London-based Limerick post- punk poet and singer/ songwriter Sinead OâBrien told David Hennessy about her debut album, âmanifestingâ her appearance on Jools Holland and being mentored by Vivienne Westwood.
London-based Limerick poet and singer Sinead O’Brien releases her debut album Time Bend And Break The Bower this week.
Championed by Jack Saunders at BBC Radio 1 as well as Steve Lamacq and Amy LamĂŠ at BBC Radio 6 Music, Sinead has also been endorsed by titles such as Rolling Stone, DIY, Dazed, NME and The Guardian to name a few.
Sunday Times Culture say Sinead is “a singular and visceral talent”, while NME said: âQuite simply, OâBrien is a hell of a performerâ.
The Irish World caught up with Sinead recently the day after her London listening party, her first chance to play some of the album tracks for an audience.
Sinead told The Irish World: âIt feels very different to an EP. An EP is such a casual affair. This is a marriage. It is so committed.
âIt’s also like having a child.
âYou have to prioritize it.â
Sinead was recently featured on Later with Jools Holland, something she describes as âvery surrealâ.
âI had said to my dad before that, âDad, I’m gonna do Jools Hollandâ.
âHe didn’t laugh but he kind of said, âYeah, that will be lovelyâ.
âAnd then 24 hours later, we got an email. We got it.
âI called him and said, âDad, I actually got itâ.
âI was manifesting. I was hoping. I was wanting, wanting, wanting it so, so much.
âI love the show and I just can’t thank him enough really.
âHe was really great. He came right up to me, and he listened to our soundcheck, he chose the song that we performed, he actually wanted that song.
âIt couldn’t have been better really and we’ve had other great opportunities since that, Glastonbury came as a result of that.â
Another performer on the bill of the same programme was former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher, did she get to hang out with him? âYeah, he actually came up to me straight after the show and he had a straw in his mouth or something. I donât know what he was doing. And he just went, âThat was bloody good, wasnât it?â
âAnd I was like, âThank you, I love your set tooâ.
âYeah, I’m glad he liked it.
âWhat a funny situation.â
The track Jools wanted was Sineadâs track Holy Country. It is one of the tracks on the album that hint at religious symbolism but Sinead reveals, âI was never religious to be honest.
âIt’s been pretty casual in my family. We could or could not go to church if we wanted when we were kids.
âSo we did go because we used to like seeing friends from school in their outfits on the weekend.
âThat was my reason that I used to go to the church. I wanted to see what everyone was wearing on Sunday and then it kind of fizzled out.â
The lyrics of GIRLKIND, the albumâs lead single released last November, say, âStatues come to stopâ referring to the moving statues phenomenon in Ireland in the 1980s.
âThat was just a fascinating movement to me when I heard about that, that the whole country were believing statues are walking around in the night time.
âAnd when I talk to my mum about it she says, âYeah, Sinead, that’s when the statuesâŚâ
âAnd I said, âMum, you just said, âWhen the statues used to walk aroundâ. You didn’t say, âIt’s when people thought..â you said, âIt’s when they did walk aroundâ, like itâs a fact.
âAnd she said, âYeah, that was the moving statue phenomenonâ.
âAnd I was like, âYou did it again, you believe that happened, like itâs a factâ.
âThey used to actually leave doors open of churches so the statues could go back in. Itâs just mad.
âWhen I was researching it, it was written up as if it was a movement that happened.
âThen there’s this crazy documentary where there was a priest and they’re asking him, âHow many sightings have been confirmed?â And he’s like, âThere has not been a single confirmed sightingâ, but then he’s saying it did happen.
âIt didn’t even need to be confirmed for it to be true.â
Sinead has just released the infectious Like Culture, a dance-y track inspired by her own nights in Costelloâs in Limerick.
âIt was kind of recounting those memories of sticky red carpets, the lights, the dance floors, all of that stuff.
âIt also had a lot of more complex stuff, about having to deal with tragedy when you’re young and how the dance floor and the nightclubs and that whole scene was where we had to deal with it at the time because it’s like a clumsy coming of age thing.
