Archbishop McQuaid, Julliette Binoche, the “national razor” and the Swastika Laundry all get mentions on Joe Chester’s haunting new album, The Easter Vigil. He talks to Alan Corr about losing his religion
Dublin based songwriter, singer and producer Joe Chester is back to get it off his chest on his engrossing new album, The Easter Vigil.
Now based in Nice where he recently set up a studio, the bohemian Chester is a quiet, unassuming and sharply-dressed veteran of Irish music. Starting his musical career in the early 90s with Dublin art rockers Sunbear, he went on to form crack guitar band Ten Speed Racer, and since 2005, he's been recording beautifully crafted solo albums.
He has become the go to guy for production duties and he’s also played guitar for The Waterboys and Sinead O’Connor among others but The Easter Vigil is his most profound and moving work yet.
Taking loss of faith as a framing device, the album ranges across songs about and the evening he and his future wife spotted French actress Juliette Binoche strolling around Temple Bar in Dublin to songs that find Chester wrestling with his whole belief system. In short, it sounds like Chester is losing his religion.
However, in truth he is no tortured singer/songwriter. “I’d hate people to think it’s an album about religion, people would run a mile!” Chester laughs. “I suppose there is a loose structure to it that is based around that. It is a sort of scaffolding to hang the songs on. Some of the songs are about loss of faith but they’re not all about that.
"The album begins with Spy Wednesday, continues through Holy Thursday on Like A Rose Tattoo, through to The Easter Vigil itself and finishes on Easter Sunday with Not A Christian Anymore. It's about the rewinding of a man's faith. The loss of belief, almost a perverse enlightenment told through the story of the passion.”
And so half-recalled memories, dredged up from a Catholic childhood in Dublin, crop up here and there. “When I was writing the lyrics, that language just started coming to me. I suppose at some stage I realised that that language is a part of who I am and, in a way, I’d been running away from that stuff, those words all my adult life. So I decided to just go with it.”
He wouldn’t be the first songwriter to borrow from the Bible for imagery and The Easter Vigil is a quiet and mournful work compared to the Byrdsian ring and pop smarts of his previous albums.
“Ironically, I’ve just gotten married! You’d expect me to write an album of love songs after getting married but the more I think about it, these songs are about marriage," Chester says. "I wouldn’t say it’s mournful but love can be sorrowful as well as other things. I wouldn’t like people to think that the album is mournful.”
A prolific producer, Chester has previously worked with The Coronas, Hozier, Mundy and Gemma Hayes. He's just started work on another album with another one of his projects, The Hedge Schools, and shortly, he will also begin production on the new album from acclaimed Dublin act Lazarus Soul. He’s also just finished a solo album with Steve Wickham of The Waterboys.
And just as with his work as a producer, there's a lot going on on The Easter Vigil. As well as those soul searching lyrics and finely-turned confessionals, it boasts lush production and guest appearances from cellist Vyvienne Long, whom Chester previously worked on with The Hedge Schools, and violin from Wickham.
It's an album full of striking imagery. Spy Wednesday bristles with lyrics worthy of Elvis Costello and on Like a Rose Tattoo, he sings about “the national razor”, a decidedly sinister sounding implement. “The national razor is another word for the guillotine,” Chester explains.
“With that song, I was thinking about the play The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams and there was a famous staging of it in Dublin in the fifties at the Pike Theatre and in the play, one of the characters drops a condom on stage and when this got out, that the Pike Theatre had a condom, there was uproar.
“It was said that on the instructions of Archbishop McQuaid, the theatre was raided and the cast was arrested. So that song started really from there but there’s a bit of Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir in there too.
"It was a little bit stream of consciousness but it’s very hard to say with all the songs on the album that this song is about this or that. It’s more like trying to create a sound world in each song and then bring people in to inhabit a world for four minutes.”
www.joechester.com www.bohemiarecords.ie
The Easter Vigil is out now on Bohemia Records
Alan Corr @corralan
