Singer- songwriter David Kitt spoke to David Hennessy about re-recording his much loved album The Big Romance to mark its 25th anniversary.
Next year marks the 25th anniversary of David Kitt’s much-loved album The Big Romance.
To mark the milestone the Dublin- born Kerry- based singer- songwriter is putting out a reworked version of his sophomore album complete with new tracks. It is also a way of the artist reclaiming his own work. Much like how Taylor Swift re-recorded old albums in order to have them for herself, this was necessary as Kitt’s old label, Warners, had no interest in celebrating his old material.
The new version will be titled The Big Romance (Kittser’s Version) and David has already released tracks from it such as Song From Hope St. (Brooklyn, NY) and T’s & C’s – both produced by Ken McHugh, who collaborated with Kitt on the original album. Following his home-recorded debut Small Moments, 2001’s The Big Romance marked Kittser’s first experience working in a professional studio.
It didn’t really last. A whirlwind is a good way to describe it, I suppose. It was a whirlwind
The record – featuring the singles Song From Hope St. (Brooklyn, NY) and You Know What I Wanna Know – sold 60,000 copies in Ireland alone and marked a major shift in Kitt’s life as a musician and performer. Now he has returned to the album with the benefit of the experience of his 25+ years as a recording musician.
David Kitt chatted to the Irish World about the project.
Can you believe it’s been 25 years. Does it seem strange?
“Yeah, I guess it does and it doesn’t. It kind of almost feels like a former life but it also feels like yesterday. It’s like it’s kind of flown by. The songs go through cycles. I’d say about 10 years after the record came out, I wasn’t even singing a lot of those songs.
“Most people do tend to sing their most popular songs, that’s what people pay to see. But I was never someone who went down that kind of cabaret route so I’ve always tended to just keep putting out new stuff and generally focusing on the record I’ve just released.
“I’ve enjoyed the process of spending a bit of time with the songs again. It’s because I haven’t been singing them every gig for 25 years there’s almost a freshness to some of them, I suppose.”
Have there been surprises in delving into your older material? Have there been instances of, ‘I know what that song is about more now than 25 years ago’?
“Not really. I was pretty clear as to what they were about. That does happen. Sometimes you write something and three or four years later you realise what it’s about.
“But there wasn’t anything in the songs that surprised me from a meaning or lyrical point of view but I think it’s more musically. I think, musically, the record is quite sophisticated. I was surprised by some of the stuff on it. It’s deceptively simple at times and I think that simplicity is actually very hard to pull off. That’s been the big surprise.
“One of the funny stories from back in the day was there’s a trumpet part in the chorus of Whispers Return the sun and when the album had been mastered, they had pressed 5000 copies. It was literally about to be released and my 24- year- old self decided that the trumpet part should only happen once. It was repeating too much.
“I just said, ‘Hang on a sec now, we’ve got to stop this’, which I wouldn’t be able to do nowadays. That would be financial disaster for me. There’s no way I would be able to. I mean, I wouldn’t make the decision to press until I was absolutely certain but back then, there’s this kind of confidence of youth and focus and insistence on it being right.
“There’s definitely a perfectionism that I’ve carried with me throughout life that I didn’t really settle for anything less than QED. It’s similar with this.
“We’ve been through quite a long process with Ken and some of it’s been brilliant but some of it just wasn’t fully hitting the mark in terms of what I wanted the record to be. I’ve still got quite a lot of work to do but I’m pretty confident it will exist almost on its own merits.
“It’s kind of got to tick a lot of boxes because the copies of the original record are going for like €200 euro on discogs and Warner’s have never shown an interest in repressing the record so ultimately I wanted a document that was going to satisfy people who’ve always wanted to own this record on vinyl, to have a version that I could press myself.
“That’s one part of it but part of it was also just making it creatively interesting and worthwhile for myself and that took a while. It’s like you have to find your way into something and then you start working your way out of it.