âYou don’t know how to communicate or where to communicate, or you don’t even know you need to talk, but it ends up spilling- Spilling being the operative word because everything is madness and it does end up spilling out.
âAnd they become these cleansing experiences, cathartic because of the physical bonding of the group, it’s like a pride of lions. Something animal about it.
âThere’s the gushing and people end up crying at the end of the night and all of these different trails off of what was happening.
âBut I think the important overarching message is that through the wars of youth, and however long that goes on, finding oneself, the dance and if you want to call it music or dance or whatever, is the saving.â
Another track on the album, Spare for my Size, Me, is Sineadâs take on the fable of the fisherman and the little fish.
âSo the story goes that he goes out fishing, he catches a fish and the fish screams, âSpare me for my sizeâ. He’s saying, âSpare me because I’ll be bigger and if you come back again, you’ll get a bigger fishâ.
âSo he’s obviously trying to escape.
âAnd the boy says, âNo, a fish now is worth more than the promise of something that may never come backâ.
âAnd I just thought that was like a disgusting lesson.
âI was like, âNo, that’s not right. I’m gonna rewrite this fableâ.
âIt’s ancient and outdated and I’m gonna make the music really modern, and people can dance to this story about a fish.
âAnd it’s not about a fish anymore. Clearly, it’s about me.
âThe message is belief in the growth or the promise that something holds.
âThat’s what I believe in. So that’s what that song is about.â
Sinead supported Duran Duran at St Anneâs Park in Dublin this weekend. And as she says she also plays Glastonbury later this month. She has also announced her UK, Ireland and European tours for September and October 2022 including a date at Londonâs Lafayette.
âI know,â she says before the Duran Duran gig and almost in disbelief herself. âIt gets quite colossal. It goes from Glastonbury to Duran Duran.
âI can’t believe that. I can’t wait as well.
âI used to play in that park with my cousin. And I just remember thinking, âThese trees must be the biggest trees in the world.â
Born in Dublin, Sineadâs family would move to Corbally when she was young.
Her love of words and music were both evident early on.
Sinead and her friend would excuse themselves from class to âinvestigateâ corridors of the school less travelled and make up stories about nuns and priests in the convent school.
Was it mitching? âIt was mitching. Yeah, so me and my friend invented the photography committee. We just invented it so that we could go on adventures.
âSo we used to say, âHey, we have to leave the class now because we’ve got to do photography committeeâ.
âI had a really good camera and we did take photographs but really we were going to the attic because there were all of these old documents.
âThere were photographs from retreats and pictures of the nuns and we were just making stories, and there’s all these amazing old books and corridors that were cordoned off.
âWe got trapped behind the principal’s office in a corridor because we were investigating those rooms. I remember half the day we had to stay silent crouched down just reading these things.
âSo that was inventing stories about nuns and priests.
âMy mum was like, âWho’s going to read this? And stop bringing home old flash lamps and suitcases from the conventâ.
âMy mum played piano since she was a kid so I played classical piano.
âI remember the day I asked her. I was five years old and I asked her in the car driving home after school. I said, âI want to do piano lessonsâ.
âI remember asking it as if she wouldn’t say yes and I was daring myself to do something that was impossible or something.
âAnd she said yes.
âAnd then I thought in my head, âOh, God. I’m gonna have to do it nowâ.â
She may call herself a poet now but Sinead did not really connect with poetry in school but this had much to do with how rigidly it was taught.
âYeah, the English curriculum was a bit- Honestly, I’d love to have a go at that.
âWouldn’t it be great if in the academic curriculum they invited in people who are writing books and writing poems and music from now to give input into some of the material?
âIt would be so cool.
âI don’t know what kids in secondary school are supposed to find inspiring about dissecting Eavan Bolandâs work in this tunnel vision where the outcome is in the book.
âI mean I didn’t find that inspiring.
âI thought, âYou’re telling me this is a code which I can never crackâ.
âI loved dissecting the poems in my own time and thinking, âThe poet did not mean that, I think they meant thisâ.
âBut there seemed to be no room for that.
âAnd that might have just been my teacher and my class or whatever.â
After studying Fashion Design in Dublin, Sinead would work at Dior in Paris for five months before she arrived in London in 2014.
