Tommy Kiernan Dunne is telling his story, and it's some tale. The Dublin rapper known as Tommy KD is releasing his debut album today. Karma's a Bitch is a wallop of lyrical reality and rhymes from a man who knows only too well the struggles that come with years of drug addiction and homelessness.
Hip-hop gave the fortysomething, now sitting across the table in a Dublin cafe sipping tea, the means to communicate about that hard-knock life.
Dunne’s eyes light up when he remembers the rappers who first captured his Ballymun teenage imagination: Cypress Hill, Wu Tang Clan and, most of all, Snoop Dogg.
"Tha Dogg Pound album, that was the one," he says. "Snoop was 19 years of age when he brought that album out, four years older than me, and I loved it. I still love it to this day."
Up to then, Dunne’s ears were tuned to much different sounds.
“I was a metaller,” he smiles. “I know, hard to believe. I was into Metallica, Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses. I had the long hair and everything, so I totally flipped when I heard House of Pain and Run DMC mixing rock and rap together.”
He copped right away that hip-hop was different because it was a way to tell stories – a way to tell his story. "Everything about it, the honesty of it and the fact that you could talk about the streets, appealed to me."
Dunne has always liked telling stories, which was why poetry and English caught his attention in school.
“I think Oscar Wilde was the first rapper – ‘we’re all in the gutter and some of us are looking at the stars’. I’ve been lucky enough to find out what I’m good at and be able to do it.
“All of us have a talent, all of us have something which is special about them that no one else has, and they need to find it and tap into it. I was born with this talent for writing raps.”
Don’t tell me I can’t Dunne recalls the first time he rapped. “My friend had written a rap song and he sang it to me. Because I looked up to him, I wanted to rap. So I came out with a rap, but it wasn’t the best. He then said to me, ‘you can’t rap’, so I was determined to show he was wrong.”
At the time, Dunne was arrested for shoplifting and spent six months in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Institution. It was the beginning of the first of many rough patches.
“I’d fallen by the wayside by the age of 18,” he says. “I was addicted to heroin and out committing crimes and ended up in Mountjoy. Sometimes, I’d sit at home dreaming and writing, but the music went to the side.”
A chance encounter changed all this. “I was walking up Grafton Street one day and there was this guy beatboxing. I was amazed by this; I’d never seen anything like it before. I asked him where was his drum machine, and he said he was making the beats with his voice.
“He was doing drum’n’bass, and I asked him could he do hip-hop. And he said he’d give it a go and I started rapping. We got a big crowd around and we made 180 quid that night and we decided to give it a go.”
That beatboxer was Jack Fleming. “He was a really posh guy,” Dunne says. “He’d gone to Cambridge and Trinity, he was very book-smart, and he was brilliant at the beat-boxing.”
As Man & The Machine, Dunne and Fleming were a fixture on Dublin streets for a few years. “We had the fans who were into the beatboxing and we had the fans who were into the rapping, so we had the best of both worlds.”
In 2005, Fleming met a Spanish woman and headed off to Spain, leaving Dunne on his own again. “I gave the music a break for a good few years.”
Rough years
Eight chaotic years followed. Dunne was in and out of hostels and squats, roughing it on the streets and using drugs. He didn't give a damn about music after Fleming left.
“When you’re living rough on the streets,” he says, “it’s not just the elements you have to worry about. There’s little punks going around kicking the heads off fellas that are asleep or urinating on them or setting their sleeping bags on fire for the laugh.
“I was woken up by a kick in the face and I tell you, it’s horrible. I’ve had a guy urinate on my sleeping bag and he was laughing when he was doing it. I jumped up, ran after him and gave him a dig he wasn’t expecting, a good hard dig. It was bad enough that he pissed on me, but laughing his head off as he did it really got to me. He was drunk, but that’s no excuse.”
Things changed for Dunne in 2013. “I met Kirsty McCarthy, who used to rap as MC Krisma, on the tram one day and she got talking to me and I trust Kirsty.”
McCarthy put him in touch with music manager Pat Neary. “Pat met me and asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to make an album and here we are now.”
Rade recovery
Aside from working on the album for the past few years, Dunne also began to attend Recovery Through Art, Drama & Education (Rade). This is a Dublin-based scheme that works with drug users on arts and drama projects.
“We try to show the public that addicts are every bit as productive a part of society as anyone else and that we can put on shows, good shows.”
Thanks to Rade, Dunne appeared on an episode of Love/ Hate, playing a ranting, raving bug-eyed character in a Christian recovery house.
“I was well able to get into that role because I had first-hand experience. I’d been in the Victory Outreach house in Drogheda, which was full of mad bible-belters and really draconian. That works for some people, but I think the people it works for are brainwashed.
"It was the most authentic scene in Love/Hate because everyone in the scene was a recovering addict like myself."
These days, Dunne is stable on methadone and staying temporarily with his sister. “Technically, I’m still homeless, but I want my own place. I hope I can make enough money from the album to get the price of the deposit of a flat.”
Past reminding
He's delighted with Karma's a Bitch, thrilled with the tracks that producer Hazo has done for him, and happy with how things have turned out. But the world Dunne comes from has not gone away, and that makes him angry.
“There are whole families living in B&Bs in 2016,” he says. “There are drug addicts lying in alleyways with needles sticking in their arms. There are prostitutes strung out on the street. There are people living desperate lives, and it’s a grim reality.
“I’m not a negative person, but I’ve known nothing but negativity all around me all of my life. There’s a lot of negativity in Dublin, and the homeless crisis right now is out of hand.
“I never dreamt I’d be doing stuff like this, like getting the album out or playing my own shows. But at the same time, it’s important to say that everything’s not rosy. If my life takes a positive turn with the music, I’ll sing positive stuff. But right now, things are far from rosy.”
With that, he’s ready to go. There are plans galore for new tracks he has written and the band he’d like to put together to do rock and rap. Right now, though, there are more pressing matters. So he borrows some cash and heads off to buy Blu Tack to stick up posters around town for the upcoming gig.
Tommy KD’s not going to let this latest chance go by.
- Karma's a Bitch is out now on Anam Records. Tommy KD plays Dublin's Grand Social Saturday, January 16th
