical career to take a walk has proved to be the driving force behind his tenth and most experimental record, Hooba Dooba, which was released earlier this month. “I don’t really care anymore which is why I can go out there and make an album like Hooba Dooba. I feel sorry for artists who are still in the clutches of a record company. Once the accounting and marketing men moved into the record business  it was really the end of creative spontaneity and everyone then started looking over their shoulders trying to focus their brand," he said.

#122 The Paul Brady Podcast

#123 CPI Archive 2010: The Sandi Thom Podcast

No punk rocker: Chewed up by pop, Sandi Thom was a 25-year-old musician with a career obituary ready to be written. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Scottish singer-songwriter about going back to basics and overcoming the crisis of confidence which almost finished her career.


When your debut album sells one million copies, the temptation must be to think that’s that, you’ve made it. But that’s not the way the music industry works. Just two years after Sandi Thom’s debut album, Smile, It Confuses People, became a worldwide number one, the call came down the line from the top brass at Sony - “I’m sorry, Sandi, you’re finished.” A difficult second album, one which the artist herself admits was rushed, was all it took, then suddenly the best-made plans of Sandi Thom had come and gone. In the months that followed, Thom contemplated much. Hurt, and with her confidence on the floor, the idea of packing it all in was one that came up more than once. “Confidence was a big thing. I think anybody can relate to it. It’s like losing your job, getting fired - it’s the same feeling, that same sense
of rejection. I think no matter who you are in life, that is something that hurts. Your pride get bruised, your confidence take a beating and that hurts. So my confidence did take a knock. In a way, you build a family around you when you are with a label for a while and if you get dropped ’s like finding yourself out in the cold. It look me a few months to come through that, to shake it off and remember why I was in this business in the first place. It took me a while to get that back again. The thing about me is that I was relatively uneducated in the music industry and when things started to happen for me before the first album I didn’t really know what to do. That was a swift learning experience for me, especially dealing with the media.

The Sandi Thom Podcast

#124 CPI Archive 2010: The Cathy Davey Podcast 

After releasing one of the Irish albums of the decade, no one expected Cathy Davey to be dropped by her record label. Ahead of the release of her third and most implicitly personal album ever, she spoke to Andrew Hamilton about getting over her musical embarrassment and being forced to really sing for her supper.

The gloves have finally come off. After eight years of writing very personal yet heavy veiled music, Cathy Davey has found a way to be herself. While the confidence garnered from the success of Tales of Silversleeve was certainly a help in this new awakening, more important was her new method, or even the concept, behind the making of this album. Make no mistake, Cathy Davey’s third album, The Nameless - due for release this week - is a concept album. While concept albums have often been used as a means for the artist to take an alternative look at the world, the journey of this record is one of self-discovery, of finding a way of describing what in the past has remained, well, nameless. “I think I’ve always been personal [as a songwriter] but I probably didn’t have as much experience. Interesting things happen as you get older and it would be a shame not to be as candid as you can be. With this record, I was able to get past my own censorship because of the theme of ‘The Nameless’ which I had running through it. The Nameless is the woman in these songs and she is always an exaggerated version of me. So whatever I was going through, I was able to multiply it by 10 in order to go along with her story,” she says.

#124 The Cathy Davey Podcast

#125 CPI Archive 2010: The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast 

There was a time when Ocean Colour Scene was the hottest band in the world. Andrew Hamilton talks to frontman Simon Fowler about the new folk revival, being happy on the fringes of Britpop and how being unfashionable has become the key to their success.

Down the years, the sleepy village of Knebworth has become accustomed to a certain amount of action. Sat lazily in the northern end of Hertfordshire, just to the south of Stevenage, Knebworth is a village unremarkable in just about every way. Except, that is, that every so often it plays host to some of the most important concerts ever. It started in ‘79 when Zeppelin came to town; Queen soon followed and then Deep Purple chose it as the venue for their first gig in more than 15 years. But there was no bigger night than August 11, 1996. On that day, Oasis were joined by Ocean Colour Scene for the second in a set of two concerts that would re-write history. Close on 400,000 people saw Ocean Colour Scene perform live over those two balmy evenings, but more - 2.6 million more to be exact - requested tickets for what has since been recognised as the largest free concert ever to take place. But that was just the start for Ocean Colour Scene. Eight months later, their third album Marchin’ Already would push their mentors Oasis off the top of the album chart, making them, for a while at least, the top dogs of Brit pop. Yet despite the massive help that it gave his band, Britpop was never something that sat easily with Simon Fowler. “I think Oasis changed the perception of what popular music really was at that time. We had been doing the same kind of thing for years and then suddenly they come along and say that, actually, they do like The Beatles and they don’t have to make excuses for it. So we would have been in their camp and in Paul Weller’s camp but really I would have seen Britpop as more about Blur and Pulp and the NME, and we weren’t really linked with that. We certainly weren’t welcome in the NME club,” he says.

#125 The Ocean Colour Scene Podcast

#126 CPI Archive 2010: The Walls Podcast
 
Five years after the release of New Dawn Breaking, The Walls are back with a new strut to their step. Andrew Hamilton chats to Steve Wall about protest songs, fresh plans to conquer America and the problem of being your own worst enemy. 

