Breaking Out: Film tribute to late great Cork singer Fergus O'Farrell
Breaking Out: The late Fergus O'Farrell, right, of Interference on stage with Glen Hansard.
The young man standing unsteadily at the mic was pale and frail, his long hair hanging bunched around his delicate features. But when he sang it was as if a draw-bridge had been kicked down and lifetimes of fury unleashed.
In the crowd at a pokey venue in Dublin was 15-year-old Michael McCormack. He had never experienced anything like the performance he witnessed that night. And in ways he would only later begin to understand, his life had changed forever.
“He wasn’t afraid for his voice to be heard. He had this confidence,” says the RTÉ producer and director, whose credits include Tubridy Tonight and Scannal-Leargas. “He didn’t give a crap if you liked him or not. He had none of that bumbling factor.”
“He” was Fergus O’Farrell, a Cork-born songwriter whose heartfelt, storm-tossed pop would become hugely influential on later generations of Irish artists. And who, when discovered by McCormack in the late 1980s, looked set to conquer the world with his band Interference.
Interference never quite came into that promised land, for various reasons. One was O’Farrell’s struggles with muscular dystrophy, which would soon confine him to a wheelchair and finally claim his life in 2016 at age 48.
Yet he left behind a rich legacy and an enduring impact on Irish music. Interference’s ballad Gold, in particular, acquired a second life when featured – at Glen Hansard’s insistence – in both John Carney’s hit busker musical Once and the subsequent stage adaptation.
And now, McCormack, that teenage fan turned veteran filmmaker, chronicles O’Farrell’s life and times in a moving and absorbing documentary Breaking Out. Heartbreaking, funny, tragic, and deeply humane, Breaking Out captures the essence of O’Farrell and Interference. Filmed over 10 years, it also represents years of toil for McCormack.
“It’s just a great story,” says McCormack. “I knew I had this guy who jumped off the screen. Was it emotional to make? Funnily enough it wasn’t that emotional. Ferg was one of the funniest guys you’d ever meet. I spent most of my time cracking up around him. You never really looked at the muscular dystrophy. Because he didn’t. It was only in the last couple of years that he started to talk about the disease because it was getting in the way of his life.”
Interference came along when Irish music was at a crossroads. U2 had just conquered the world, the Irish singer-songwriter boom was a few years away. My Bloody Valentine were about to record their masterpiece, Loveless. And Interference drew on all of these threads at once, alchemising the disparate influences into a heavenly and unique mixture. They were confessional and intimate but they also made the walls shake.
“Glen Hansard, Steve Wall, Mundy – all the people he worked with got some of energy from him. He definitely did have something,” says McCormack. “When he decided that he wanted to make music his focus, when he was constantly having to change the way he made music [because of his disability], the only way he was able to do it was to become the spider and get people into the web and have them hang on for dear life.”
O’Farrell was born in Schull in 1967. His father was a businessman who owned a local hotel. O’Farrell studied at Clongowes where he formed Interference with classmates. After school he moved to Dublin, where Interference set up in the Winstanley building, a semi-derelict shoe factory belonging to O’Farrell’s father in the Liberties in Dublin.
Living and rehearsing in the building, Winstanley attracted figures such as Glen Hansard, Mundy and Maria Doyle-Kennedy, all of whom are interviewed in Breaking Out.
“There were always musicians around that area of Dublin,” says McCormack. “They were young and they were very cool. And so you’d get people hanging out, just to catch glimpses of them. It was squatting time. Everyone you knew spent some period of time squatting, in Ranelagh or Rathmines or the centre of the city. Places like An Béal Bocht [on Charlemont Street ] existed, that were superb venues and open to young bands coming through. It just seemed like you could be in a band then and you aren’t making a lot of money. But at least you could survive.”
This fascinating tale alas has a bittersweet ending, as O’Farrell passed away, in his home in Schull, Co Cork, during the making of the film. McCormack believes the singer secretly had always planned for the story to play out that way – for his life and his death to be his “final performance”. And for it all to be captured on camera.
“If you look at the timeline of the doc. My father passed away in Christmas 2015. I rang Ferg – I knew The Frames were supposed to be going down to help him record. I said, ‘Could you put it off for a couple of weeks until I get over this?’ He said, ‘They’re coming next Monday’. I went down in a bit of a daze.
“Which is probably the right way to do it. We were filming that whole week. One of the things that I remember is that, when we finished that filming and I went away in a daze, and then he passed away two weeks later, it took me a while to look at the footage. And when I did, I could see he was dying. I hadn’t known that at the time. I could see: he was grey in the face. Time was running out. He was putting his last lifeblood into that week…It sounds corny but I almost think it’s his greatest performance. He was going to go on out on a high. That’s the way he looked it.”
Breaking Out, having been delayed by Covid, arrives at a timely moment. It is often said that we are presently living through a golden age for music documentaries. Whether it’s Billie Eilish’s the World’s A Little Blurry or Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground, it is fashionable nowadays to use music as a prism through which to scrutinise the world.
However, none of that was true when McCormack went about trying to finance Breaking Out a decade ago. He didn’t see it as a music documentary – or a 'disability' film. Rather. he wanted to make a movie about an elemental Irish talent who deserved a wider audience. Trying to persuade people to back that vision involved a lot of toil and heartache.
“There is definitely a renaissance in music docs now,” he says. “Back then, it was really hard to get any funding. Especially for a band like that – a cult band very few of us knew about it.”
Thankfully, this film will ensure a whole lot more people get to know about Interference and the great Fergus O'Farrell.
- Breaking Out is released in Irish cinemas on Friday, November 19
- Interference and Glen Hansard play Cyprus Avenue in Cork on Sunday, Nov14, as part the Right Here Right Now event
