EIGHTEEN MONTHS of no live music, then September arrives and suddenly it all starts to happen again for producer, composer, and musician, Daithí.
He is about to play Galway’s two new music festivals - Fall Right Into Place and Meet Me At The Castle - and inbetween, release of the debut album from HousePlants, his collaboration with Bell X1’s Paul Noonan.
Daithí plays Fall Right Into Place this Saturday, September 11, sharing the bill with Villagers, Elaine Mai, NewDad, and Sinead White. Then on Saturday September 25 and Sunday 26, he plays Meet Me At The Castle with Lisa Hannigan, Tolü Makay, Wallis Bird, Jape, Nealo, and DJ Sally Cinnamon.
“It’s been crazy! It’s the busiest I’ve been in years,” Daithí tells me during our Monday afternoon interview. “It’s exciting, because I feel really useful.”
.
Photo:- Christian Tierney
That return to live music began in August when HousePlants played The Grand Auld Stretch series of shows at Nimmo’s Pier. What was it like standing in front of an in-person crowd again after more than 500 days?
“It was one of the first shows I played in 18 months, and I was apprehensive,” he says. “I couldn’t remember why playing live was so important to me before lockdown. It’s hard - the rehearsing, the build-up, the getting everything ready, the nerves before you go on stage - I couldn’t remember why I wanted to do it, but by the time the gig was over, I was so energised, and there was such an adrenaline rush, I remembered why it is I have dedicated my life to this. That was a real moment.
“During lockdown, I was writing music without being able to play it live, so you have to think about why you’re doing what you’re doing. Most of the music I create is built for performance, and you really get the reward when you’re playing in front of people, getting that immediate reaction. At that gig, I could see different groups of people who knew the lyrics, and that’s what it’s about, that immediate feedback.”
In the beginning
Playing live as HousePlants with Paul Noonan, a project conceived and developed during lockdown, was “like taking it into high definition”. The next step on that path comes on Friday September 17 with the release of HousePlants’ debut album, Dry Goods.
The origins of HousePlants lie in the extraordinary ‘Take The Wheel’, created with Paul Noonan, which opened Daithí’s 2019 album, L.O.S.S. The following year, Noonan joined Daithí on stage at the Choice Music Awards.
“At the time, the Coronavirus was still in China and people were talking about it as something far away, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be mad if it came over here and shut down the entire music industry?’. And then it was, and our entire social fabric of playing music live was completely gone.
“Me and Paul stayed in touch. He had been working on a few tracks, and sent them to me, and I noodled around on them, and sent those back to him. A track from one of us would start as one thing and become something else. We would transform each other’s ideas. I’d look at something Paul had come up with for something I’d sent him, and think, ‘I never thought of it going in that direction.’
“They didn’t suit my solo work, they didn’t fit into Paul’s solo work, but they felt more than the sum of their parts and we realised they had a special feel and vibe, and an album started to emerge.”
Big, powerful, momentum
Throughout the pandemic, the duo have released a number of songs, all of which will feature on Dry Goods: ‘What’s With All The Pine?’, a humorous tale of interior decor as a source of strife in a couple’s relationship; ‘Window Pane’, and ‘Companero', inspired by the 2015 marriage equality referendum.
“Paul had written those lyrics at the time of the referendum, and that amazing line, ‘If this is not Heaven then it’s somewhere on that road/If this is not the Word of God, then I guess He never spoke’,” says Daithí, “so I created this synth track, that built into this big, powerful, momentum, with this sense of excitement. That’s what I wanted to do, capture the feeling of what it was like that day, when the results were coming in, especially in Dublin. It was electric, the whole place shaking with excitement. It’s a fantastic subject to write about, and it’s a good thing to remember, when the country was in lockdown, the referendum - Ireland at its best.”
One of the standout tracks on the album, one likely to resonate deeply with listeners, is ‘Mannequin’. The theme of an inanimate, isolated, object (“Where’d everybody go? My dear seamer hasn’t dressed me in an age” ), followed by a return to life and hope in the chorus (“Love is the meaning when all is lost” ), very much chime with our recent experiences.
“Paul is one of the best songwriters in the country,” Daithí declares. “He has this great way of working Irish phrases into his lyrics in a way that never sounds corny. I could work from those lyrics. It starts off as one thing, something static and unmoveable, like a mannequin itself, then builds and builds into a big disco beat. My job was to animate the mannequin Paul had written about.”
‘Music is my focus’
.
Photo:- Christian Tierney
With the album about to come out, and live music returning again, Daithí can look towards the future - both for himself, and for HousePlants.
“Music is my main focus,” he says. “A thing that’s struck me, now I’m in my thirties, are the numbers of artists I see who have been around a while, who are now ‘lifers’. They will play music no matter what. Seeing them, I realise I’m a lifer too, and so is Paul, and I’m proud to be that.
“Paul has already started talking about other ideas, so there is a future to HousePlants, but right now, we want to make these songs work. There is an appetite right now for a live, danceable, band. Irish people appreciate a band who can get them moving, and we want to be that band.
Tickets for Fall Right Into Place are available via www.fallrightintoplace.ie and www.strangebrew.ie Tickets for Meet Me At The Castle are available via www.hibernacle.ie, and are sold as individual day tickets to attend on either the Saturday or the Sunday. Both festivals take place on the grounds of Claregalway Castle.
