Cork musician Simple Kid on middle-age and making a comeback

Kieran Mac Feely, aka Simple Kid, is going on the road again with a new tour that includes his first Cork gig in 17 years.

Tue, 16 Apr, 2024 - 20:00

Ed Power

When Kieran Mac Feely came out of semi-retirement and played a rare show in Dublin under his stage name of Simple Kid last year, he was stunned by the warmth of the response.

Some of those turning out were long-time fans who’d been around for the two extraordinary albums he released in the early 2000s. But many were too young to have seen Simple Kid in his heyday and were delighted he had decided to pick up his guitar once again and play genre-splicing hits such as 'Truck On' and 'Lil King Kong' — tunes that combined heartfelt lyrics with shaggy choruses and charmingly hangdog melodies. It was a moment they had assumed would never happen.

“It’s overwhelming, actually. It’s a really sweet reaction,” recalls the Cork-born songwriter from his home in Hastings on the south coast of England. “One guy who was there in a Simple Kid t-shirt said he was seven when the albums came out. This guy was in his 20s. He was excited to be there; he never thought he would. That was so cool.”

Buoyed by that success, he is now going on the road again — with a new tour that will include his first hometown show in 17 years — at Cyprus Avenue on Sunday, May 5.

He’s looking forward to it with a mix of enthusiasm and jitters.

“I’m nervous about it,” he says. “Every time I play in Cork, I recognise half the audience — people you haven’t seen for a long time. It’s an odd one. I’m a little confused on stage — and I think the audience is confused because it’s like, ‘I know you as a person’ [rather than as a performer under the spotlight].”

Mac Feely enjoyed considerable success with two eponymous records, released in 2003 and 2006 and usually referred to as Simple Kid 1 and Simple Kid 2.

They received ecstatic reviews — passing judgement on SK1, the Guardian said Mac Feely “gets his pungent social commentary from Dylan, his third-person vignettes from Ray Davies, his swagger from Marc Bolan”. The NME, writing about SK2, said, “he can make a guitar gently weep — but Simple Kid smiles the wicked smile of the lo-fi prankster, and we love him for it”.

Rave write-ups, if welcome, could only go so far, however. For all the acclaim, the nose-to-the-grindstone reality of the life of a touring musician became thankless after a while. Fed up shlepping from venue to venue, never knowing how big a crowd might come out to see him, he turned his back on the business. He became a music teacher, and settled in Hastings, where he lives with his wife and three children.

But music continued to call, and after a 10-year pause, he returned to songwriting and, in 2022, released an excellent third LP, Simple Kid 3: Health and Safety — a record that he had started largely as a therapeutic means of reconnecting with music. To have the opportunity to share it with the rest of the world was an unexpected bonus. He certainly has no desire to become a full-time musician again — by the time he retired Simple Kid, he’d had enough of the sheer slog.

“My career was peaks and troughs,” he says. “If you had the energy, when you were in one of the troughs, you could find your way back out again. I got back to one of the many troughs and ran out of energy. I just didn’t fancy waiting around for another [peak]. I didn’t want to do it for a while. I wanted to do something else.”

Simple Kid, aka Cork musician Kieran Mac Feely.

Turning away from the business was not a painful parting — not at first, anyway. As he says, he had his hands full working and raising his family. It was only in the past several years that he experienced a pang.

“I sort of put it away. I started missing it recently. I didn’t for quite a while. I was waylaid by parenting and children and financially trying to keep my head above water. But as the kids got a bit older and a bit of space came back into my brain, something starting going, ‘oh, I wouldn’t mind a bit of excitement again’. So yeah, it is exciting. It feels completely different. The stakes are much lower in a way — there’s no illusions about world domination. Or anxiety. It is what it is, which is nice.”

Simple Kid 3 is the best sort of comeback in that it isn’t attempting to recapture old glories. These new songs are audibly the work of a musician in middle age quietly nostalgic about the influences on which he was raised — whether that be the pastoral pop of the Beach Boys or the wonky grooves of krautrock boundary-pushers such as Can. One of its most impressive aspects is its homespun quality — in an era when you can replicate the gloss of a recording studio on your laptop. Mac Feely has gone out of his way to give his new material an artisanal, hand-made finish. You can feel the warp and the weft of the songs.

“It’s almost too easy to make things that are polished,” he says.

“How do I make it sound authentic? How do I strike a balance? How do I make it sound as if it’s got emotion to it. Within 20 minutes you can rack up a glossy production now. It’s a nice problem to have. It’s nice to be able to do what you want. I spend a lot of times dirtying things up. It’s a long, bizarre process. I’m in no rush. It’s about the process at this stage. It’s about me having time on a Saturday night — I’ll go 'around the houses' as many times as you want.”

Cork music has always existed in its own microclimate. In the 1980s, Nun Attax and Microdisney mixed absurdism with outside-the-box songwriting. A decade later, as the rave scene exploded at Sir Henry’s, Sultans of Ping and Frank and Walters came storming through, giving that traditional Cork surrealism a playful 1990s upgrade.

Mac Feely’s older brother Alan was bassist in the classic mid-1990s lineup of the Sultans. But by the time Kieran began to play, initially with his band The V Necks, there was a sense the good old days were over. He had arrived at the party just as the lights were coming on, as had future Oscar winner Cillian Murphy, whose group, Sons Of Mr Green Genes, were contemporaries of The V Necks around Cork.

That end-of-days atmosphere was even more pronounced in London, to where The V Necks relocated. Renamed The Young Offenders, they were painfully aware they were knocking on the doors just as Britpop was passing into history.

“We went to London as soon as we could. We were trying to feed into being the next band over there,” he remembers.

“We didn’t realise that whole Britpop thing was ending as well. The appetite was shrinking everywhere for another band — yet another band. I had an appetite for it — I was in the middle of it. I was hungry.”

With hindsight, he’s glad The Young Offenders passed into history. To have a previous life as a 1990s indie urchin is a fate he’s happy to have avoided: “I count my lucky stars in a way that it didn’t take off. I’m not sure I’d want that hanging around my neck for the rest of my life.”

Mac Feely was ambitious in those early days. Twenty years on, with his kids growing up, he makes music for enjoyment rather than out of any burning desire to conquer the world. It’s much better that way, he feels. Without any pressure to be commercially successful, he can enjoy Simple Kid as a purely creative undertaking — a far healthier outlook, all things considered.

“Young man’s dreams, young man’s anxiety. Young man’s everything,” he recalls. “It’s one of the benefits of being middle-aged. It’s nice to leave that stuff go.”