Katie Kim and band will play a very intimate show at the Linenhall Centre in Castlebar tonight Friday May 7 with support coming from Mia Sparrow. The slow-burning subtlety of Katie Kim’s latest album, Twelve, might never have come into existence if a computer bug had not wiped out 50 songs singer Katie Sullivan had been working on.
It is an album that came out of nowhere, called Twelve, even though there are just 10 songs on it. There’s no hot air, no pre-match bluster, no obscene hype, no advance notice, no press release even – some albums don’t need to avail of such machinations to make their presence felt.
There is a fertile imagination at work here which knows when to take a few chances with the songs and the arrangements. Such an approach produces songs which pull you closer to the speakers and make you want to know more about the act. She first start playing music as a teenager. “I picked up the guitar when I was 14, started to write songs and, a year later, started playing small gigs and supports at home in Waterford,” Katie says. “Then it was years of locking myself away with my computer and recording all day between jobs. I met Terry Cullen [from Ten Speed Racer] at one of the bars I was working in and he asked me to sing with his new band.” That band was Dae Kim, an act which provided Sullivan with her apprenticeship in what being in a band was all about.
“It was my first band experience and carried on for four glorious years of writing, recording, touring, and partying,” she says.
An album was recorded and released, which saw the band gather a gaggle of admirers for its subtle blend of slow-motion shoegazer grooves and beguiling lyrics. After Dae Kim faded into the rear-view mirror, Sullivan turned her attention to her own songs. Sullivan kept writing song after song until she had about 50 recorded on her home computer. Disaster struck in the form of a computer virus. Those songs and scraps vanished from her hard disc and there was no way to bring them back.
“It was soul-destroying, to be honest,” she says about that mishap. “Everything I had experimented with, be it releasable or not, had been wiped with one click. I was so irate and even thought about suing! But I came back down to reality and had to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start again.”
The songs on her debut album came from those second sessions when Sullivan willed herself to start all over again. “I’ve come to the realisation that things happen and you have to deal with them,” she says. “Twelve might not be the album that it is now if that had not happened – and I’m very proud of Twelve.”
After a limited release and a short tour last autumn to get the word out (a push which brought her to the attention of many radio stations and publications ), Twelve is now about to get a bigger, broader, promotion in Ireland. Support for this show will come from Mia Sparrow. Mia Sparrow consists of local lads Ger Staunton and Paul Brett with Caroline Carew hailing from Tipperary. Tickets for this show are €15 and can be purchased online at www.linenhall.ie or on the door on the night, show commences at 8pm sharp.
