When David Balfe daydreams about a particular time, in a particular place, he is in the shed in his back garden, a space his parents lovingly brought into being to nudge their son on to a track of creation rather than destruction. That gift birthed a group of young artists who were thrown into turmoil when one of them, the poet and musician Paul Curran, died by suicide in 2018.
It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay. These are the words I found myself repeating when I listened to Balfe’s mixtape, Into a World that Doesn’t Understand It, Unless You’re from It, released last August. Balfe creates under the name For Those I Love and released an album of the same name in 2019, made in memory of Curran. Initially meant just for that group of friends, the album was picked up by September Recordings, the label arm of a management team that counts Adele, Rick Rubin, Richard Russell and London Grammar among its roster, and will be released “officially” at the end of the month. And with it, Balfe will become one of the many working-class artists Irish culture now orients around.
I wish there was a way to explain how huge a feeling it is to be able to put your feeling of loss into somebody else's collective hands for 90 minutes
Besides art, Curran’s life centred on Shelbourne FC. In the aftermath of his death, Shels were playing Longford Town. In the stands, the ultras lit flares, holding aloft banners bearing the images of Curran and another fan, Smurf, who died the same day as Curran, a four-minute walk away from one another. Deep in injury time, it was 2-2. Shels got a penalty. David O’Sullivan casually slotted it past the Longford keeper. The crowd erupted. Afterwards, Balfe and his friends scattered Curran’s ashes in the centre of the pitch. A murmuration of birds flew overhead.
Last October Balfe and I were doing laps of the pitch at Tolka Park in the autumn sun. “I wish there was a way to explain how huge a feeling it is to be able to put your feeling of loss into somebody else’s collective hands for 90 minutes,” Balfe says of that game. “It was for me, and for a lot of my friends, the only break that we had from the chaos that was haunting us at that time.” Balfe confesses his greatest fear is losing his memory. The album is in many ways an act of remembrance, a collage, an archive of emotion, places, people and love.
It’s December in Dingle, the world is still on its head, the usually packed streets are empty and St James’s Church has taken on less of a magical feel and more of a sombre, ghostly one. Other Voices is going ahead without an audience and there’s not even a sniff of a takeaway pint in the town, which has effectively shut down, as Pamela Connolly from Pillow Queens, who used to be in a duo with Balfe under the name Mothers & Fathers, found out when she travelled down a night early.
By the end of Balfe’s set, most of the crew are in tears. Aoife Woodlock, the series’ music producer, emerges from the church crying and retreats to the side of the building, leaning on the stone wall that borders the graveyard. I sit on the ground outside with my head in my hands. I thought that seeing live music, having been starved of it, would provide something of a release. But instead something much bigger has occurred and nobody can even talk to one another. We have just witnessed something that doesn’t even feel like a gig. It’s something else. I feel like I’m on the precipice of a panic attack, but one shrouded in gratitude. I want to scream. Balfe walks out of the church with his father, and then something very strange happens. Because of how the crew is naturally positioned, decompressing outside, in two lines opposite each other, 2m apart on both sides, we realise we are standing in a guard of honour. A spontaneous, wordless applause breaks out. Balfe’s head is bowed. He raises his chin slightly in a gesture of thanks as he walks.
The next morning, we stroll down to a small jetty at the harbour and sit, feet dangling above the fuel-stained sea. Balfe has already performed on Later with Jools Holland, but the Other Voices show is fuller. The morning after the night before, digesting the record in a live context, the idea of going on the road and doing, say, 20 shows in a row, doesn’t feel, as Balfe puts it, “Safe. It’s not.” What he envisages are “more bespoke pieces” live, and to “use it for myself to serve as a bit of a cathartic channel, and not something that feels like a repetitious piece of labour”. After the performance, he notes that there was an eight-pack of Guinness in his room. If this was two years ago, he would have walked off stage and “rallied the whole thing”. Now he knows he just needs to “F*** off for an hour. I need to just go lie down and get my head together after that, and try and close that tap again.”
There's a responsibility that comes when you're opening up topics like that because you don't know about the history, the trauma that the audience brings to the performance
He draws an analogy for creating space between what he presents publicly: “Sometimes you go to the pub or something and there might be one person at the table who doesn’t really say a whole lot. Everybody else rattles along for the night. But when they do open their mouths and say something, everyone listens because it’s considered and it’s rare and it’s not just the first thing that is spilling out of their mouth and mind. I think you learn from those people, that if you want people to listen, then you can’t scream and shout and bombard them with information constantly. I think you become a burden.”
There needs to be an act of “turning the tap off”, he says, after performing this music. “I think there’s a great responsibility that comes when you’re opening up topics like that, and it’s not just to do with your own personal safety, but it is very much to do with the responsibility and safety of the audience that are watching as well, because you don’t know about the history, the trauma that the audience are bringing too, to your performance.”
At the moment, he is happy. This happiness is the result of many intertwined factors and external aids: a fantastic counsellor, good medication that works for him and an amazing partner. Both the therapy and the medication “were only achieved by having financial security. That’s the tragedy of it. When I needed that most, I didn’t have the financial security to get it. But now I have the financial security and I’m able to get that help. Having the financial security is also monumental and it should not be understated, because it has taken incredible stresses out of my life.”
Balfe has made an album that is a work of profound truth. Mouths, hearts, lungs and tear ducts open with each musical and lyrical phase. There is pure joy in it
In early February, it is very cold, and Balfe has forgotten we were meant to chat on Zoom one night, which is probably for the best, as otherwise he would have been thinking about it all day. When I text him, it’s pure luck he has his phone to hand, because he tries to stay away from it. He doesn’t like doing social media, and he’s bad at checking his emails. The main reason for that is every time he engages, there is an incredible weight at the other end. His Instagram DMs fill with strangers professing deeply personal things. For some his music offers a window of time within which they can grieve, reframe a loss or memorialise. For others they hear something in his music that allows them to rethink steps they were going to take that were deeply destructive.
And what music. Balfe has made an album that is a work of profound truth. Mouths, hearts, lungs and tear ducts open with each musical and lyrical phase. There is pure joy in it, and the heartache that underpins the essence of life. It demands, presents and commands an expansion of space, within which troubles and grief can float a while, perhaps for ever.
When I ask him how he feels about the album journeying towards a public presence, he is at pains to separate what he feels about that, and what he understands, logically. How he feels lands like a medicine ball to the chest. “I feel irrationally, monstrously guilty. I feel terrible about it … This is something that I’ve been able to challenge with the help of my girlfriend, my family, my friends, and challenge it well. However, you are specifically asking me about how I feel, and I feel guilty.”
But he also understands the impact the record is having on those coping with loss, and on those for whom the music is a crowbar, prying them away from potentially destructive acts. This is “a net good”, as he puts it. Of the messages he receives from people whom his music is in some cases literally saving, he says, “I don’t think there could be anything – there isn’t something that can be more important or valuable – than that.” He feels okay about trying to make peace with that guilt in real time. It’s just current discomfort for him, and that’s okay. It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay. The cycle repeats, and the end just leads to the start.
