On April 10, 1999, I was in the producer's chair in Studio 4 in RTÉ while we aired a special episode of a live Saturday night chat show called Kenny Live, hosted by Pat Kenny.
The show was paying its respects to the late actor and comedian, Dermot Morgan, who died unexpectedly the previous year at the age of 45. At which point the Dublin-born Morgan was on the cusp of a major career breakthrough: despite his profile in Ireland, he’d only recently started to attract attention elsewhere. A result, basically, of his work on the Channel 4 comedy series, Father Ted, in which he took the lead role.
That Kenny Live tribute featured members of Dermot’s family, his friends, associates and former colleagues in Irish and British television and radio and was the brainchild of Pat Kenny himself, a close friend of Morgan’s. It was assembled from the floorboards up by one of the show’s many unsung worker bees, Nita Byrne, who sourced an excellent line up and who, for her troubles, suffered the slings that invariably accompany such endeavours.
As long as I’ve known him, Pat Kenny has been a keen supporter of new music – and in particular new Irish music – and I have referred to this in several pieces here previously. A one-time guitar-slinging folkie, his decades-long career in radio and television is distinguished by many things, one of them being the numerous emerging bands and musicians he has platformed in high-profile broadcast slots.
Pat has always seen the value in all music, especially rock music. And for all the criticism levelled at him throughout the years – much of it unfounded and disproportionate – he has consistently given airtime to fledgling talent when he either didn’t have to or when he could simply have gone with far drearier material instead.
Among the guests who contributed to that Dermot Morgan tribute were the creators and writers of Father Ted, Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, and the director of the series, the former RTÉ staffer, Declan Lowney. Neil Hannon, performing under cover of a band name, The Divine Comedy, provided a gorgeous interlude when he played a live version of the Father Ted theme, 'Songs of Love’. The song appears on Hannon’s breakthrough 1996 elpee, ‘Casanova’, which was released on Setanta Records.
Also taking the boards that night was another Irish songwriter and musician hiding behind a band alias: Ken Sweeney who, then as now, writes and records as Brian. A friend of the Father Ted writers, Brian released its first album, ‘Understand’, on the same Setanta label in 1992, the fourth long-player in that company’s fine catalogue. It was because of my work at the label that I first encountered Ken and I’ve written about our relationship, and about his band’s exploits, in a previous piece here.
When I say that Ken saved my life I’m not playing it for laughs. I’d never even met him when he selflessly moved me out of a squat on the North Peckham Estate – that I shared very briefly with a drug-crazed Scotsman – and onto a couch in his rented suburban semi in leafy Ealing. The metaphors can write themselves but suffice to say that I’ll always be grateful.
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Listen to Brian's debut album Understand
It took Brian an eternity to complete a follow-up album: in the best traditions of one of Ken’s favourite groups, The Blue Nile, ‘Bring Trouble’ finally saw the light in early 1999. During that long hiatus between chapters, Ken had returned to Ireland and a career in journalism. He’d starred as an extra in an episode of the second series of Father Ted, ‘New Jack City’, in which another lamented Irish comedian and musician, Brendan Grace, plays Father Fintan Stack. Ken also features briefly – alongside Brian Eno – in the last ever episode of the Father Ted series, ‘Going to America’.
We took the entertainment bookings on Kenny Live really seriously. Living in the shadow of the longer-running Late Late Show, it was one area where the team felt we had a consistent advantage over our rivals in the office next door. Those slots were booked by another stalwart, Caroline Henry, a formidable presence on the music beat here and elsewhere. So although he wasn't au fait with either of the Brian albums, all Pat Kenny really needed to know was that Caroline and myself rated them and that we saw real value and purpose in having the band on the show.
And on that point the three of us were always ad idim. The national broadcaster has a duty and responsibility to support new and emerging talent however and wherever possible, especially in the realm of music and performance. And especially so on its most-watched and most listened to output.
And so, to Brian who, on the night, starred Ken alongside a handful of hardy shape-throwers – among them the great Pat Dillon behind the traps – as they opened Part Three of the Dermot Morgan tribute. Like an indie-cut Traveling Wilburys, they performed 'Turn Your Lights On’, one of the stand-out cuts from ‘Bring Trouble’, Ken giving us a terrific live vocal performance as the band mimed to a backing track.
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Listen to Brian's second album Bring Trouble
It had been an interesting enough seven years. Back in 1992, Ken and I had fetched up in that very same studio building as leaner, more serious but far less worldly-wise young men. As part of a necklace of different jobs I did at the time, I operated Setanta’s in-house publicity machine: I played Scooter to the label’s owner and founder, Keith Cullen’s Kermit, basically. And it was in that guise that I’d snared a slot for Ken on the excellent Nighthawks strand, a live late-night revue on RTÉ produced then by an old mentor of mine, Philip Kampff.
Ken and I had lined up a week of media engagements in Ireland in support of the release of ‘Understand’. As with practically every single Setanta release, we had no shortage of support from outlets back home: anyone we rated wanted a piece of Brian.
We completed as many radio and print interviews as time would allow us during a memorable few days back with our families, a trip on which I saw, yet again, how engaging a story-teller Ken could be. Nighthawks, a politically charged culture show that went out a couple of times every week on RTÉ2, was going to top a solid week’s work. Which it did. Eventually.
