Cork singer-songwriter Cian Ducrot: ‘Something massive is going to happen this year’
Cian Ducrot performs at Hits Live: Birmingham at Resorts World Arena on November 24, 2023 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images For Bauer Media)
For a vision of the future, a touch of clairvoyance, maybe you want to be standing near Cian Ducrot as we ring in the new year.
Even if the man himself doesn’t quite see himself as a 21st century soothsayer, there’s certainly something in his ability to divine the future.
The Corkman might be swaggering the world stage now, supporting Ed Sheeran across Europe and scoring chart hits in various jurisdictions, but it was all a little different as he welcomed the year 2020.
“I was on the balcony at home,” Ducrot explains, “this was just before the pandemic. I remember standing on the balcony with my mom, and I said two things to her: I was like, something massive is going to happen this year that’s going to change the world forever.
"I didn’t know what the word pandemic was at the time, but it was that kind of feeling like something is going to impact the world. I don’t know what it was. It was just a feeling. I mean, that I felt something was coming.
"And then the other thing I said to her was, I also think this is going to be a really big year for me, and I feel like I have to go to LA in February. I don’t, can’t explain why, but I have to go there in February.”
So, it turns out Passage West has its very own Nostradamus.
Of course, musicians have always managed to pluck real things from the ether, and so Ducrot’s path to the top may have happened anyway, even if he had gone to Lithuania instead of Los Angeles, but like a man with a divining rod in the old west, he seems to be able to navigate by intuition.
In recent years, Ducrot has played to rapturous crowds at Electric Picnic and across Europe, and he’ll wrap up 2024 by playing the New Year’s Eve Countdown concert at Dublin Castle.
Yet it’s clear he feels that his February 2020 trip to LA acted as a crossing of the threshold, moving away from his classical training, flute in hand, and more in line with the busking he did across Cork and elsewhere.
Citing the example of songwriter John Mayer, who had dropped out of Berklee College of Music only to then hit the big time, Ducrot’s own studies in London were parked, and Sin City was the departure point to a new world.
“I think I had been balancing the double act for such a long time,” he says of his classical/pop wrangling, “and I had sort of been more wishing for one of them to take off than the other one, I guess, in the back of my mind.”
His mother, Sabine — herself a classically trained flautist — offered to pay for his flights to California, and after that he was away.
“It was mad, because I realised, wow, February would have been the last month that I could have gone to LA for the next, like, four years.”
It’s safe to say that things have worked out. In 2024, Ducrot played Musgrave Park and next July he’s stepping up to headlining at the Marquee, but the gigs have been increasing in scale and scope for quite some time.
On the day of our chat he’s in Lisbon for his first ever show in the Portuguese capital, although given it’s the same day as , he’s hoping to catch that TV institution on the playback afterwards.
“I’m still waiting for that call,” he says, no doubt hoping to emulate his pal Ed Sheeran when it comes to surprise on-screen appearances.
Yet he has form in this regard — just last August he held a pop-up concert with a flash mob choir at the Dublin portal, continuing a pattern that likely harks back to his busking days.
It also chimes with his ability to tap into how people consume music now, with so many coming at songs indirectly through social media, particularly TikTok.
“Everything you do as an artist nowadays, it’s double edged,” he says, “you have to be thinking simultaneously about the experience of somebody watching it on social media, which is always going to be way more [in number] than people who are seeing it in real life. I think we’ve gotten to a point in the world where social media is bigger and more real than real life. People take it as gospel.”
Ducrot can certainly see the peculiarity in all this, but in this strange, fractured world, it’s about meeting people where they’re at.
“Half of us probably feel like we’ve seen so many shows and been at so many tours because we are getting fed so much content about it,” he continues.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing being on social media and feeling like you’ve been on tour with someone that you’ve never even been to one of their shows. As an artist, you will think about all these things.
“The New Year’s Eve show — it’ll be on on social media and all these kind of outlets. It’s a very, very strange show, because we have to plan it in a way that it’s for 5,000 people in the crowd, but also halfway through the show, we go live on television, and so you have to realise how to bring those people in, and then keep them on, and then have a midnight moment to then keep those people entertained on TV, while also entertaining a crowd in real life.”
If it sounds like a headache-in-waiting, Ducrot sees it as “a constant battle”.
“It’s a tricky thing, because music, you just want to connect with people. But now connecting is not a real in-life thing, except for tours and shows. It’s majority done on a social media-based thing.”
And, he stresses, this shouldn’t be dismissed as less important. His songs could well be the soundtrack to important moments in anyones lives, and if they come at it from the other side of the world via a smartphone, does it make that connection any less real?
“They love the content, it’s real life,” he says. “It’s not just a marketing promotional tool to them. That’s how they found you. That’s how they connected to you. That’s how you help them get over a loss or a break-up or something they’re dealing with. And so, I think there’s a lot of negativity around social media and all this sort of stuff.
“And some artists will really shit on it and really try to be very negative about it. But I think we have to remember that a whole generation have grown up and known pretty much just that. Me included. People say, ‘oh, we’re not content creators’, but it’s a privilege to make content and stuff for fans that are there and want to listen and love the music and love the content and the videos. It’s just about finding that balance.”
A counter-argument might be that if we are saturated with content, even the good stuff, the information we want about our favourite performers, what they’re eating, where they’re going on their holidays — it can remove that sense of mystery.
Yet for all the otherworldliness of a Bowie, or the sparse, gnomic public utterances from Bob Dylan, Ducrot argues that they earned the right to their sense of enigma.
“I don’t think they were mysterious from the beginning, they would have huffed and done everything it took and done every interview and been on every television show and doing everything they could possibly do to get to their success, and then they can step back and go, ‘Well, now I’m David Bowie’.”
It is very much a different time, and one Ducrot appears to be gliding through with some ease. He has previously spoken about the family difficulties of his childhood, and his own musical journey means that sometimes he has to pause and reflect on what might have been.
For example, he doesn’t regret packing away his classical leanings, and he doesn’t ponder about whether he could have been the new James Last.
“I don’t think I would have been happy in the end,” he says of that alternative reality. “I think that was probably why I wanted to search for more and seek something that felt more aligned with all of my, you know, personality, and all of my ambitions, and all of the things that I love.
“Flute was part of that, but it didn’t capture enough of it. I still use it,” he says.
“I still play it on stage. It’s not like I’ve just thrown it away and never touched it again. But, I think it was just a stepping stone to part of my musical discovery, I guess.”
In fact, he thinks his classical training has been “extremely influential” in terms of his songwriting.
“It can really take over my senses, but it comes out in a kind of a pop way, which is very interesting.” Even Mozart, he says, played with distorted guitars, can still be classical, “it’s all the same notes”.
And so back to 2025. Ducrot’s new year’s resolutions, “being healthier” and “exercising more” will be relatable to many.
Is there still scope for the musician to have another balcony moment?
“Maybe it’s just luck, but I think we do have an intuition, and we do have a sense of things that are that are coming,” he says, adding later: “I think it’s a good way to believe in yourself, and to sort of, I think, manifest things, to believe that they are maybe sort of pre-written, in a way, but you still have to chase them. If you don’t, they won’t happen, but they’re there for you if you want them.”
- Cian Ducrot headlines New Year’s Festival Dublin’s Countdown Concert at Dublin Castle.
- Tickets from €49.90 available from ticketmaster.com
