Gemma Hayes: ‘I’ve always struggled with confidence issues. As a teenager, I always had crazy panic attacks’

In 2006, Gemma Hayes had a meeting with the head of Sony Records, a woman who was interested in working with Hayes, who, at that point, had released two albums, including her Mercury Prize-nominated debut Night on my Side. “She said, I get it, music means a lot to you,” says Hayes. “And you’re thinking about longevity. But we want to work with superstars. Do you want to be a superstar?”

Gemma Hayes leans back and recounts what she told the Sony Records boss. “No.” The next words came from both of them: “Well, we’ll call it a day then.”

Nearly two decades on, Hayes is sipping an Americano amid the quiet charm of Rolf’s Country House and restaurant in Baltimore in west Cork, a blustery day sending the leaves in the garden outside leaping to meet the window panes. Clad in black, her hair scraped back into a scrunchie, two thin gold necklaces around her neck, she is an understated presence. Since that period in her life, the Tipperary singer-songwriter has released three albums, but took a significant break in 2015, after the birth of her first child, Max.

[ Gemma Hayes: ‘I wasn’t owning my sexuality, I was wearing baggy jeans and t-shirts’ ]

This interview is part of her re-emerging to be present in the cultural scene again. With a new album due, her first in ten years, and a live show in Vicar Street taking place next weekend, her sound remains current: Irish band Pillow Queens regularly name-check her as an influence, and her songs can sit easily on a playlist next to material by Olivia Rodrigo, the globe-trotting sensation. But Hayes is honest enough to admit how hard forging a return is. Her story is complicated. Just because someone can be a star doesn’t mean that they should be or that it’s right for them. “You have to want it,” she says, “and you have to be really strong to deal with it. As a woman, it’s harder to be exposed. You become public property.”

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Hayes, raised in Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary, was drawn to music from an early age: her father, a garda, played keyboards in a band called The Hillbillies, and her musical nous was obvious: she had specific and strong ideas about what and who she wanted to be musically. But playing live was crippling. “I’ve always struggled with confidence issues. I always have to talk myself into saying, ‘You’ll be okay, you can do this’. It doesn’t come natural to go, ‘I can do this’. As a teenager, I always had crazy panic attacks. I had to get help for them.”

Through counselling, Hayes learned ways to cope. “One thing that really helped, that I was told years ago, and it’s such a simple trick, is to grow in your head: just become bigger. Become seven foot tall. Just be really big. And just picture the anxiety still the same size. So it’s still there. But you’re growing bigger than it. I do these little things before I do anything that I think is going to be challenging. It doesn’t take away the anxiety. You just feel more capable to deal with it. Don’t deny it. There’s a little volume knob; just turn the dial down to three. And also try to find out the source of it. Where does it come from? I’ve always just been an anxious kid. Shy.”

Was it in the family? “Yes, my mother would have had anxiety as well. But in a way, if I’d been a super-confident, easy-breezy person, would I have turned to music, would I have needed that? You’re born the way you’re born. You have what you have. You can utilise what’s deemed negative and put it into something creative. There’s an internal struggle. And I have to win. I can’t let it win. And how better to do that than to get up on stage with a light on me?”

And for a time, Hayes did win. Record labels wanted to sign her; magazines wanted her on their covers, and even pop impresario Louis Walsh declared himself impressed by her raw talent. But the attention looked at times to be something Hayes endured rather than enjoyed, and, once she stepped outside the mainstream, forging a career as an independent artist came with difficulties attached: crowdfunding record releases, organising tours, dealing with social media, and then coping with the rigours of touring. Change was also coming in her life: in 2014, Hayes married Stuart Musgrave, a scion of the Musgrave retail dynasty in Cork, and gave birth to her son, Max.

Not long after the release of her album Bones + Longing in 2014, Hayes pressed pause on her music career. “It wasn’t a head decision. I was just exhausted. I had put out Bones + Longing when Max was very small, less than a year old, and I thought that I could maybe just chuck him on my back.” She laughs. “I’d seen people with the Babybjorns off gigging, and I thought, ‘Easy peasy, you know,’ but it wasn’t. It was exhausting. I remember doing a few shows in Germany. My husband was brilliant. He came and was looking after Max. But I was still breastfeeding. And Max was waking up two or three times a night and it was a different hotel every night. I was getting up on stage the following night at 10 o’clock, having not slept. Bleary-eyed. It just wasn’t working for me.”