“But the process to get right into it, where I really felt like it was a worthwhile exercise took a while but once it started clicking and maybe just the fact that the puzzle was a little bit more challenging than I expected, I almost enjoyed that.
“I’ve gotten to a point with some of the tracks where I actually think this is actually better which is a great feeling.
“There’s two or three that I really can’t wait for people to hear because I think they will satisfy the needs that they have for the original thing but it will give them something extra so that’s kind of job done if I can do that.”
Has it been inspiring? Could rediscovering and reworking old material inspire new material?
“To an extent. I’m always working. I’m always working on five or six different things at the same time so my creativity in the last 10, 15 years has been very, very healthy. I do think maybe there’s an emotional openness or it can be mistaken for kind of naivety but in some ways, I think it’s just before life kind of kicks the sh*t out of you.
“It’s like reconnecting with the person who made the record from an emotional standpoint and trying to find five songs that kind of fit within that emotional landscape, that’s been inspiring and a creative challenge that was almost defragging all the bits of life that got in the way in the meantime and all the ups and downs.
“Also it was a time before phones and social media and it’s been just even realising the amount of time that you spend focused on something without the distraction of a f**king Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is. The amount of time you stayed with an idea.
“It’s what we’re all doing- mindfulness and meditation and all these things- to kind of almost try to get back to that place. People call it like a flow state or whatever so in many ways, reminders of that world and that way of being and that way of being creative and making stuff and less distractions.
“There’s definitely a wistful longing for that, the simplicity of that time but also maybe an aspiration to kind of return to some of those. Do we really need to be on our phones five hours a day? Back then I had a team of probably 20 people helping me out and I’m pretty much doing all those jobs now so the challenges are multifaceted, I suppose.”
Did you always know it was music for you?
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t know it was my path from a career perspective. I was obsessed with music and I took a year out between third and fourth year to record because I was like, ‘I need to get all these ideas I have in my head out’.
“I would have been 20, one or two of those songs ended up on my first album, Small Moments so it was always there in the background but a lot of the time I didn’t even share those recordings with people.
“I literally just did them for myself. It was never like, ‘Oh, this is my God-given talent and I can’t wait to show the world what I have’. It was never about that. It was really quite a private pursuit and I had a lot of faith in the thing itself but never really thought, ‘Oh, this could be what I do for a living’.
“So no, definitely not. I think my mam in particular really wanted me to go into something more solid and academic and maths related.”
So was it a whirlwind to go from keeping it private to then sharing the music but not just that, to have it getting high praise across the music press?
“Yeah, it’s very surreal now thinking about that part of it all. It’s Mojo, Uncut, the English edition of The Times, The Guardian, The Observer, and it was getting four out of five everywhere. Getting to play David Bowie’s Meltdown: Just the fact that David Bowie even heard the record and liked it, there was crazy sh*t happening.
“If anything, that’s the part that you’re most separated from in a way. But that three year bit of activity where I had loads of money in my bank account and I was taking all my mates out to dinner five nights a week and being able to fly to New York on a whim and staying in the Chelsea Hotel and all that kind of cliched sh*t in a way but hugely exciting.
“It didn’t really last. A whirlwind is a good way to describe it, I suppose. It was a whirlwind. I probably could have had some better advice at the time. I mean this record is an example of that. Warners basically own this record forever. That’s something that obviously was a mistake and I probably could have had better advice in general in terms of just ‘maybe put a few quid away’.
“If anything I was kind of going, ‘Oh, I don’t care. I’m going to do the exact opposite of what you think anyway’.
“I would have easily had the deposit for a house or something back then. I was in my 20s. I was just kind of having the craic really so it wasn’t ever to the forefront of my mind that this could be something that was kind of transient.
“You don’t really think like that. And I don’t really have any regrets over that either. It’s just the way it goes. People have asked me, ‘Oh if you had anything to say to your 25-year-old self, what would you say?’
