Mick Flannery is the first Irish musician to win awards in the US's prestigious International Songwriting Competition. Back in Cork, it's a different story. Brian O'Connell catches up with him after a day's hard graft on the building site
Inside a disused and litter-strewn bedroom on Cork's Union Quay, Mick Flannery shakes off eight hours of stonemason's dust, rolls a cigarette and sits behind a piano. The 22-year-old has just finished work and has the scarred palms and blackened nails to prove it. It's late evening, and fiddles and guitars are woken up and tuned.
Flannery doesn't say much, just mumbles a line or two about having to get a solo right and asks for a light.
"I've got a new song I want to try," he says as his manager, Pat Conway, the former owner of the Lobby venue, takes his place on an upturned keg. A copy of Go Ask Alice rests on a candle-stained locker, while a Cottages of Ireland poster obscures the night skyline. It's not exactly Greenwich Village. In fact, it's not even Whelan's.
I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing here. I've been had. I take solace in an e-mail from music producer PJ Curtis the night before, saying: "He's the best thing I've heard in years. He'll be huge."
Sensing the unease, Flannery clatters the piano, stubs out his cigarette and sets free a voice he has no business owning. It's Tom Waits and Thom Yorke, pain and pleasure, delight and dread.
Conway glances over. He smiles. Ye of little faith, he must be thinking.
Three months earlier, and one of the most prestigious songwriting competitions in the US has already signposted Mick Flannery's huge potential. The International Songwriting Competition counts among its judges the likes of Rosanne Cash, Robert Smith, Macy Gray and many leading American music industry figures, and Flannery has picked up two awards - in the "best lyrics" and "best folk and singer/songwriter" categories - the first Irish person to do so. The $6,000 (€4,737) in prizes will help fund his next album, while a distribution deal in Ireland and the UK has been secured for his debut, Evening Train.
Evening Train is an extraordinary recording, a concept album of substance that Flannery started writing when he was just 15. It tells the tale of two brothers, a card game, and an assortment of shady characters and underhand dealings. It's mature beyond his years, yet ask Flannery to name check his musical reference points, and his youthful vintage comes through.
"There's a lot of music in the family," he says. "On my mother's side they were into a lot of American stuff. My grandfather, for instance, was a Paul Robeson fan, while my aunts and uncles are into Tom Waits, Dylan and the McGarrigles. My mother and aunt play regularly, they used to have sessions in Killarney in a place called the Vintage. For me, though, one of my most profound musical memories was seeing Kurt Cobain on TV doing The Man Who Sold the World.
"I remember I was speaking to someone on the phone at the time and I dropped the phone to the floor - I'd never seen Cobain before or heard of him, and it blew me away. I went out and bought the album, which, along with Blonde on Blonde, was one of the first albums I bought."
WHEN FLANNERY FIRST started writing, he kept it to himself for fear of provoking the ire of his teenage friends. He finds it hard to articulate where the impulse came from, and didn't find the writing process a particularly easy one, yet he stuck at it.
"When I started writing at 16, I didn't tell any of the lads in school what I was doing," he says. "It wasn't cool really. It's hard to explain why you start doing something like that. I just got a buzz out of it. Most of the songs took a while for me to finish. I was never much of a 10-minute-song type of guy, it was always a slog for me."
After secondary school, Flannery enrolled for a two-year diploma in music, management and sound at Cork's Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa (CSN). The course aims to equip students for life as a professional musician, both from an artistic and business point of view. It boasts a strong coterie of past pupils who have gone on to forge successful careers in the music industry, including Sinéad Lohan, Áine Whelan, Pauline Scanlon and Niall Connolly.
Flannery thrived on the freedom to concentrate solely on his music and to mingle with contemporaries with similar interests. Suddenly he was cool.
"I had a fair idea college was not for me, so it wasn't that hard a decision to make," he says. "The first thing I got from it was the chance to meet loads of musicians, and getting a band together became easy. Coming from Blarney, you don't know if people are playing or not, and I never really met that many other musicians my own age. For instance, the first recording I ever did was with a few lads from Blarney, who were probably the only three people at the time I knew who played."
It was while at CSN that Flannery had the idea of writing a concept album, and his debut took its first steps.
"During the course, you were given time to head off and rehearse and try to get a few songs together if you wanted," he says. "Later on, if you were good enough, you could play at one of the regular college showcase gigs. In the second year of the course we were let off on our own to put a project together. My idea was to write a musical. I failed at that because I couldn't get a handle on the dialogue or stage directions, so instead came up with the idea for a concept album."
With the album finally finished last summer, next stop was New York and the perceived road to global domination. Gigs by this time were plentiful in Flannery's home town, yet he needed a fresh challenge.
"Once the album was recorded I went off to New York for three months trying to make myself famous," he says. "I got a few proper gigs along the way, but mostly it was open-mic gigs. I think I went there expecting the whole Dylan thing, but when I got to the Village, for instance, there was nothing going on there. Everything had switched over to the East Village, and it didn't seem to have the same buzz as you'd expect.
"I got a good enough reaction, but it was small time, especially the open-mic slots. The audience is basically other songwriters waiting their turn. It's kind of like talking to someone who's waiting to talk to you - pointless really.
"I was only there for three months. I reckon you'd need about two years. I like America, though; the album is set over there. I'd like to think I haven't finished with the place yet."
CURRENTLY, FLANNERY IS busy promoting Evening Train, while steadily building his fan base nationally. An Irish tour kicks off later this month with his biggest gig to date at the Spiegeltent in Cork as part of the Midsummer Festival, followed by the Cobblestone in Dublin.
It's not all champagne and strawberries, though, and meanwhile Flannery is to be found playing in record shops up and down the country in the evenings and mixing cement on building sites during the day. His days on the sites may be numbered, though.
"It's going well, but there are tough days," he says. "Last week, for instance, I played in Tower Records in Galway to an old man and a young fella and no one else. It wasn't that bad actually - we sold a CD to the old man! The young fella had no money, which was a bit disappointing, but that's the way.
"Then there is the other side. The awards have opened up lots of possibilities in the States, where I'm keen to return. On the way here I heard RTÉ Radio 1 playing one of my tracks, which they have been doing quite a lot lately, and it was a strange, affirming feeling. I could get used to that."
Mick Flannery's debut album, Evening Train, is out now. His Irish tour kicks off tomorrow at the Spiegeltent in Cork. For details, go to www.mickflannery.com
