The Sigla Blog

Tonight, Fionn Regan supports Lucinda Williams at Tripod, so if you’re heading along to see the multiple Grammy winner, go early. Around the time of the Mercury Prize, I interviewed him and - whether it’s a self-conscious thing or not - he’s not your usual straightforward interviewee. Garreth commented recently about including more interviews (oh, if only I had the time), so I thought I’d put this up.

Fionn Regan interview

“I felt like a Shepard on a traffic island, you know, down from the moors trying to figure out what all the passing machines wereâ€?. This typically allegorical statement is Fionn Regan’s verdict on what being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize this year felt like. No stranger to nominations, he made the shortlist of the 2007 Choice Music Prize, bagged a Best Male Meteor nomination and his star has been very much in the ascendant since 2006. Signed to Damien Rice’s Heffa label, the Bray native has injected something new into the hackneyed stereotype of the singer songwriter. Whether it’s a poetic sensibility (his conversation is like his songwriting, as the opening sentence reveals) or a lyrical sense of humour, Fionn Regan has garnered a lot of attention and the Mercury nomination (“a box of fireworks going off in my handâ€?) is just the culmination of that. It’s a long way from growing up in County Wicklow and figuring out that music is your destiny. “I felt I didn’t really have a choice when it came to being a musician. It’s something contained within you and it’s only a matter of time before other things in life start to blur and your focus is within the hands of the pen or the guitarâ€?. “It’s like a pactâ€?, he says. With yourself? “Yeah, with yourself and with something invisible and unnameable. It’s there and you just have to salute it.â€?

And salute it he has, helped by growing up in a house where creative types gravitated, thanks to his painter mother and composer father. Exposure to art from a young age encouraged Regan to listen and absorb experiences, forming the basis of his own later creative journey. Music was at the core of it, but books and paintings also impacted on him. “I heard all sorts of music growing up. a lot of traditional music, and sometimes Breton musicians from France would be passing through. It was like our house had magnets sucking in all kinds of characters, characters whose currency was poetry or music or story-telling. Between hearing music and reading, it’s like I got a lot of traveling done without having to leave the house. I remember putting elastic bands over shoeboxes or hitting things with sticks to make notes and sounds. I’d lie in bed and listen to the noise of trains in the distance and how they sounded.â€?

The songs on his debut, The End of History, crackle with literary references from Paul Auster to Saul Bellow and the singer admits that his introduction to story-telling came partly from an old radio in his family home. “You could hear conversations coming over itâ€?, he intones, “and I felt I was listening to other people telling their stories. It’s like trying to figure out how you get from being someone who cleans plates in a restaurant while listening to the jukebox, to someone who actually gets onto the jukebox themselves.â€? Cleaning plates is one of the many jobs Regan dabbled in before his music breakthrough, and he agrees with the old writing adage of inspiration finding you while doing some mundane domestic job. “I had a lot of different odd jobs, from sticking bits of rope around sticks to cleaning gutters, and the interesting thing about that is that once you climb up a ladder, you see things differently than you would on the ground. Each place you work is like its own little country, you could spend your whole life documenting things without leaving the factory you work in.â€?

Although Regan returns constantly to the idea of using your imagination to explore the world while staying put, touring and travelling are an inevitable part of any musician’s life and the album is steeped in wanderlust. “When I was younger I used to hitch a lot and I loved the feeling of just putting your thumb up to the passing headlights. These days, with playing gigs all over the place, it gets to the point where you’re so confused about whether you’re happier to be away or to be at home. There’s only so many times you can check the postbox when you get home, but it’s usually only a matter of time before my foot starts tapping and you want to get moving again.â€?

The End of History was recently released in the US on cult label Lost Highway and Regan is the first Irish artist the label has signed up for a debut release. His recent tour of the US was completely sold out and that fact, and the country itself, delighted the songwriter. “It’s such a big country and it was interesting for me to see the place that has been referenced so much in music, say in the songs of Woody Guthrie.â€? Guthrie was so intrinsically American, so associated with a particular place, does Fionn Regan feel a similar alliance to Ireland and is there an Irishness to what he does? “Oh, definitely, all the visual references and a lot of the characters are from my immediate environment. In ‘The Underwood Typewriter, there’s a line about “watching the mailboat from the clearingâ€? and I mention Knocksink Woods in ‘Put A Penny in the Slot’. The more I learn about Irish writers like Joyce or Beckett, the more I identify with the way they write as something “Irishâ€?, there’s a certain turn of phrase, a certain thread running through their work.â€?

I spoke to him just before the Mercury Prize winner was announced (The Klaxons ended up winning) and asked him if - up against competition like The Arctic Monkeys and Amy Winehouse - he thought he could win the prize? “Well, being nominated shines a light on the record and if some ten-year-old kid listening to the radio hears one of my songs and it makes them think differently about something, that’s amazing.â€?

Fionn Regan on myspace.
The excellent video for ‘Be Good or Be Gone’