While still a law student at Queen's University in Belfast, Kieran Goss made up his mind he wanted to do a proper gig. He talked to the people in Ents., hired out the rather sizeable Mandela Hall, printed up the tickets and practised.
There was no doubt this was to be his first, and potentially premature, big step. After all, on any other night of the week he would have been playing in one of the Union's much smaller rooms, churning out the entire songbook of student favourites for a drunken, but very appreciative, audience. This night in the Mandela would be different, however. American Pie and The Boxer would definitely not on the set-list and an early marker would be very obviously set down.
Several albums later, Goss is now one of the country's best-loved performers. His presence is a genial one and audiences warm to him immediately. His music is mainstream and yet not quite in the middle of the road, influenced by the likes of James Taylor and yet informed by more contemporary songwriters such as Neil Finn.
His immediate talent is for melody: he possesses an actual singing voice and because his music is never about any kind of sonic aggression, you'll probably find your granny will take to him as easily as your little sister. It was perhaps no real surprise that Goss progressed steadily within Ireland, playing bigger and bigger venues, step by step. In recent months his career took a huge leap forward with the news that his current album, Worse Than Pride, had gone platinum and is still selling. Record companies checking on recent sales figures will surely be asking themselves embarrassing questions such as "how did this happen?" and, in particular, "why is our company name nowhere to be seen on the sleeve?". The answers to these questions are quite simple. Goss did it entirely by himself. This was a case of taking total control of his own business - something which, in the singer's view, was absolutely essential.
"I felt that I had reached some sort of a glass ceiling in Ireland and that I could only be as big as I was allowed to be by certain forces I couldn't control. A perception then grows that you're in the B division. Certainly, some people looking at it probably thought I was doing really well, but I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't be selling the amount of records that I'm selling now.
"At the time you have your own doubts but I've always felt I could sell. I've never been elitist, what I do is a mainstream thing and all sorts of people like it. Only now that I've made a determined effort to get it out there and made no apology for it has it reached all of those people."
And so, Goss set about cutting out the middle man. But before the business end of things could commence, he needed to get to work on an album he could believe in himself. He set up a studio in the bedroom of his Chapelizod home and began to work on the songs.
It involved a certain obvious investment, a clear space and deep breath.
"I went through a process of buying the gear, learning how to use it and then starting to record. I was footering - messing around with it and making a lot of mistakes - but as soon as I realised I could actually record an album with this gear I asked Pat O'Donnell if he would engineer it.
"Most of what people call pre-production was done in the bedroom but then we realised there was a bit too much noise - people ringing the doorbell and things like that, so we went to Moville. We rented two cottages that were lying empty at that time of year - right on Lough Foyle and well away from the traffic. We lived in one and we set the other up as a studio and that's where we did the bulk of it."
Most musicians recognise that having the run of a studio can also bring with it certain dangers. There is the obvious risk of a manana factor creeping into the daily routine and - perhaps most commonly - the possibility of a fatal lack of musical focus. But in Moville, Co Donegal, however, even at this early stage, Goss knew things were going well.
Thanks to Pat O'Donnell, he was getting the sound he was after and he was also enjoying the fact that, for the first time, he felt entirely comfortable about what was happening in a studio. Again, what Chapelizod and Moville had given him was control. "I know that's a bad word in music because people think you're some kind of egomaniac, but you need musical control. And yes, you could mess around forever and come up with nothing at all, but I suppose, by nature, I'm a fairly disciplined person. When I was studying law, even though people saw me gigging every night, I was still in the library at nine the next morning. It's just the way I am - ordered and very economical with time .
"Even during that two-year gap between New Day and this album I was still getting up early and writing. I'm not very rock 'n' roll. I'm not out at three in the morning and that's just me. Half the battle is discipline, particularly in songwriting is about finishing songs. You can have all the ideas you like but you have to finish the songs."
And so the songs were finished. Goss recorded an album he was happy with and it was time to change gear and enter the world of business. The album needed a label and a home and he initially attempted to go along the traditional route - presenting his recording to various record companies and taking it from there. This experience he describes as the low point in the whole project - after the months of successful recording in Donegal he was met with varying degrees of indifference in the high-powered offices of Dublin.
"It's a lot to do with the structure of the Irish music industry. A lot of the majors are just like little suboffices of big corporations and it doesn't really pay them to take risks. Why take a risk if someone is going to come in and hand you the new album by some major international act with all of the publicity material already packaged and all you have to do is stick it out? I mean, would you do it? I don't think I would. But it's still a gunk to your confidence because you've made this album, you're really proud of it and you're sure it's going to be big and all you're getting are token gestures.
"To be honest, I could have got it released that way but I just felt that they'd go through the motions. That's not what I wanted. I wanted someone with a bit of vision and who wasn't afraid to say that it could be number one. But the only people who believed that were myself and my manager."
The process Goss embarked upon necessarily involved internal conflict. Unlike many artists notoriously incompetent when it comes to business, Goss knew he had the skills - but even so. Most artists, even those with certain business skills, tend to avoid that side of things entirely, seeing it as a draining distraction from the creative process.
For Goss, however, it had become unavoidable, a matter of balance.
"I have to be very careful when I talk about the business side of things because you can give the impression that you're a complete breadhead or just a clever businessman - which I'm not. Most of the time I'm an artist and my life is driven by music, but when my back was put to the wall I just drew on other resources from the past. I have a legal training and I have been in business and bought and sold things, so I just thought, well, the same principles apply. I thought that if, just for a while, I could take off the artist's hat and put on the businessman's hat, that I could do it.
`Basically from last June up until January of last year, I was a businessman. I set up a record company, I went looking for grants, I raised finance and I put a team together to do the PR and everything else. Then I had to put the distribution in place and I talked a to a lot of people before settling on Sony. That takes a lot of time and while you're doing it, all the public know is that you're not out there. Time is ticking away and its two and a half years from your last album and you're not writing anything. But once I had the structure and the money in place, I knew it was going to work."
Brand New Star went platinum, Goss owns the master and now he is selling it to other territories. He has also signed with the publishers Peer Music, and this association has now begun to open doors in that biggest territory of all, the USA. In July Goss, was in LA working with Judd Friedman, someone who has written for Whitney Houston, Rod Stewart and Celine Dion.
In Nashville, he co-wrote with Rodney Crowell and even struck up a relationship with one of the greatest songwriters of all - Harlan Howard. In that sort of milieu it only takes one major international artist to pick up on a Kieran Goss song and everything would dramatically change. Certainly he would welcome this degree of financial success, but it is not his primary aim in life. He has just proved something both to himself and to the music industry and, that done, he can enjoy himself for a while - at least until it's time for the next one.
"Five years ago I was much more driven than I am now. My life was quite one-dimensional, but I think I've grown up a bit. Getting married was part of it, but also getting to know my own family better and having a nice circle of friends in Dublin. My career taking off has just been a sort of finishing touch. Last Christmas I wasn't sure that I had any way of even getting this album out.
"Yes, I would do it again, but at the end of the day, I only did it because I believe in what I do and it was the only road open to me. Yes, it worked and it was very successful but the downside was that I hardly played the guitar at all and personally, I didn't feel happy that I wasn't writing. But now I've really started to set aside time specifically for the writing and I've already got about 15 songs for the next album. That might seem prolific but I know myself that it's just discipline."
Kieran Goss is on tour through- out Ireland in October and November.