For Those I Love: David Balfe on the influences that fed into his acclaimed album
David Balfe's For Those I Love entered the Irish album charts at No 2. Picture: Faolán Carey
David Balfe recently released his self-titled debut album For Those I Love. An initial word-of-mouth buzz has gradually given way to widespread acclaim and a race up the charts for a record that was created as a tribute to his late friend Paul Curran.
It is laced with samples from the likes of the Clancy Brothers and Sampha, and and The Streets were an obvious touchstone. Here, Balfe discusses some of the influences on the record, from his home estate in Dublin to football to clubbing.
From the start, there was quite an influence from a Mount Eerie record called A Crow Looked At Me. I think one of the things that I found very influential about that record - what Phil [Elverum] does on that record is expose an innocence and an openness of grief that I could relate to, that I could understand, and that I felt very sympathetic to the focus on the minutiae of grief.
There's a part on the record where he speaks about giving his wife's box of clothes away to a local thrift store or a charity store and then later, throughout the years, seeing people in the small town walking around wearing her old clothes, and how devastating a moment like that can be. I think I learned a lot about how to write openly through that record.
I started listening again to The College Dropout, the Kanye album. Again, it was something that I adored when I was in my teens.
There's a relatively easy comparison in the sonic palette, because I learned so much about sampling from listening to that record, even just the very basics of the idea of the - they always call it the chipmunk vocals - but repitching samples to pull different emotional cues from them.
I definitely revisited that record a lot and tried to understand more about texture and how he filled out some of those samples and how he pulled the right emotion from those samples to give the density to the sonics that he needed.
I didn't find myself revisiting that record when I was writing this one... it's not something that I went back to specifically for this project.
Original Pirate Material has never left my life. It's been there since I first heard it.
And I don't know if there has been a week or a month in my life since then that I've gone a full, uninterrupted listen of that record.
It has influenced how I've written for years, because so much of how Mike Skinner wrote then was to do with the beauty in the mundane, revisiting these moments that seem so insignificant, and understanding and being able to highlight the importance and the value in those moments.
I think a record like that, hearing that and knowing that story - the same with Boy in Da Corner.
Man, I go back just to the opening notes of 'Sittin' Here', it's just so evocative.
[As soon as I hear the opening notes of the track], I feel like I can touch the coldness of the concrete. I feel that record. Still a beautiful record, it came to me pretty much in around the same period of my life as Original Pirate Material, had very much a similar impact.
But with both of those if you believe the mythology - like, Mike Skinner made it by himself, the mythology is Dizzee made some of those tracks on the PlayStation... But at a young enough age for me, hearing those stories and going 'Oh f**k, OK, this stuff that I'm making in my shed, I could do this at a high level, I could make that, there's no barrier here between me and my pursuit of quality. I could, with practice, make something just within these walls of that quality.’
And I think that that's not something that necessarily inspired me directly for this record because it's something that I've been doing long beforehand anyway, but it's something that, understanding that at a bit of an early age and believing that, was enough to convince me to stick with it.
Paul was a lifelong Red and well known in Tolka. And Paul died at 27. And the exact same day, a stone's throw away, the same way, another lifelong Red also died at 27, called Smurf.
So the fans and the club lost two of their most visible supporters the same day, the same way, at the same time, a stone's throw from each other, but unrelated. So no matter what, it was always going to play some significant role on the future of the club, at least for that year, it's an impossible shadow to shake.
We were all encouraged and invited to go to the first game of the season. And we went there because after the game, we were going to be scattering Paul's ashes in Tolka. You go to the first game, March 18, 2018, against Longford, two-all, 93rd minute, we get a peno, Davey O'Sullivan scores, bottom right hand corner of the net, 3-2, final whistle.
That was when I understood it. Like, that game is when I understood the relief that going to Shelbourne games had given to Paul, and to Robbie and to Gav [friends] for all of the years beforehand.
It was the first time I understood that you could channel all of the pain and the grief and the stress and the worry of your daily life into a game, into somebody else's collective hands, and that you can do it feeling safe, in the swell of a terrace, with everybody else doing the exact same thing.
