Mick Flannery tells it how it is before his upcoming show in Limerick | Sarah listens up

Mick Flannery sings like a fallen baritone who finds himself revived in a rundown blues bar and couples this great voice with a lyrical maturity that is at odds with his youth. At  only 23 his age adds to the appeal, as people try to square away the idea of someone so young sounding so damn old.

Often compared to Tom Waits and with echoes of Dylan permeating his new record, White Lies, Flannery has established himself as a talented songwriter and engaging performer, playing both (left handed) guitar and piano. Although his sound certainly doffs a cap to the great folk storytelling songwriters of the past fifty years, a young pretender he is not.

Mick was in Killarney getting some repairs done to his van by an obliging uncle when I caught up with him on the phone and asked if this was another in a line of interviews this week, “Not this week, well I did two, last week I was doing a few. It’s not too bad, it’s alright. It’s weird like coz it’s one way conversations you know? ” I remark that it can be weird from the other side too as some people like talking a lot less then others. “I don’t really enjoy it that much either, I’m not gonna make life too difficult for you either, I will say something.”

With a two way conversation agreed on I ask Mick about his debut album, Evening Train, self-released at the tender age of 21. “ I started it in college and it was just afterwards when I decided I might as well make it into a c.d. It was supposed to be a musical originally, yeah, but I couldn’t do the dialogue, I found it hard writing parts for people, anything I wrote was shit.” Telling the story of a week in the life of two gambling, boozing and hard living brothers it would be a pretty gritty musical. “It wouldn’t exactly be a song and dance kind of thing alright….”

Much of the hype building around this unassuming stonemason from Blarney, County Cork is centred on a trip to America and his double win in the US International Songwriting competition. “When you read the press releases it’s like I was there for years, which is bollocks, I was there for three months. It was grand. I went over with a bit of money I had saved up, I drank the lot of it in the first two weeks like. Expensive fuckin place. I enjoyed it, well most of it. I found it abit weird on the old music scene because I was just going to open mic nights and it’s quite competitive like, but it’s not really an audience, it’s more like a room full of fucking songwriters, hoping that you’re not really good, waiting for their turn. It’s like amateur x-factor, without anyone paying attention to it.”

So New York and the music ‘scene’ wasn’t what you expected it to be? “Expectations, well I’d a stupid expectation of it being exactly the same as the 1960’s and it would be all these cool fuckin’ bohemian people, riding eachother, taking drugs. But it wasn’t, it was a bunch of fuckin’ pretentious dickheads, they’re all loaded like and they called it fuckin’ anti-folk, even though it is still folk and they’re all getting money off their parents and shit like that…bastards, fuckin’ bastards,”  he laughs.

After the release of his debut, the comparisons to Tom Waits abounded, what does he make of that? “No, it’s not a bad thing, I’ll never complain about that.” Evening Train was a concept album with strong characters which offered an authentic journey through musical Americana, while White Lies is softer in some places with a harder edge on other tracks, with songs about love, being in it, falling out of it and getting away from it  “ Yeah, it is, I suppose, a bit harder and a bit softer in some places. I don’t have the characters to hide behind this time, in that way. I have an anecdote but I’m not gonna say it to you, I haven’t really decided if I am gonna say it. There was a woman but I’m not gonna talk about that…” I pushed abit but got shot down, “There was one particular woman for a long time like, hey, no … !” Flannery knows that as a performer you have to put yourself out there, by nature he is honest and open, yet he is trying to do what he does and keep himself to himself. “Some of the songs aren’t autobiographical, some of them are fictional, stories like you know. But yeah, most of it is… I suppose most other songwriters do the same. I dunno, it depends on how blunt you are about stuff. “

Now signed to EMI I ask what he makes of his new release White Lies and he demonstrates how blunt he can be “Yeah, it’s alright, I haven’t liked it for a long time. It was kind of finished maybe twice, the first time I didn’t like it at all, the second time we changed a couple of things on it and I said ok that’s alright. I didn’t get on very well with the… eh, actually I won’t put it like that… eh, me and the producer guy that they brought in, I dunno, we didn’t really see eye to eye all the time. I think he was more geared towards radio friendly music and we’re not really interested in radio and it came to a head and we had to call it a day like. It was a bit stressful….you know it’s weird, when I got a copy of it with all the booklet and stuff done, it felt like it was finished and I felt like fuck it, it’s gone, forget it, and it nearly even sounded better for the fact that it was done. Do you know what I mean?’

I do, but I venture that it’s a good thing to be able to hold your ground when signed to a major label? “I understand what they signed as well like, I mean they signed me without any fuckin’ crap about me at all, they can’t fuckin’ change me, they don’t really have a hope you know. I can’t write fuckin’ pop songs and if I tried to they’d be crap. They’re not too bad like, they’re alright, I forget the question now, I rambled, what was the question?”

At this point, I had sort of forgotten the question myself as what should have been a brief ten minute phoner morphed into a proper forty minute conversation complete with expletives and me talking about as much as Flannery. Maybe not your typical interview but what the fuck, just like Flannery’s music, when it’s good it’s good.  No bullshit.

Mick Flannery plays Upstairs in Dolan’s | Thursday October 23

For more info & sounds log onto myspace.com/mickflannery. For booking log onto www.dolanspub.com