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, a book caught hold of Joe Wall. When he had finished, he passed it to his brother Steve and before they touched down in Australia, both had walked The Road with Cormac McCarthy. That book, like every great piece of art, has a way of lingering. Three years later and the shards of The Road began to resurface. Mingled with thought of recession, and the generations of Irish who carried their fire to every corner of the world, an idea sparked at 30,000 feet became the hopeful, up-temp song of the summer. “We went to Australia three years ago to do some support for Crowded House and it was on that long flight that we all read The Road. Joe read it first and then passed it to me and I remember not moving out of my seat until I closed the last page. Joe took that line from the book - the idea of carrying the fire. He must have made a mental note of it and it came over into the song. One thing which is interesting about it is that he has taken the phrase and brought it into the Irish context. The lyrics are about the Irish diaspora post-famine. I don’t know of many other Irish pop songs that namecheck Oliver Cromwell or the people in the coffin ships. So it’s a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meets Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea but in a pop song - that’s the best way I can describe it," said Steve.

#126 The Walls Podcast

#127 CPI Archive 2010: The RSAG Podcast
 
Andrew Hamilton chats to Jeremy Hickey aka Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) about success from the sidelines and his latest album, Be It Right Or Wrong.

Jeremy Hickey never set out to be a one-off. After learning his trade behind the kit, the Kilkenny drummer plied his skill in small venues around the southern coast of Ireland, learning and experimenting as he went. When a borrowed four-track recording presented him with a window into life as a solo recording artist, a giant light-bulb went off in his brain. He hadn’t got there yet, but with this new discovery - and the new moniker of Rarely Seen Above Ground (RSAG) - he finally knew what road he had to take. When his second album Organic Sampler was short-listed for the Choice Music Prize in 2008, he knew he had almost made it. But despite his success and critical acclaim, there was still a large slice of doubt in his mind. It took 10 long years to get there, but there was still a very real chance that people just wouldn’t get it. “I probably still get a lot of that, I’d say. Definitely. When I started out, everyone thought that it would work. Some people backed away from me going ‘I just don’t know about this’. There was a long, long time when people were very stand- offish. But when it really started to get going and we got happier with the visual side of RSAG, then it changed. The music was always there but the idea of presenting it live was the tricky one. I think after a while people just got used to it - you know, the idea that what I was doing was a little bit different,” he says.

#127 The RSAG Podcast

#128 CPI Archive 2010: The Adrian Crowley Podcast
 
With a growing reputation and a Choice Music Prize-winning album under his belt, Adrian Crowley is an artist on the rise. Andrew Hamilton chats to the late-bloomer of Irish music.

By the age of 25 most people are packing in their teenage dream. Too old to play for Man United, too lacking in star quality to be an actor, too much of a grown-up to be a rock star. Yet it is at just this age that the world first began to hear the name of Galway musician Adrian Crowley. While Crowley is certainly a late developer from an “industry” point of view, his music and song-writing is something aged and matured over many years. It was a long journey, but one that, according to Crowley, that had to be made. “I think the music brought me there itself. I didn’t start out with too many great expectations of making a career out of it. The way I approached it was that when most people would have been out there looking for gigs I started working on my first album. I took an unusual approach to the whole thing. So,
the momentum started growing slowly over a few years so when I finally decided to go full-time it just happened by itself. I wasn’t really a decision that I would try and make a go of it but there was one year when it all just started coming for me and I went with it. I was doing music to satisfy something that I was striving for - I had no idea what people would make of it and I wasn’t trying to sell it to anyone. I think that had an influence on the music that came out on the other end. People are always telling me how unusual my music sounded and different from what they might have heard before.”

#128 The Adrian Crowley Podcast

#129 CPI Archive 2010: The Teenage Fanclub Podcast
 
It shouldn’t work but it does. Andrew Hamilton chats to Gerry Love about the multiple-personality-disorder which is Teenage Fanclub.

Gerry Love has seen his share over the last 20 years. From those big- label days, when even Kurt Cobain thought they were the best band in the world, to their more recent endeavours, when the Scottish three-piece-plus-a-drummer began to live less in each other’s pockets and more in each other’s work schedules. That’s why, when he says that the band is still close - and it’s the music and not their personalities that keep them together - you’re inclined to believe him. “If we are touring, if we are in each other’s close proximity for a while then we do share music and talk about what we are into now and things like that. And more often than not it turns out that we are still into the same things. But we don’t really communicate, in some ways, in terms of actual words. If someone just puts down some music, then the rest of us know they are doing okay. We don’t really sit about talking - we talk about football and world events - we don’t really ask each other how we are getting on. But somehow we each know how the rest are getting on [without talking]. It’s sort of a weird, intuitive sort of relationship. Although Norman is living in Canada now, it doesn’t really feel that he is that far away. I live near Raymond and Francis but I probably see them as much as I see Norman. But that’s fine, we all have our own lives now. When we meet up in a place to do what we do, it still feel very natural. I think even the fact that we can still make music and people still like it tells its own story, regardless of whether we go for a pint with each other or something. The fact that we can have a harmonious relationship together in a musical sense is quite a deep feeling," he said.

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