Some of the most spiritually satisfying nights in my life have been in clubs. One particular time was seeing Omar S in Index. I didn't even drink at the time so no intoxicants or anything. Paul and Robbie came with me.
I walked in and I was like, 'OK I'll see you guys in a few hours'. And I was on the dancefloor by myself, giving it the large one from the start of the set till the end with no breaks.
I'd say it's the toughest cardio I've done in five years. I dunno if anybody goes to an Omar S set and not have what basically seems like a religious experience, but that one in particular, it was such a long set and I didn't even break to go to a bathroom, It was just so locked in and so intoxicating and just flawless as well.
Just seeing and understanding a mastery of the craft and the understanding of a crowd and how to respond in real time to a crowd, it's such a different form of curation to a prerecorded album.
But the use of dance music across the album is a little bit different. The real dominance of dance and club music in my life has been serving as a backdrop to my friendships... I ended up with a 2001 Renault Clio years and years ago. Somebody in my family passed, it came down to me, I learned how to drive, I was the first one of my friends to learn how to drive. It was an old, shit car, it didn't have Bluetooth or anything like that.
But it also just opened up the scale of our world, it was the first time we were going from just outside of the estates hanging out to being able to go anywhere. So we'd all collectively shift in for petrol each day, each night, we'd all throw whatever, three, four quid in, pool it together, put it in the car, and then we'd go out and we'd just drive around.
And this took place for years. So it started off long before I was doing little mixtapes or anything like that. When we were driving around in that Clio, we'd listen to Raidio na Life at night time - what an eclectic collection of electronic music that you're getting after 10pm until the early hours.
I've continued to see very, very much the caricature of my accent and the accent of my peers as that of being somebody who is unintelligent or un- or miseducated. And that again has helped me see the lack of acceptance or empathy. And it's very frustrating.
It's particularly frustrating because it's like, I think a lot of people think it's cool as well. That the whole working class thing is fuckin' cool now and we've got loads of people who aren't from that but they're writing like that because it's cool... But, they're still calling the guards if they see somebody in a tracksuit walk outside their house.
I have a dedication and a love to where I'm from that I think will remain undying. I'm glad I left when I did because I needed to, for myself. But I wanna go back now. And there's a lot of stuff in the way. Not least just being able to find affordable rent.
Robbie Dingle: He's a printmaker and a drawer. I think he captures an essence and a soul to a world that I know, that very, very few people have ever captured with the same aggression and almost raw elegance that he does. I find Robbie's work to be some of the most inspiring stuff. I think Robbie focuses on a similar thing to what I do, the minutiae of what can seem mundane and just exploring the beauty of that.
I think he's made some of the most sonically exciting music of the past couple of years. I think his ability to express so much melody within such a small range and tone of voice is remarkable. I think he understands how to sit within the space of tracking the space of a beat in a way that very few of his peers do.
They had a terrific new album last year called The D They Put Between The R & L, which a great title, great album. And they would still be my daily go-to. I'm trying to be a little bit unbiased here because Dublin is so small, Ireland is so small, that everything's quite incestuous, everybody knows everybody, so I don't just want to be like 'I love Pillow Queens', because Pamela [Connolly, guitarist] is my best friend. I've only just spoken to the guys from A Lazarus Soul during the week - I'd never met them before. It’s fair to say they’re my favorite Irish act, probably by quite a long shot.
I've never figured out is it one guy or a group, I really don't know. I love the sound. Pretty sure that the guy from the Deadlians took the piss outta me recently, but I don't really give a bollox because I love the tunes! I love them.
Maybe a group that has been active for a little bit more time but I think is still in their infancy. They put out a great record last week, the same day that I put mine out. It’s two different rappers. One of them is a guy called Billy Woods, who I've just adored for years.
The most prolific rapper I've ever come across, he seems to just put out like a new record each week, it's alarming because the quality of each release is just shockingly good, shockingly high. Just seems to have a work rate that's unmatched, but certainly is not receiving the praise that should be there.
