Ex-Saville frontman Ken O'Duffy has released his second solo album and it finds him in a bittersweet and melancholic mood.
It was late summer 2019 and Dublin singer-songwriter Ken O’Duffy had the next two years of his life mapped out.
After decades as a mainstay of bands like The Experiment, the mighty Saville, scene supergroup The Citizens and even a stint with Light a Big Fire in the late eighties, he had just released his well-received solo debut album, The Last Night at The Gentleman’s Club.
There were gigs to play and vinyl editions to hawk . . .
But like all the best laid plans of lab mice and nice guy musicians, a certain virus had other plans. As the pandemic raged and a series of lockdowns kept Ireland indoors and musicians away from stages, O’Duffy did what he does best - write songs.
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"I’d just released my first album and my plan was to have two years of gigging," he says. "And, of course, sell the vinyl copies I got made up, but of course two months into it, bang! Everything closed so all my plans for the next few years just stopped.
"So, I had time on my hands, so I just got down to writing."
He then assembled a band, including his old Saville mucker Joe Fitzgerald on drums, and the result is his second solo record, a collection of beguiling chamber pop called Sing The Songs, and if that title has a certain classic early sixties feel to it, then that’s only right.
"I felt these songs are really singing songs, they’re not really guitar songs and definitely not dance songs," he says. "These are songs to sing along to, so I felt that summed up the whole feel of the album in many ways."
From the title track, which deals with the demise of religion in Ireland, to the Jacques Brel playfulness of The Willow Tree, it’s an album that finds the contemplative Coolock man imbued by a certain serenity - even though it was written during a very anxious time for everybody.
"The songs were written during lockdown but even if the album hadn’t come out, to me the songs had already done their job because they really were therapy for me during that time."
He may have been in and out of bands since the late eighties but O’Duffy has never been a professional musician. In fact, he has a "real" job teaching English in further education, adult education, and higher education.
"I’m based in Finglas, and my job now is a lot of teaching refugees English," he says. "The other night when I launched the new album, a big bunch of Ukrainian students came to the gig, they found out through social media, and they arrived at the gig. There was a table full of them. Isn’t that just lovely?"
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that O’Duffy teaches English. Sing The Songs is full of literary flourishes and sly asides, particularly on The Night Finds You Alone, a Bossa Nova shuffle that might have inspired an admiring "niiiiiice" on Jazz Club on The Fast Show and which contains the line, "you sang of faded streets built on a colonial fantasy."
"It’s about João Gilberto, the guitarist. And because he was singing in Portuguese, I never knew what he was singing about," O’Duffy says.
"I always thought they were these melancholic songs and I also imagined he was talking about this faded colonial glamour. But of course, they’re not. They’re about the beaches of Rio Janeiro but I never knew that!
"So, when I was writing that song, I wanted to talk about my interpretation. He was really a recluse who suffered from agoraphobia, but he invented Bossa Nova and he taught it to all his friends, but he would slip away because he suffered from anxiety."
He may quote WB Yeats on the album, but it’s William B’s painter brother Jack who is the inspiration behind a song that O’Duffy has been trying to write for most of his life.
"I love the painting The Singing Horseman by Jack Yeats and I bought a copy in the National Gallery about thirty years ago and it’s hung in every place I’ve lived in and it has been the most glamorous thing about anywhere I’ve lived," he says.
"I’ve always loved the way in the painting that the horseman has his hands clasped in front of his chest and his head thrown back and I’ve always wondered - what is he seeing?
"I always thought one day I’m going to write the song that I hear when I look at that painting. It’s not like I felt like a fraud but I’m not a horsey person.
"I grew up in Coolock and equine activity was confined to the edge of the estates, but I felt the urban cowboys and cowgirls must have felt the same joy and freedom as a rider in the west of Ireland, so I wanted to sneak in my own experience into the song."
A veteran of Dublin’s music scene in the late eighties, his first band The Experiment tread the boards in the city’s most compact and bijou venue The Underground, a spawning ground for acts like A-House and Something Happens.
The Experiment released their debut single on Horslip Eamon Carr’s Hotwire label. It was a happy time for O’Duffy. He recalls: "I remember one Friday night we supported Something Happens in the Baggot Inn, the Baggot!
"I played in League of Ireland B, and the next morning we played against Bohemians in Dalymount Park. To be honest, it’s all been downhill since then. That was the best weekend of my life."
Since those heady days, O’Duffy, who was born in the magical pop year of 1966, has carved out his own niche as an extoller of droll, classy pop songs with smart lyrics and melodic nous.
Along with the likes of Bren Tallon, Ger Eaton, and Waterford’s now sadly defunct O Emperor, he is a part of a coterie of Irish pop classicalists who’ve kept the nation safe for the sanctity of the song.
"For me I’ve always loved many types of music but the one I love the most is classic song writing," he says. "It’s what I feel I’m strongest at. I suppose when you talk about Brel, Scott Walker, Ray Davies . . . they mean the most to me. I see it as tradition. I see it as a folk music. It’s where my heart is."
Sings The Songs is out now.