Going on tour without Max was not an option. “There was a little human that I craved to be with, and I felt like I was part of the details of his life: I knew every cry and what it meant. So it felt weird for me to either travel without him, or to have him come with me and see him disrupted by all the movement and different hotels and all of that. And at that stage, I’d given music 20 years. So I thought, look, I think I’m going to step back for a few years, and just focus on this little fella. Every woman’s situation is different. My situation allowed me to do that, so I took advantage of that.”

I’d resigned myself to the fact that maybe we’d never get back to Ireland. And then Covid happened

—  Hayes on moving back from London

For a time, it was absolutely the right thing to do. “The first few years were great,” says Hayes. “And then I just felt like there was this little ghost hovering around me. I started to feel ... not dissatisfied, but there was something niggling creatively. I started to feel like I was becoming invisible. It’s very hard to describe. But then Myah came along, which was great. And then I was like, ‘Oh right, I’m not going to get to my music for another while’. Now there’s two kids: a toddler and a newborn.

“And then I found myself getting unhappy. I think you can over-give. I nearly sacrificed myself and became all about the children. There was nothing left for myself. So I tried writing some songs and I found that when I was creative, I was a nicer person. I had more patience. I wasn’t as snappy. It was nearly meditative. So I decided, for mental health reasons, to create again.”

Until 2020, the family were living in London. “We were on Albert Bridge Road, which is just beside Battersea Park: that was where we did all our socialising and sports and go for a walk to clear the head. Max was in school in Chelsea. It was a beautiful community. I loved it, but always wanted to come home. The thing is: wherever your kids go to school, they start to anchor you there. Because you don’t want to disrupt their lives when they’re happy. So I was thinking, it’ll probably be secondary school, but then I don’t want to uproot them when they’re teenagers. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that maybe we’d never get back to Ireland. And then Covid happened.”

The pandemic brought them home to Ireland to stay. “We were here in Baltimore. I remember I had all their school uniforms for London. Myah was about to start school. And Max was going into first class or whatever it’s called over there. And then we still couldn’t travel. So I put them into school here. And it was like, ‘Oh this is gorgeous’. [The school] just seems to be a lot more holistic in their approach. Their headmistress is very empathetic with all the different characters.”

The village had a restorative effect on Hayes as well. Whether it was going blackberrying in the bramble-filled boreens or taking long walks past the Baltimore Beacon, she fell in love with the place, how the seasons unfolded, how it was busy during tourist-filled summers, with a “jovial sort of energy”, but then, in September, with the warmth still in the day, the boats would slowly disappear from the harbour, and the quiet would descend for winter.

Back in London, even when there were moments in which Hayes could have created new work, she didn’t. “Even when I had the time, I was just tired,” she says. “There were times when the kids were in bed, and I could have been off playing the guitar and I’d find myself eating half a jar of Nutella, staring into space or on social media. And then I’d beat myself up: I’d be going, oh my God, I could have been productive and here I am spacing off, looking at before-and-after pictures of celebrities, just junk for the brain. Also confidence is a funny thing. Because I felt that maybe I had put all my resources into these little people. The ground was shaky.”

In Baltimore, it was different. The key for Hayes started when the artist Lisa Hannigan, who also makes her home in west Cork, called her up to ask if she would play a gig for the RNLI towards the end of the pandemic. “I hadn’t gigged for years. And she asked me, ‘Would you do a charity show if I set one up?’ I said no. I was like, I can’t. The idea of it [was] terrifying.”

Two friends, the Baltimore-based singer-songwriters Tessa Perry and Liz Clarke, intervened. “They were like, ‘Come on! You live in a small community, you’re creative’,” says Hayes. “Tessa said, “Come up to the Glebe. It’ll just be me and Liz and just play to us.’” So Hayes brought her guitar up the hill to Glebe Gardens and Cafe, run by the Perry family. “And I played a few songs.” So: was there an audience? “No!” Hayes laughs. “We just had a coffee and they were like, ‘Come on! Just do it!’”