The Nighthawks producers loved the fragility and candour that runs through ‘Understand’ and booked us on that basis. And we got to that point in the end, but only after a frantic, on-the-spot re-writing of the camera script, during which Ken’s backing band was deemed surplus to requirements and banished into the wings.
So instead, our hero did what he does better than most and, with the barest of accompaniment on his own acoustic guitar, poured his heart into a staller performance of two delicate Brian numbers. You could have actually shot the thing using an old tin can with photographic paper wrapped inside and it wouldn’t have detracted from the power, so visceral was Ken’s delivery.
I watched that recording at close quarters from the studio floor and I was reminded of many of the conversations I’d enjoyed with Ken, late at night, in front of the raked ashes in the good room back in Ealing.
When, after days spent on the slog on different sides of London we’d get the kettle on and pore over our favourite sons: Mark Mulcahy of Miracle Legion, Hinterland, Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile, East River Pipe and anything on the Sarah Records imprint, a Bristol-based label whose stuff we both adored. And those nights helped us, if not to make sense of our lot, then to certainly wade through the anxiety and the penury that undercut a lot of it.
London is a magnificent city, but it could be a wretchedly cold house too, especially for those of us just cluelessly trying to get by on our wits. ‘Understand’ was another rare piece of paradise that helped to sustain us as we went.
The second Brian elpee, ‘Bring Trouble’, was a far more difficult affair and there were several times when Setanta thought it would never land. But then Ken always boxed southpaw and was never going to be defined by orthodoxy, and certainly not by what he committed to wax. He was a devoted and passionate fan of music – to his detriment, he’d regularly big up the work of others at his own expense in interviews - but he saw a far bigger and more nuanced world too.
But when his head was in the game he was as obsessive and clear-eyed as any and, looking back at that body of work at a distance, I’m not surprised at how well its stood up.
Nestling just after ‘Understand’ in that slip-think canon, is my own favourite clutch of Brian material: a four-song 1992 EP called ‘Planes’. Produced by Ian Catt – who had previously done time with Saint Etienne - it snaps Ken’s two very distinct faces: the title cut and ‘The World Ended with You’ capture the brittle, barely-breathing Brian. ‘Knowing’ and ‘She Takes You Away’ – for me, Ken’s best ever song – just go in the other direction, right at the throat and absolute on power-drive.
Both ‘Understand’ and ‘Planes’ were released during a regular swell season at Setanta. Another band managed by the label, The Frank and Walters, had been licenced out to a major and were flush with the chart success of a timeless single, ‘After All’. Dublin band A House were re-drawn, re-invented and re-born off the back of their ‘I Am The Greatest’ elpee while another longer-term resident, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, was about to follow suit and return to the fold after a pretty drastic glow-up.
And you could read all about it too: in Britain, the label enjoyed the same extent of positive press and media as it did in Ireland. A testament, I think, to the quality of its output as it was to the knacky media strategies employed by Setanta and its redoubtable independent handler, Alan James.
One of Ken’s earliest champions was an emerging young writer at Melody Maker magazine, recently landed into London: Peter Paphides.
Alongside the likes of Andrew Mueller, Bob Stanley and Jim Arundel, his frame of reference ran wider and considerably more catholic than most of the other writers – myself included - whose work adorned the paper every week. He was brave with it too at a time when it was neither fashionable nor profitable to step outside the gang chorus.
Pete went on to write about music and culture for Time Out magazine and then subsequently onto many other notable adventures in journalism and beyond – but his affection for Ken, and for Ken’s material, has never waned. He launched his own label - Needle Mythology – back in 2019, ostensibly a house of redemption and reflection for under-regarded records and its catalogue already reads like a coalition of the criminally ignored. A succession of records blighted, upon their original release, by corporate malpractice, poor timing and a warped sense of the zeitgeist. And all of which, in a more equitable critical court, have now been granted clemency.
Having re-licenced and re-issued terrific albums from, among others, The Lilac Time, Robert Forster, The Finn Brothers and Whipping Boy, Pete has now trained his sights on Brian. And it’s easy enough to see why: Ken ticks all of the label’s criteria.
‘Understood’ – a compound of ‘Understand’ and the ‘Planes’ EP – is the latest addition to the Needle Mythology family. And, as such, it affords those of us who were there at the time to re-acquaint ourselves with the magic. To those who missed out, it’s a chance to hear the enduring attraction of another increasingly scarce commodity: authenticity.
I’d talk to Ken regularly about his songwriting and I’d wonder why he wasn’t as prolific as some of the other artists at Setanta. It's an interesting place, the songwriter’s fear of the song. And he’d tell me – like he’s still telling others - that he only ever wrote songs when he felt he had something valid he needed to say.
Resolutely holding the line, he told Alan Corr in a recent interview for RTÉ Entertainment, that: ‘I only wanted to make music that moved me emotionally and if it didn't happen, I wouldn't make records. I don’t give up. I’ll keep working on something for years until I get it right’.
By any critical measure, he had it right all those years ago. It just probably feels sweeter the second time around.
Understood by Brian is now available via Needle Mythology
