Fionn Regan has gone back into his secret Wicklow studio to make his most Irish-sounding album yet. Alan Corr meets the bard of Bray
“I had a dream that I was talking to the Irish Sea,” says Fionn Regan. “And in the dream, the Irish Sea told me to find my spirit. The Irish Sea said that everybody has to find their spirit or they’re going under.”
That dream was the spark for Regan’s new album, The Bunkhouse Vol I: Anchor Black Tattoo. It’s a striped back acoustic affair of a mere 23 minutes in duration and the Irish Sea is not the only guest star. The Sugarloaf, the landmark mountain Regan grew up in the shadow of, makes a brief appearance, as does the Wicklow village of Enniskerry and other locations around Regan’s home county.
“There is a lot of Ireland in this record,” he says. “The place where you grew up never really leaves you. You have a knee jerk against it and you move to New York but home always drags you back in. Being from beside the sea in Bray and all that is always there . . . “
Naturally we meet in an organic tea shop in the bohemian quarter of Dublin’s Portobello. The aroma of countless herbal teas infuses the atmosphere and down in the darkened basement, Regan isn’t quite cooking up some medicine but he is drinking a very large brown goblet (I am not making this up) which contains a sweet-smelling coconut drink.
“I’m not sure what it is,” he muses taking another tentative sip. “Apparently it’s going to give me energy.” He sits in front of an old record player, there’s a portrait of Michael Collins on the wall, and in the corner of the room stands a very good guitar with the words “Please use” underneath.
Regan immediately hefts it up and starts casually picking out a series of complicated chords. He smiles impishly and says, “This is a good place isn’t it?”
He won’t admit it, but the whole tableau looks like a set up for our interview. It is perfect habitat for the urchin-like, 31-year-old singer from Bray. He is wearing a black jacket, turned up blue jeans and big boots. Around his neck on a chain is an Aztec-looking ingot.
"I’ve always had enough material to record albums but other things complicated it."
Arriving just a year after his last album, the lush string-leaden 100 Acres of Sycamore, Regan's new album is another sign that his purple patch is continuing. “I suppose at the moment I sort of feel that I’ve found a way of making records that suit me, “ he says. “There were two things that happened. With my second record I had a nine-month wait before it was released and I don’t ever want that to happen again so I’ve simplified things to get things done faster.`
"I’ve always had enough material to record albums but other things complicated it. I had to simplify things. Getting the work out is what’s important to me.”
Simplified is the right word. To record the new album he hid himself away in his studio, the titular Bunkhouse, and as he sings on 67 Blackout, he “strapped a mic to the back of a chair” and just played for two days and recorded it all on a 4-track.
“Silence was the canvas,” Regan says. “I recorded the songs, listened back and found that the they didn’t need anything else done to them.”
The back-to-basics recording methods mean these graceful new songs sound like they’re straight from the heart. Working in isolation in the Bunkhouse meant things fell together very quickly and Regan says that all his best stuff is caught live. He does not dally. It’s all about catching a moment in time.
The Bunkhouse Vol I: Anchor Black Tattoo does, to quote Van, mark a period of transition for Regan. His first three albums - The End of History, the carnivalesque The Shadow of an Empire and 100 Acres of Sycamore – have won him acclaim from NME to Vanity Fair but he has never enjoyed the sales he deserves.
“I think with this record . . . how would I explain this record? The thing is, I’ve always tried to be as entertaining as I can be about things but I don’t understand it, I don’t know, I don’t know . . . I feel like it’s a very pure record, there’s definitely a burrowing toward some sort of bone marrow.”
During the summer, Regan headlined the Lunar Festival in Tamworth in Arden in Warwickshire and he took the time out to visit Nick Drake’s grave. He recorded the experience on his Twitter account: “The bell rang in tower & a dog sat beside me when I left an acorn at Nick Drake's grave in Tanworth-in-Arden.”
But Regan seems to want to play down the significance of his visit now. “It’s quite a humble grave and my visit wasn’t planned. It’s not somewhere I would have made a pilgrimage to . . . that’s not really my kind of thing.”
He’s already started work on another album and he’s also working on a film soundtrack too. Regan's two passions remain writing songs (they’re spilling out of him right now) and painting (once again, that’s one of his abstract paintings on the cover of his new album).
“That to me is the original sphere of joy,” he says. “It’s absolutely necessary for me to do that and it’s an absolutely massive privilege and if I get to keep doing that, or take that privilege with the occupational hazards, then it's no problem.”
You can see the Irish Sea swelling with pride at those words.
The Bunkhouse Vol.I: Anchor Black Tattoo is out now. Fionn Regan plays The Olympia Theatre on Thursday, October 25th
Watch Fionn Regan’s preview videos
Fionn Regan has collaborated with Dublin photographer Richard Gilligan on a series of videos previewing The Bunkhouse Vol I: Anchor Black Tattoo.
Each video was shot around Dublin and Wicklow and features a track from the album playing in full via the original acetate test pressing on a portable vinyl record player.