âI had been in London every summer since my second year in college interning anyway so I actually felt at home in London very quickly.
âSo it was the obvious option for me to come here.
âIt’s like home away from home.â
She would work in design for Vivienne Westwood. What was it like working with her? âThat was brilliant, really quite formative. It was seven years so I went in a bit of a kid really.
âShe’s a tough one. She likes strong characters but you don’t have to be strong in the sense of being loud or bullish or anything.
âShe likes a bit of fight and I believe in myself and I believe in what I’m saying so I think we quite quickly kind of gelled and understood each other and respected each other.
âShe mentored me every day and taught me everything.
âIt reminds me of when painters in the Renaissance used to have a protege or an apprentice.
âIt was like that.
âIt was passing on skills and knowledge.
âSo she would be like, âShow me your ideas for the designsâ.
âSo I present them and then she’d say, âOkay, that one would work but how did you come to that? Is that good for sales or are you doing that because it’s a piece of art? And I want to know whyâ.
âSo she never wanted to do stuff that was good to sell. She wanted to make art.
âBut I actually had to do both.
âAnd I wouldn’t agree with everything with Vivienne. We would have little kind of fights. It was really good. She liked it.â
It was here in London that Sinead and her friends would get together on Friday nights to catch up, share music and Sinead would read her latest poetry.
It was a friendâs invitation to appear at New Gums, a night of spoken word performances and music at the Brixton Windmill that set Sinead on her current path. It came at a time when- much like the Danny Wallace book or the Jim Carrey film based on it- she was saying yes to everything.
Did she need that push to perform her stuff? âIt wasn’t even like a push.
âIt was a friend starting a night and I, in order to support her- She was also supporting me, I didn’t realize it at the time- I was like, âOf course I’m gonna do itâ to fill up her programming that night.
âSo I just said yes, because I had been reading my notebooks with my friends when they were playing guitar and hanging out.
âSo I thought it would be like that, casual.
âIt was at The Windmill in Brixton. That’s like a living room, âI can do it it will be fineâ.
âI just said that. And I never thought about it again and just did it. And I didn’t get nervous.
âI think that was a crucial moment, because I didn’t get nervous.
âI never really get nervous (performing).
âI don’t know why because there’s other things that make me nervous.
âBut that never did.
âProbably because I did actually want to talk about what I was working on.
âI was genuinely like, âOh, I’d love to share this and see what people feel about itâ.
âIt comes from a genuine place.
âI do feel like I have a purpose with it.
âSo it’s not like I have to question, âDoes it feel okay to perform this?â
âI think that’s why I don’t get nervous as such.
âI didn’t pursue music, you end up exactly where you need to be if you’re following your instinct and I’m led so much by my intuition and my instinct so thatâs why I said yes to that performance. I did feel like performing so I said yes.
âAnd then I felt like it a lot more than I thought I did.â
In 2018 she would release her debut EPÂ A List Of Normal Sins.
The well known performance poet John Cooper Clarke invited her to support him on his spoken word tour.
âHe really went out of his way to be welcoming. He and his manager took such good care of us.
âAfter the gigs there would be sing songs, shots of whiskey, telling me stories about Mark E Smith and The Fall.
âHe had stories about Vivienne as well, which I did not need to hear.
âI was like, âThat’s my grandma. Stop itâ.
âYeah, that was actually amazing.â
Sinead joined FEARS, Aislinn Logan, Martina Evans and Joy Crookes for the embassyâs St. Brigidâs Day celebrations last year.
âThat was great.
âI found it quite funny because during lockdown, I got stuck here and I wasn’t able to go home for Christmas.
âI called the embassy and told them I was stranded in London. Obviously I work here and I live here so I wasn’t really stranded.
âIt was a bit of a false claim.
âAnd they were like, âNo, we can’t do anything. You’re an Irish citizen but you live in Londonâ.
âBut anyway, I had that encounter with them where I was trying to blag my way home and then the next thing I got invited there to do a St Brigidâs performance.
âIt’s just funny.â
The album Time Bend and Break the Bower is out now.
The single Like Culture is out now.
For more information, click here.