And how did she feel after the day? “Good. It was like, whatever monster I had in my head that was going to devour me if I tried to do something, didn’t. And Lisa was incredible. And I did start doing charity shows with her. She is incredibly generous, with her time and her kindness. She’s really strong on the stage. It’s very potent and I find that really inspiring. And with Tessa and Liz, there’s a lightness. They just get up on stage and have the craic. So it really helped, the three of them.”

Their bond is strong offstage as well as on. Asked to recommend a few places in the village, Hayes mentions The Algiers pub, where the singer-songwriters sometimes go. “They do great margaritas: myself and Lisa and Liz and Tessa will talk about everything over a margarita.” As for other places Hayes loves, “there’s Rolf’s to read and have amazing breakfasts. There’s Bushe’s for a hearty sandwich: they use Field’s bread, which is the best bread in the world. We go to Sherkin and to Heir island for the wood-fired pizzas. And St Matthew’s church is fantastic.” She smiles at this last, in acknowledgment of the context: gigs at St Matthew’s church in the village are run by Hayes’s husband of almost 10 years.

With music, you can say things and connect with people in ways that are magical. That’s what I always come back to

How does she feel about the fact that in August it will be a decade of marriage? “Mad. God, 10 years! We’re going to have to celebrate,” she says. “Marriage is an interesting concept. Stu is my best friend. I hate to say it, but I don’t know what I’d do without him. The message that I was brought up with, or that I picked up subliminally from society, was to be independent. So it’s been an interesting thing to learn to lean and to be okay with leaning on somebody. I love the fact that my other half is somebody that I can go ‘help’ and he is there. It’s wonderful to have that strength.”

The couple have lived for the past few years in the middle of Baltimore, in a beloved holiday home belonging to Hayes’s mother-in-law, with a rose garden and views over the harbour. They plan to buy a house in the area when they can. The next immediate project, though, is Hayes’s new album, which is being mastered for imminent release, and has been co-produced by Hayes, Karl Odlum and Dave Odlum. “I really like how it sounds,” Hayes says. “It’s really exciting to have a body of work that I’m excited to put out to the world. There are acoustic songs and then there are very big songs. I’m big on production, even when it’s not fashionable: I like big sounds, melodies coming in, synths, keyboards. You can sometimes take a little sad song and make it have loads of fizz around it. I recorded some of it at home. Lisa [Hannigan] came in and did backing vocals, holding her baba. She’s been so generous.”

Paul Noonan of Bell X1 also features on the album, which is no real surprise as, for some months, Hayes, Hannigan and Noonan have been performing gigs together, and they are fast emerging as the country’s best-kept secret, with each of the three vocalists as strong as the other. “It was one show originally, and it was so nice,” says Hayes. “So then we decided to do more and more shows. The WhatsApp group is called Trio, but there is no name, although I think it’s made it to posters now.” It’s also on Wikipedia, I mention. She laughs. “Trio? It’s not very imaginative, is it?”

For an artist who sometimes comes across as needing control in all aspects of her music, it’s perhaps indicative of a more relaxed mindset these days that Hayes can let the name go. For her recent video for the intense, slow-burn single Feed the Flames, they did everything last-minute, so Hayes found herself on the morning of the shoot with nothing to wear. “I didn’t want to wear a big winter coat, because it would have been shapeless and formless, so I just panicked and chucked on something. A friend of mine here said, ‘You look like a farmer dressed up to go to Mass’. The check shirt was buttoned. Tweed jacket. A pair of wellies.” That’s a vibe in itself, I say. “It sure is, not a vibe that I had planned!” she laughs.

Hayes appears similarly unruffled about her live gigs to support the forthcoming record. She has devoted considerable time over the years to thinking about why she does what she does, when playing live can make her so sick with nerves, and she has come to some important conclusions about it. “I’m testing a part of myself,” she says. “There is a thrill to being that scared and overcoming it. With music, you can say things and connect with people in ways that are magical. That’s what I always come back to.”

Gemma Hayes’s album Blind Faith comes out later this year; the single Hardwired is out now. She plays Vicar Street, Dublin on May 18th. vicarstreet.com