The Sigla Blog

Richie Egan has been on a rollercoaster over the last two years. The Dublin musician aka Jape landed most musician’s dream: a major label record deal - only for it to almost slip through his fingers. Ritual, his third (and hugely anticipated) album had been long finished, but record company drama held up the release. Chatting to him in Dublin on a sunny afternoon, he’s delighted the album is finally being released. “It’s been hard to get excited about it, as the songs feel – not old exactly – but they should have been out ages ago. But I’ve been able to counteract this because I’ll be playing them live and that requires me to rework them in a very different way. It’s fun to deconstruct the songs for a live situation and mess around with the dynamics of the song.”

The uncertainty surrounding Ritual’s release led to some dark times, and Egan is glad they’re behind him. “I got a bit depressed for a while and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t write at all.” He confesses that instead, he drank and partied, while feeling bad about himself and his writer’s block. “I didn’t know if the album would ever get released or if I’d get signed. I had left my job and wasn’t sure if I could make enough money to get by. It was really stressful. But finally, it’s coming out now and I actually learnt some stuff about myself in the process.”

All that sounds at odds with the kind of chap Richie Egan is – amiable and very friendly. Having worked by day as an audio visual technician, Egan decided to give up work and focus all his energy full time on music. “I had a real ‘it’s now or never’ feeling, and knew I’d regret it if I didn’t give it a go. It was hard – when I was in my kitchen with no money and asking myself what the hell I was doing – but it was also really liberating. Despite all the stress and upheaval of recent years, Egan took the positive away from the experience. “I’m definitely the kind of songwriter that has to live shit. I work in bursts – I do stuff, take stock of it and then funnel those experiences into songs.” One such experience has resulted in one of the album’s finest tracks: an unlikely tribute to Phil Lynott. Egan sings that one day he too, will be “a dead man who plays the bass from Crumlin”. “I was at a gig with some mates and my dad texted me to tell me about the lunar eclipse. Onstage, the band was covering a Thin Lizzy song, so it was like this mad spiritual moment. The next morning, I wrote the song in ten minutes, it was like turning on a tap. If you’re from Crumlin you’re totally proud of Phil Lynott. He was a cool fucker.”

Lynott proved that a bass player from Crumlin can achieve big things, and there is huge UK interest in Jape, with Ritual the album that could see him make a breakthrough there - not least as he’s on the bill for Glastonbury this year. In the meantime, he has already attracted some high profile attention – Jack White’s band The Raconteurs covered one of his songs on their entire last tour. How did they hear about his classic song ‘Floating’? “I down in Kerry when I got a phonecall from a friend who works in Whelan’s, who told me that Brendan Benson [from the band] wanted to talk to me. So he puts him on and Benson goes ‘Hey man, we’ve been covering your song and we’re playing the Olympia tomorrow night and want to invite you along’. Off I went with my cameraphone in the air feeling totally chuffed.”

As every songwriter knows, there are crests and troughs to the creative process, and not every song comes so easily. Egan is fairly prolific, constantly rotating new tracks on his myspace page, many of which he never actually releases. “I’ve got loads of half done stuff on my hard drive that I randomly put up on myspace for people to listen to. It’s good to get them out there and nowadays people are more accepting of stuff that sounds rough around the edges.”

His previous albums Cosmosphere and The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me demonstrate his sheer ability as a writer, capable of being poetic and emotional, before switching gear to a party tune with irreverent lyrics. Ritual is weighted more in the direction of glitchy electronic pop, something he says was a conscious decision. “I wanted to make a record that was accessible, push up the BPM but keep it in a pop format. The album went through a lot of guises and was actually a lot more dancey, but it has ended up being more of a mix of electronic stuff and guitar tracks.”

As a process, Egan has no set way of writing - he constantly mixes things up, sometimes starting with lyrics, sometimes with music in a bid to keep things fresh. “I think it’s good to be confused as a songwriter.” He also plays with The Redneck Manifesto, a four-piece post-rock instrumental band with a sizeable following. His solo work differs hugely from theirs, and although he grew up playing in punk bands, he’s not surprised at where he has ended up musically. “I’ve been making music for years, recording stuff on to a four-track, and it was always very melodic. I’m constantly tinkering around with melody. It’s very organic. I can’t imagine myself not making music. If I didn’t have music, I’d go off the rails.”
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Ritual by Jape is released on Co-Op on June 6th. Richie plays tonight, June 5th at Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, the Roisin Dubh in Galway on Friday June 6th, a (free) launch gig on Saturday June 7th at 6pm in Tower Records on Dublin’s Wicklow St., Electric Avenue, Waterford on Sunday June 8th, Thursday June 12th at Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Sunday June 14th at Vicar Street as part of Future Days with Dan Deacon and White Williams and June 15th at Spirit Store in Dundalk, Co. Louth.

Link: www.myspace.com/richiejape
Review: Ritual
Musical Rooms: Jape