'Chuzzle' believes in leaps of faith - he took one when he chose a career in the music industry. Róisín Ingle meets him to discuss destiny.
At a gig in the Dublin venue Crawdaddy, Chuzzle begins his performance as a member of the audience. His band is already on stage playing the soaring introduction to the first psychadelicate song. "Stop," he sings, moving through the hushed crowd who turn to look as he makes his way onto the stage "... and start". Seekers of originality breathe a sigh of relief. This is not just another gig.
Chuzzle - the name is partly inspired by the Dickens character Martin Chuzzlewit - is wearing a formal-looking red coat. He has accessorised it with a dapper top hat. The look is almost Dickensian, a Ye Olde Pop Star, browsing with intent in a musical curiosity shop. He is not Daragh Downes from Raheny in Dublin, a slight man with soft brown eyes. He is Chuzzle. As one of his songs would have it; All Hail!
The gig at Crawdaddy is shorter than usual. His father died suddenly a couple of weeks earlier and it doesn't feel right to be rocking out. His Dad used to come to see the gigs and had a strong belief that his son would make it in music. As a result, the songs are more emotionally charged than ever. Chuzzle walks off stage after a storming performance of The Secrets Have A Life All Of Their Own before strolling, alone, out into the Dublin night.
After seeing him perform his otherworldly, sweetly chilling set for the fourth time and still struggling to describe it to friends, it's not surprising to discover that Chuzzle has what his manager John Brereton describes as "an almost violent allergy to cliché" and that's what makes him so hard to pin down.
But it's not originality for originality's sake. The clothes - a refreshing change from the Strokes-style uniform beloved of a whole generation of bands - are something of a Wildean mask.
"It's the thing of having to wear a mask in order to be yourself. If I went up there as myself I would get stage-fright; I'm actually a shy person," he says, sipping coffee a few days later in a city-centre hotel. "I also don't think I have the right to bore people, I don't want to be like a magician playing the same three-card trick over and over again."
He also enjoys the interaction with the audience. "I like to see the first song from that perspective. I don't like the gap between audience and performer. I also say a mental thank you to the musicians at this point. They do things I couldn't do and allow the ideas to take flight," he says.
"The thing is, you need a damn good reason to ask people to pay to come and hear you play," he says, warming to his theme. "It's fine when people don't get it but it's really satisfying when people come up and say 'thank you, at last I haven't come away from a gig feeling cheated or bored. Something different went on there'."
Chuzzle started learning guitar aged eight and wrote his first songs at 10. While he says the lyrics back then were as rudimentary as what you'd expect a 10-year-old to come up with, the melodies were "easily as good as anything I am writing now". "Actually, musically, everything I know now is pretty much the same as what I knew then. I never studied formally, it's not an intellectual thing, it's being able to hear when something magical is happening."
His musical heroes are Elvis - who inspires some of his impressive falsetto vocals - and the Beatles. "It was cruel in a way," he says. "When you serve your apprenticeship learning Beatles songs, absolutely everything after that is a disappointment. I assumed theirs was the general level of talent, so it was a massive anti-climax to discover it wasn't. I still go into Tower Records to the Beatles section and hover there. I think unconsciously what I am doing is waiting for their next album to come out."
If it wasn't for what he describes as "a pleasant nervous breakdown" a few years ago, the music world may have lost Chuzzle to academia. He was studying philosophy and German literature in Konstance in Germany when he began having recurring dreams of being on stage with a guitar. "You didn't have to be Freud to work that one out," he says.
At the same time a number of strange events, including a spookily accurate tarot reading, led to his decision to choose music instead of the promising lecturing career that beckoned.
"I had always been the fella with the guitar at the singsong. I dabbled in a couple of bands but in Germany I started getting very low because I was torn between the two things," he says. "I remember going into a guitar shop and strumming the chords of Strawberry Fields Forever. I was crying and singing the same lines over and over again. 'No one I think is in my tree/I mean it must be high or low.' It was pretty obvious what was going on," he says.
Before he could make the transition there was a PhD to complete. A big U2 fan, Dr Chuzzle was conferred with his certificate on the same day Bono got his honorary doctorate. They met after the ceremony in Trinity College. "It was so weird, I was gently leaving one world to enter this other world of music which didn't connect and then both worlds collided in the provost's garden," he smiles.
"I am a huge believer in the leap of faith," he continues, reflecting on the first year in the history of Chuzzle. He is currently recording a number of songs in studio, and working part-time, teaching English to Chinese students.
"It has to happen inside you before it happens outside. Before I had any musicians or anything recorded, I used to enjoy the gap between what I knew was going to happen and what wasn't happening on the outside."
It brings to mind a photograph of a young Bono from the 1970s, where the U2 singer is jumping off a pipe in the Arts Block in Trinity. "There is this look on his face, like he is making a leap of faith, like he knows something is going to happen despite the fact that at the time there was absolutely no evidence that he was going to make it." It's a look you find on the face of Chuzzle these days. Check him out.
Chuzzle plays The Hub on Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin on Friday, August 6th. Doors 8 p.m.