Villagers: Sing out loud and proud
CONOR O’BRIEN is done with repressing his feelings. Last week, the Villagers frontman tweeted: “I’ll finally experience the feeling of being regarded as an equal citizen in my own country, if the Irish people vote ‘YES’ on May 22.”
He was referring to Friday’s marriage-equality referendum. Previously coy about expressing his sexuality in his music, O’Brien has embraced it on Villagers’ third album, the delicate and intimate Darling Arithmetic.
“You can be honest about your personal feelings, but you can also be honest about repressing those personal feelings, which is something I’ve toyed with in my lyrics for a long time,” he says.
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“In terms of just being at ease with being a gay man in the world, that’s obviously something that took me a while [to come to terms with]. Because, any time in my life that I tested the waters and was open about it in public, I was either threatened or shown disdain, or just various, stronger versions of bigoted feelings towards me,” he says. “But there comes a stage when you... there’s no other option than to speak out. Obviously, there’s a certain wave happening right now. It’s quite cathartic to ride that wave.”
Although he was touring the UK in April and is currently on the European continent, O’Brien has been following the debates ahead of the vote. “It’s good that it’s all out there. It’s becoming a topic that people can’t really escape, and that’s one step closer to the general normalising of marriage equality and equality in general,” he says, before discussing the arguments of the ‘no’ side.
“It makes me angry, and you feel sad when people are discussing whether you’re an able parent or an equal human being in the world. It’s something that’s depressing in this day and age.”
O’Brien hesitates before talking about the unpleasant reactions he has suffered in Ireland. “I’ve never been physically attacked, but I’ve been chased, I’ve been shouted at. Even to this day, it’s something in Ireland — I still don’t feel comfortable walking down the street, holding the hand of my partner.
“It’s not something that you can really do, yet. To a certain extent, you can, but you turn a corner and you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, so there’s a long way to go. It’s a constant source of anger for me. It is. I’m constantly angry about society around me. It pisses me off. This [the referendum] will be a small step to changing that.”
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Has he considered leaving the country? “I’ve thought about it a few times and I’ve sort of nearly done it, but I dunno, I don’t think I want to now. I really, really like it — as much as it angers me and annoys me, and there’s so many things that I hate about it, there’s also so many things that I love about Ireland. The more I travel, the more I want to come back to it and the more I miss it.”
Darling Arithmetic is Villagers’ most personal album. Recorded over eight months last year, with O’Brien putting in eight-hour days, Monday to Friday, at a barn by his home in Dublin, it is a step removed from the aesthetic of the Choice Prize-winning Awayland. O’Brien bares his soul on its nine songs (there are only two instances of outside additional arrangements). ‘Courage’ confesses that “it took a little time to be me”. ‘Dawning On Me’ is a beautiful serenade, while ‘Hot Scary Summer’ is its inexorable other, where “we got good at pretending, then pretending got us good”, and “where all the pretty young homophobes[were] looking out for a fight”.
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This stripped-back ideal was his aim. “I remember thinking during the process of writing a lot of these songs, that I didn’t need to make something that speaks to volumes of people or to large amounts of human beings. I just wanted to write music as if I were writing it to one person, and I wanted to sing it to myself, or sometimes to just another person, or someone in their room, an imaginary person. It was something that was a lot more intimate, which I hadn’t let myself do before, because I thought it would yield disappointing results or really sentimental results. But I let myself go there, this time,” O’Brien says.
Is it difficult to perform such personal songs every night? “What I’ve found, from performing over the years, is that the hardest time to perform a song is when you’re not really feeling it. Or, you feel like you wrote something for a reason, at such a time, to get a crowd going or to try and emotionally manipulate groups of people, which can work. It’s definitely done by some very influential, successful acts. It comes all the time; it’s the basis of a lot of showbusiness. I find it to be a difficult thing to keep that up, so these songs aren’t doing that. For me, they’re actually just pure expressions, so they’re very easy to sing.”
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It’s evident, both with Darling Arithmetic and hearing him talk about topics from which he has previously shied away, that O’Brien has developed a newfound confidence. He attributes this to the Ceiliúradh concert at London’s Albert Hall, to mark President Michael D Higgins’s visit to the UK in April, 2014. He performed a duet with Elvis Costello, a solo song, and the final group effort, a traditional Irish song, alongside the likes of Dónal Lunny, Glen Hansard, and Paul Brady.
O’Brien says he left the hallowed venue with a new belief in himself. “It was like I wouldn’t have felt confident in that situation before, because I’d have felt completely swallowed up by it. Sometimes, I feel like, when there’s anything that has any sort of social relevance, I get really kind of nervous around it, because I don’t think my music is... I think it’s just a confidence issue. But I think that just playing with these legends, and being able to do my own thing alongside them, it just gave me an ego boost. Maybe it was the first time I realised I was a songwriter,” he says.
With the marriage equality referendum on Friday (Harvey Milk Day in California, in honour of the murdered gay politician, O’Brien points out; “serendipity, if ever there was”), Villagers are playing Cork Opera House the following night. By then the result of the referendum should be known.
“It’s gonna be quite intense,” he says. “I don’t think a Villagers show... I hope it’s adequate celebration.” He stops and thinks. “But isn’t the Eurovision on, as well? We’re competing with the best!”
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