Mick Flannery returns with another bellyful of blues on a third album that finds him growing in confidence, both as a person and a songwriter. Alan Corr meets the quiet man from Blarney
Upstairs in the bar of a Dublin hotel three drunks are causing a scene. They thump the table, slag each other loudly, and generally turn the air blue. The rest of the clientele are not amused. At a safe distance across the room, Mick Flannery smiles quietly to himself, takes a sip on his freshly-poured pint of stout, and continues to mumble into my tape recorder.
28-year-old Flannery is the Blarney boy and sometime stone mason with a voice like gravel and glue who is slowly chiselling out a career for himself as a singer of some excellence. He’s about to release his third album, the powerful Red to Blue, and unlike our last meeting several years ago when Flannery was tired-eyed and crippingly shy, today he looks fresh and very alert.
“My record label have told me to sharpen up my act and do at least 100 press ups a day,” he says, that sly smile playing around his mouth again. “I’ve also to cut down to two bottles of vodka a day and 300 fags. Actually I’ve given up, but I think I’m just testing myself. My mam might be reading this so I’ve given up drink and ciggies totally OK?”
He’s a joker alright but Flannery is a guarded individual. He describes himself as “grumpy” and his sentences tend to trail off into almost pained modesty. When I mention his girlfriend, he bristles slightly and deflects the question with a look of mild bemusement. Has your confidence grown or are you still, in your own words, a dour swine? “Maybe.” he says.
However, Flannery has every right to be more confident. Red to Blue is likely to win him further crtical acclaim and sales, something that may make the two year recording period even more worth the effort. “It took a bit longer than I expected,” Flannery says, proving that he is also a master of understatement. “For a while I thought I was finished but the lads in my band convinced me otherwise and eventually I agreed with them but that admission was a difficult one to make.
“I’m glad I waited because the songs I would have put out a year ago would have been a collection of self-involved crap. I’m not saying that this isn’t a collection of self-involved crap. OK it wasn’t that it was self obsessed, it was just that it wasn’t good.”
As “self-involved crap” goes Red to Blue is at the very acceptable end of the soul-baring spectrum. On album stand out Getting On Flannery emits a ghostly moan over shivering strings as he relays a tale of doomed love. Keeping Score also seems to be about the gradual winding down of a romance. “Well it’s not based on personal experience really but when I was younger I was a bit more jealous which is not to say in the future I won’t be,” he says. “But yeah, I was watching a few different situations unfolding . . . ”
Red to Blue opens with the ferocious sound of Gone Forever, a loose bluesy blast suggesting that Flannery has taken a step up from the intimate, carved-from-stone ballads of his last album. Get That Gold is simillarly full throttle and on several songs Flannery seems to be issuing warnings to people who just don’t know when to put the pin back in the grenade when it comes to having too much of a good time.
“Well, it’s kind of like a self prophesy that I’m hoping to avoid,” he says. “I just wanted to make a good strong point with that song. Maybe I came up with that it when I was deep down in a hangover and I worried that maybe I’d end up like the person in the song.”
The first albums Flannery bought were Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and his work has similarly existential and poetic qualities even if the first song he ever wrote, Mad Man’s Road, was about a murder which took place on the road on which he lived. “That was a long time ago. I’m happy with this album. I can actually listen to it,” he allows. “I tend not to listen to my first two albums. I think I still had an American accent back then and that grates on me. This one is a little bit more confortable for me to hear”
He’s still works as a stone mason and he likes the solitary nature and the physicality of the job. “I enjoy it but I’m sure if I was doing it five days a week for the next six years I’d be screaming ‘give me my guitar!’” he says. “The guy I work with is a buddy of mine but I’d prefer if he didn’t put on the radio while we’re working. It’s too loud, you can’t think.”
Speaking of loud, across the bar our resident drunks are getting more racuous and the cops have been called. As the boys in blue arrive to hasten their exit, Flannery stops a passing waitress and says, “Sorry, but could I buy those lads over there a drink?” Then he smiles quietly to himself and takes another sip on his pint.
Red to Blue is out March 30. Mick Flannery plays: Dolans Limerick, April 20. Iberius Church Wexford, April 21. Opera House Cork (with The Vanbrugh String Quartet), April 22. Ruby Room Castlebar, April 26. Olympia Theatre Dublin (with The Vanbrugh String Quartet), April 27. Crown Plaza Dundalk, April 28. Sandino’s, Derry, May 5. Roisin Dubh Galway, May 12/13
