Mick Flannery a Cork Midsummer Festival musical highlight

Mick Flannery returns from the German capital to headline a homecoming gig, writes Richard Fitzpatrick

MICK FLANNERY is holed up on Berlin’s west side these days, but will return to his native Cork for the opening night at the city’s Midsummer Festival.

The Blarney man lived in the German capital for a three-month spell before Christmas and returned in the spring, prompted to make the move “for a bit of a change”. He’s signed up, too, for German courses. Learning the language on the fly wasn’t happening, he explains.

“People switch to English once they see you fumbling and messing it up. That led to me making no effort whatsoever so I decided to go to a college. Normal people on the street don’t want to waste their time while you practice German on them. It’s not fair.”

Berlin makes sense for him as he gigs regularly in the region, although, when it comes to favourite venues, he singles out McCarthy’s Bar in Dingle, Dublin’s Olympia Theatre and the Cork Opera House. The life of a troubadour has its days, he admits.

“It’s not a way of life that’s abounding with money, but we’re very privileged. It’s a very lucky way to live, as long as you can keep your sanity. There’s no routine. You just take it day-to-day. You’re meeting different people all the time. There are no real negative experiences involved in it; you just try not to drink too much so you don’t get into a deep depression.”

Flannery is still only 29. It seemed like the singer/songwriter, who inhabits a land somewhere along the alt-blues/folk/rock faultline, emerged fully formed when his debut album Evening Train was released in 2007. He won a best Irish male gong at the 2009 Meteor Awards a year after the release of his second album, White Lies.

Flannery in known for his distinctive, gravelly voice — reminiscent of Tom Waits, one of his influences — and his lyrics, many of which deal with the vagaries of love and which bring to mind another guiding light, Leonard Cohen, especially the Canadian’s habit of switching back and forth between sensitivity and steeliness.

Flannery is renowned by now for singing the blues, although his thoughts aren’t always morose and melancholic while plumbing the depths during a live performance.

“There was a gig the other week, and you know that I’d be singing these sad songs. The people in the audience might think that I’m sad while I’m singing these sad songs — that there would be sad thoughts in my head, but there were these people in front of me and they’d ordered a pizza. There were four of them and they were munching into this pizza, devouring it like hyenas.

I was trying to get through this sad song and all I could think was, ‘Why did ye not get two pizzas? There are four of ye — why did ye not buy two pizzas, like?’.”

Flannery got the grá for music from his mother’s side of the family, part of his education coming from lock-ins in a bar in Killarney with cousins and friends, while he began strumming a guitar at around 15 or 16 years of age. His aunt, Yvonne Daly, tours with him and sings vocals on Red to Blue.

In 2004, he won two awards at the prestigious International Songwriting Competition (his winning entries surfaced later on Evening Train).

Tom Waits is one of the competition’s judges; other winners over the years include Catie Curtis and King Charles. Flannery sent his winning entries by post, but has got to know the ways of Nashville since then.

“My opinion isn’t worth anything,” he says, “because I don’t know much about it, but the people I know there and the friends that I have there who are in music, they say it’s quite narrow. It’s all country. A lot of it is all just factory songwriting — people put together to write songs for other people to sing. That’s the kind of business that’s run there. It’s like a conveyor belt of songs.

“It’s kind of saturated with songwriters so there’s not much of an audience. It’s a great place for musicians because musicians get a lot of recording done there. A lot of high-class session musicians live there because that’s where the work is. So you’d meet some of the best players in the world there, and some of the worst songwriters.”

Flannery worked as a stonemason for much of his 20s. He still does occasional shifts with a stonemason friend, though he hasn’t worked professionally at it for about three years. It’s good work to clear the head, and he enjoys the healthy, physical aspect to it, he says.

“It can be rough in the winter, although there’s no such thing as summer in Ireland so it can be rough year-round. I miss it. I miss the fitness that you get from it. When you’re doing it, your brain shuts off because once you get used to it you don’t have to really think about it.

“There’s nothing too elaborate that we’ve done, a garden fountain maybe. Entrance walls mainly, fronts of houses, fireplaces. I wouldn’t be making gravestones or anything like that. I’m just used to putting stones on top of each other for want of a better description.

“It’s nice work. It’s not like building a block wall — you can look at it after, say, if you’re driving past, and think, ‘I wish I didn’t put that shitty stone in there’.”

- Mick Flannery performs as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, 8pm, Friday, Jun 21, at Cork City Hall. Further information: www.corkmidsummer.com

The sounds of Midsummer

For those who haven’t lost the beat, Ray Scannell’s production of DEEP will be a trip down memory lane. Sir Henry’s closed in June 2003, 25 years after the bar and nightclub on Cork’s South Main Street opened. Exactly 10 years later, for 10 nights, Scannell, one of the country’s most exciting theatre-makers, will recreate the story of the famous deep house club, and the story of nightlife in Cork for many during the 1990s. DEEP will use documentary interviews and archive footage, which means some familiar, gurning faces might crop up wearing sweaty T-shirts and Joe Bloggs pants. Louise Lowe directs the production; her site-responsive histories of inner city Dublin have been acclaimed in recent years.

The world premiere of The Hours by Belfast-born composer Ian Wilson also promises to be an attractive proposition. Wilson, a veteran of the BBC Proms and the Venice Biennale, will join up with classical ensemble ConTempo Quartet and the jazz trio, Ronan Guilfoyle, saxophonist Cathal Roche and drummer Matthew Jacobson, to run through a selection of jazz standards, Bartok’s Romanian dances and some of Piazzolla’s popular tangos. The title piece, The Hours, is based on an interpretation of the seven prayers of a cloistered day, which will be particularly evocative given the venue — Triskel Christchurch.

The Georgian building will also play host to a performance by The Hilliard Ensemble. The chamber group has been in existence with a floating cast for almost 40 years. Renowned for their performances of medieval- and renaissance-period music, the British male vocal quartet will mix in some contemporary music. In amongst the sacred and secular, there will be music by Gavin Bryars, Guillaume de Machaut and Arvo Part on the night.

The magnificent St Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh is one of the other interesting venues being used to host a festival event. The American sound artist Stephen Vitiello teams up with Adrian Gebruers, St Colman’s carillonneur and organist, for a sound and visual production entitled From Another Room. The pair’s collaboration includes the use of field recordings from around Cobh as well as electric guitar.

One of the most adventurous collaborations during the festival is Gamiina, which will interpret the music of Icelandic string musicians, Amiina. Cork Educate Together students, the UCC School of Music and the UCC Gamelan Orchestra will join the Icelandic troupe at Cork Opera House in a night of music featuring gamelan instruments, so expect lots of unusual plucked strings, gongs and xylophone sounds.

A midnight production of Brinks Helm on the opening night of the festival at Triskel Christchurch will bring together industrial musicians Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle fame in an art meets music affair that has been two years in the making. It is curated by The Black Mariah gallery, who will also house an exhibition, daily screenings and live art performances in venues around Cork city to go with the performance.

Meanwhile, Cork itself is the vision that will come to life in Gorging Limpet, a site-specific performance installation that blends music, film and video in Karen Power and Maximilian Le Cain’s warehouse spectre.