“Looking back there were definitely opportunities then that I didn’t quite realise just how big those opportunities were and maybe some of them that I was a bit blase and laissez faire about, didn’t maybe necessarily fully grab the bull by the horns.
“But we did have a lot of fun. We weren’t quite The Happy Mondays but if Happy Mondays are 10, we were probably somewhere around six. We all went on this adventure together.”
What was the highlight of stages you got to play etc?
“Getting to know Tindersticks and getting to support them. I eventually became part of the band. I joined Tindersticks in 2010. They were heroes of mine. Their first album was one of my big records when I was 18 so to be on a bill with them, I really felt like I was in the right place.
“Getting quite big in Ireland, you’re getting sucked into maybe more pop stuff and you’re on The Den and everything. And as much as I love The Den, and it was a privilege to hang out with Dustin for a couple hours, it’s the pop world.
“It was great to be doing all that stuff but to be touring with Tindersticks and to become pals with them, that was really special. It’s hard to top that actually.”
Did staying based in Dublin keep you grounded through it all?
“I guess it was grounding to an extent. There was always a fair amount of slagging and bringing you back down to earth, I suppose. Nothing really changed that much from that point of view. My friends’ opinion of me didn’t really change.
“It was a bit weird maybe, certain lack of privacy but having grown up in a political household where I was the son of a Fianna Fáil politician, I was kind of used to all that stuff and it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what my dad had to go through so I had quite a perspective on it.”
Of course your father is Tom Kitt, former politician. Did coming from such a family mean people had preconceptions about you when you went into music?
“Yeah, definitely. I was lucky that my dad was very respected and that he was definitely seen as someone who didn’t always toe the party line so he was seen as an individual, I think so that helped. Ireland is a very tribal place. And, of course, there are people who will have preconceived ideas that are pretty wide of the mark.
“My mam would be quite a free thinker and she would have definitely brought us up to really think for ourselves and given us quite a wide moral compass and finely tuned moral compass and social compass and everything. Ultimately we were all very much our own people.
“So from a personal point of view, it didn’t really affect me but I grew up in Ballinteer and you would always get slagged on the bus and before any of the music stuff happened, you would get slagged just for being associated with a certain political party by virtue of your birth or your family name.
“I think it’s definitely been something that’s there over the years but thankfully it’s never been too challenging to be totally honest.”
Was it difficult to follow The Big Romance, was it a case of a difficult third album after the success of it?
“Geoff Travis was the person who signed me. He then got let go by Warner’s and I’d signed a two album deal so I was still on Warner’s and the guy who was all of a sudden my point of contact was John Reid who’s basically the bad guy in the Elton John film.
“He didn’t really like me that much and he didn’t really rate me maybe and he definitely didn’t like Square 1 which was the follow up to the big romance. He pretty much told me so to my face in a very difficult office meeting in Warners in London. I probably did the classic thing of rushing into the one after.
“A lot of people love that record and I don’t think it’s terrible or anything. I think it’s a decent record and I think it was the record that I was meant to make at that point in time. It was very much informed by my romantic life at the time, maybe more than my musical life or something.
“There’s that Bob Dylan thing, you can’t be wise and in love at the same time. There’s definitely an element of that. I think I was trying to do a 180 a little bit as well and I don’t know if that was the wisest thing to do looking back but at the same time, I don’t see how I could have done anything differently.
“So there definitely was pressure but I wasn’t really submitting to it.
“If anything I was kind of going, ‘Oh, I don’t care. I’m going to do the exact opposite of what you think anyway’. That’s just what people do when they’re in their mid 20s, I think.”
The Big Romance (Kittser’s Version) will be released on All City Records on 10 April 2026, on vinyl, CD and digital. The album is available from Bandcamp.
A special performance of the album in full, featuring friends and collaborators old and new, takes place at The National Concert Hall in Dublin on 10 April.