WITHOUT wanting to sound unkind, Fionn Regan cannot give a straight answer. The soft-spoken Bray man cuts a dash in the lobby of Dublin’s Radisson Hotel amid the power-lunching businessmen and the tourists poring over crumpled maps, his trademark mop top, hippyish fashion sense and easy-going demeanour at odds with the sharp suits and bright raincoats.
He is here to talk about his new album, and he has a lot of stories to tell. Since he released his first album in 2006, his star has burned and risen steadily, although there have been ordeals along the way. They are interesting stories, even if he constantly begins a new one before he’s got to the end of a sentence, peppering his dialogue with ostentatious imagery and flowery metaphors. Yet even then, it’s more of an endearing personality trait than a calculated effort to roll out premeditated soundbites.
Some of Regan's yarns relate to the new album, 100 Acres of Sycamore, but many of them delve deeper into the past. His third release has come relatively soon after its predecessor, the well-received, energetic The Shadow of an Empire. That record was a continuation of his "Regan Goes Electric" phase, which began with an album recorded for Lost Highway with producer Ethan Johns. But the US indie label didn't like the end product, refused to put it out, and released the singer-songwriter from his contract.
He’s surprisingly diplomatic about the debacle. You get the sense that with Fionn Regan, most things are a learning experience.
“It’s well documented that business and artistic endeavours don’t always make the best dancing partners,” he says with a shrug and a sip of his coffee. “When I was making the record, I was perfectly aware that it was a very daring piece of work. It was a very hard record for the label to get their heads around – it was very wild, it had a punk element to it.
“But the thing is, these things are the aces up your sleeve, if you can view it like that. If you want to get bitter about it and roll off the face of the planet in a barrel, you can. But being wise and open to the experience was the most important learning curve for me. Now I know that I can make a record standing in a storm. I’ve become a bit of a tightrope walker.”
The bustling, rock-tinted tone of The Shadow of an Empirewas the result of getting that frustration out of his system and being almost constantly on tour in the intervening period. Its successor, however, is much more sedate. Certainly, the new album has more in common with his debut, The End of History, but something else has audibly changed.
The addition of lush strings on several tracks hints at a new phase of his career, musically speaking. Lyrically, too, these are beautifully constructed affairs, entwining love paeans with striking imagery from the natural world. That was no coincidence, since Regan wrote most of the record in the Majorcan village of Deià, having been invited there to stay in the most unlikely of circumstances by English actor Anna Friel.
"Yeah, we're good mates now," he nods enthusiastically. "It's one of those things where the stars just aligned. Mad things like that always seem to happen to me. We met in Valencia and got talking about the Robert Graves book The White Goddess, about the origins of poetry. He's buried in Deià, and he had bought loads of houses when it was in its early stages, which he gave artists to live in and write. So the seeds of that artistic community has spread down through the generations.
“For a writer or a painter or a film-maker, it’s amazing. It does feel like you’ve walked through the wardrobe. The place is laced with magic. It feels like when you’re walking around that a sheet could blow up in the air, a hat could turn into a star, or something just feels magic. It has that kind of energy to it.”
It's easy to see how the origins of songs such as North Star Loverand For a Nightingalecould originate in such an environment. Others seem undeniably Irish, such as First Day of May, while still others reach further afield, such as centrepiece The Lake District,a song Regan is justifiably proud of.
“I can only write about how I feel and the things that were happening. I think when it came to this record, I was in more of a peaceful headspace anyway, and the songs just came like liquid gold. But I knew in order to get the musical language and the aesthetic of it nailed I was gonna have to do a lot of work before I went in.”
A huge amount of pre-production went into the album before it was recorded over seven days in Leeders Farm, the wooden barn studio conversion in Norfolk owned by The Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins.As with his previous albums, Regan produced the new one himself, although he denies all charges of being a control freak.
“The only time I made a record in the conventional way was the record that didn’t get released, so it suggests that unconventional is the way that I work best,” he says of the short recording time. “I never work well when there’s a committee involved in the record. It has to be my own. I suppose you look at a film-maker like Tarantino, he kind of makes films like that. If he tried to splice himself with loads of outside involvement, it’d just unravel the thing.
“It’s not a control thing. It’d be a lot easier if I had a George Martin-type character in my life – and with Ethan Johns, that’s what I kind of thought I had, in a way. I think if there is a producer out there for me, myself and Ethan are very similar in our ideas, and he’d be the closest to that kind of person that I could see myself doing a series of records with.”
For the moment, however, he is happy to maintain his one-man operation. Perhaps 100 Days of Sycamorewill lead him farther than the creative retreat of a well-known actor's house in Deià, or farther than his previous albums have taken him. He's proud of the album, calling it the most complete thing he's ever done, but he has no expectations regarding its success. He has, after all, learned about the capricious whims of the music industry the hard way.
“I’d love it to do well, but it’s really out of my control. The way I’ve done everything has really gone against trying to be a massive commercial success in any way. So with this record, it’s going to be a graceful snowball, and word of mouth will really make it happen. The people will really decide.
"With the techniques of modern recording, where you can airbrush this and that, they make things exciting. It's like a fireworks display. But someone has to sweep the rockets up the next morning, you know? I think with my records, they're a bit more like the Northern Lights. You have to travel and get on a boat, and you might see it, you might not. But if you do, it will have an effect on you. everything that I do, when it's at its best it's a mystery. And I feel like this record's full of mystery. When you listen to albums like After the Goldrushor Astral Weeks, you feel they go on forever. With this record, I feel like I've achieved that in my own mad way – that feeling of a piece of work that goes on playing.
“Things happen for a reason. And this record wouldn’t have happened without the last record, and the last record was very important. It was like a chrysalis, whereas this one is like the butterfly. And the second one wouldn’t have happened without the first one. I don’t know what I’m gonna do for the next record, I might be on a bouzouki, you know? I don’t wanna just do things because I’m on to a good thing, to just repeat what I’ve done the last time. I’m just gonna go with my instinct. It’s not intellect, it’s instinct.
“Really, I’m operating like a one-man circus. Put the pegs down, pull up the flysheet and then move on. I’m operating in my own world,” he says with a determined nod, “and that’s the way I’m gonna keep it.”
- 100 Acres of Sycamoreis released today
