Loughlinstown, where I grew up in Dublin, didn’t really have bands or musicians at the time. Not that I knew of anyway. Situated in the most southern part of Dublin, Loughlinstown was pretty much just rows of newly built council houses with estates separated by small roads, rivers, fields & forests. In fact there was hardly a shop or bus, just multi coloured houses & the odd horse walking through, some called it legoland. When the local church was knocked up, it was red & yellow, some called it Mc Donald’s. At election time, the only posters on the polls were Sinn Féin. Everyone pretty much did the same thing, hung around & got into trouble. The coast was just a short walk across the estates to get to & for most of us, even now, it’s the best thing about the place, it’s somewhere you can restart from. Apparently, before my time, Loughlinstown was known for having a big tree, but I missed that. Plenty of extreme characters were about the place all the same & in some ways we couldn’t have had a better childhood. I was also born there & the stories that I’ve shared over the years have made me realise how unique our childhood was. I’m grateful for that now, although it certainly wasn’t all good & when music became a part of my life, the only thing that I was certain of, was the fact that I needed to get out of there...
A couple of my cousins from another area, two brothers, gave me my first real insight into music. Mark was the older of the two & I heard him sing a few times. He encouraged me to join in but I’d just freeze up, I didn’t know what to make of it. These days I perform an A capella song or two & I can sense how awkward it can make people feel in the room at times, especially when singing without a microphone. I understand that awkwardness, it’s familiar to me & it adds to the moment. I’ve never really kept track of dates, age, the amount of gigs I’ve played, how many pints I’ve had in a night or things like that, but, I must have been about 15 when I started hassling Mark’s brother, Dave, for lessons. I learnt my first few chords from him & he encouraged me to find my own path, which I did. It never occurred to me to share the fact that I had a guitar. Felt like that was a separate thing to the life I was living in Loughlinstown. It turned out that one of my best friends there had one too. His younger brother told me one day. Guess he had felt the same.
Lyrics were an important part of music for me very early on, not just as a musician either. As a kid I’d only listen to vinyl which had lyrics on the sleeve so I could read along & luckily enough, my folks had a decent stack of vinyl. In my late teens I was into contemporary guitar music but essentially it was that stack of vinyl which led me back to the
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