Recently signed Dubliner Stee Downes has become a coveted vocalist for hire

Irish vocalist Stee Downes has worked with some of the coolest dance-music acts on the planet. Next year, he hopes to step forward with his own tunes, writes Don O’Mahony

NOT only has Dubliner Stee Downes achieved his dream of being signed to one of his favourite record labels, the last three years have also established him as , adorning numerous underground dance smashes.

He now stands poised to consolidate his position as a solo artist. How different it all is from the time the Castleknock native spent the late 1990s playing in various bands, the most notable being the house disco funk sextet Nu Root Rhythm.

Back then there was little hint of the suave nu jazz and soul vocalist in waiting.

“At that time I was writing songs more for other singers,” he recalls. “I wasn’t fully confident in my own vocals. I just thought: I like writing songs and I’m in this band. We had a few female singers at the time and I used to write songs for them.”

In the wake of that band’s demise, Downes took on singing himself. A multi-instrumentalist, he had also studied sound engineering and learned digital production from a friend.

“I was never really good at any of them specifically,” he says of his guitar, piano and bass-playing abilities. “But in cooperation with a few different skills I think the timing was right in terms of how you can make music these days with almost being self-reliant. You just need a good laptop and a good ear for music and some instruments.”

Downes admits to not having had much of a plan beyond just wanting to continue to write and record.

“I have two really close friends who are very good producers and we still always exchange ideas and I learned a lot from them. But at that time I was just trying to see what the next step was,” he says.

Having developed a huge interest in Berlin’s Sonar Kollectiv, a label run by the jazz dance collective Jazzanova, that became the focus of the demos he was writing.

“I was always into jazz and soul music. But then I veered off into all different styles of electronic music or hip-hop, dance music as well. And I think Sonar Kollectiv at the time, the Jazzanova thing, was bringing all those elements together. Kind of a little bit techno ethos, but then involving jazz music and soul music. They had a lot of crossover artists that were doing electronic music with singers, so it fitted perfectly with the type of music that I really wanted to do,” he says.

One night in 2007, Downes emailed a couple of his demos to a generic address on the label’s website. Within hours they’d replied asking for more.

Downes says he was amazed they connected with his music, but they had further validation to offer him.

“I said I want to get some other singers on these tracks and they were like, ‘No, we should leave them as they are’. So then I kinda accepted I was a singer at that point,” he smiles.

In 2008, Downes released of his debut All In A Day, an album of smoothly-delivered laid-back nu soul standards. In the following years, Stee took on other jobs on the side just to survive.

However, his appearance on Hamburg producer Lovebirds pumping house track ‘Want You In My Soul’ in 2011 changed all that.

Last year he went on to achieve more success on ‘Hold Me Down’ by Australian producers Flight Facilities, and he recently appeared on Neighbour and Thievery Corporation’s Ben Garza’s collaboration ‘Your Calling’ as a result of being heard on that Lovebirds track.

The future looks rosy for Downes, with another single with Lovebirds due out in the New Year.

But the last few years have seen him write and record two albums. One with the nine-piece Jazzanova band, which he is keeping on hold, and the follow up to All In A Day, titled The Bigger Picture, due in May.

Stee Downes plays The Opium Rooms on Camden Street, Dublin, next Saturday, December 19