Self-made man with Secret ambition

Paddy Casey may have parted ways with his record company, but his optimistic new album shows how he’s moving on, says Ed Power

PADDY CASEY is still angry. “I wasn’t annoyed my last record didn’t do the business,” says the Dublin-born singer-songwriter, “What got to me was that the label kind of gave up on it.”

Addicted to Company came out in 2007. It was the follow-up to Living, the multi-platinum LP that turned Casey into a star. The expectation was that Addicted would perform every bit as well. When it didn’t, relations with his label turned sour. There was a nasty falling out. Casey says he has moved on. But it is clear he remains upset.

According to Casey, when the money allocated to him was used up, there was nothing left in the pot for touring the US.

“The album had come out in America and I wanted to go out there and support it. The response was – ‘You can’t, we’ve only got a set budget’. I was pissed-off for a while.”

He parted ways with Sony not long afterwards. Ever since, he’s been working hard on his fourth long player, The Secret Life Of. Self-released and home-recorded, it is a departure from Casey’s previous output. He thinks it is one of the best things he’s done.

“There are lot of optimistic songs on it,” he says. “I have always written positive tracks. I haven’t necessarily put them on my records.

“It is the sad songs that people usually respond to. They like the quiet, serious ones more. That probably set the tone in terms of what audiences expect from me.”

So as nobody was in any doubts about his upbeat new direction, the video to his latest single, ‘Wait’, features Casey clowning around with a man in a penguin suit. It’s wacky and distinctly silly – not qualities with which he is generally associated. “I had this idea about a penguin coming to Ireland not knowing about the recession,” he says. “He is just looking for money to bring fish back to his kids. It was cheaper to buy a camera than rent one so I did that. That was the only expense. It was good fun and isn’t meant to be taken seriously.”

He is enjoying life as an independent artist. The biggest change is that you aren’t constantly worried about record budgets. Your time is your own. Nobody is looking over your shoulder.

“When you’re in a big studio you are constantly watching the clock. There is a degree of pressure. If you’re in there for a week, it costs the same amount as a family’s rent for a month. It plays on your mind. You can’t go in there and not do something, even when you’re not feeling inspired.”

This time is different. The album was mostly recorded in the kitchen of his house outside Naas, Co Kildare. When a song came, he turned on the tape. When one didn’t, he sat back, waited to be inspired. “I didn’t worry about whether a track was going to be a potential single. I just let it all flow. I did the recordings and decided afterwards how I wanted things to work out.”

Casey’s relationship with Sony went back a decade. In the late 1990s, he was spotted at a singer-songwriter night in Dublin. The label offered him a deal and in 1999 he released his debut, Amen (So Be It). The record didn’t sell particularly well. However it was positively reviewed (one American critic hailed him the next Jeff Buckley). Four years years later, he released Living. The single ‘Saints and Sinners’ started to pick up heavy airplay. Casey’s life was transformed. Over several surreal years he performed to nearly 10,000 people at Dublin Castle and appeared on David Letterman’s show in New York.

Casey wasn’t very comfortable with that level of exposure. Very quickly, he had gone from being an unknown singer-songwriter to becoming one of Ireland’s most popular artists. It got to the point where it was difficult to go for a beer without fans coming up asking for his picture.

“You don’t want to set yourself up as being different from everybody else,” he says. “It makes for a pretty uneven conversation. That was never my way of doing things. I was keen to stay as grounded as possible.”

The title ‘The Secret Life ... ’ came about when a musician called around to Casey’s house and was surprised at his relaxed method of songwriting. He’d assumed the Dubliner was intense and miserable. “He said ‘This is your secret life’. From that moment on, I couldn’t get the name out of my head. I had originally intended it to be a book and a CD. The book fell by the wayside a long time ago. The name stuck. Even before the album was finished, I knew that was the only name for it.”

* Paddy Casey plays Cyprus Avenue in Cork tomorrow