My Childhood with Declan O'Rourke: ‘After the Junior Cert, I’d play guitar every waking moment’

O’Rourke’s eighth album Oceanic, is out on October 16.

Declan O'Rourke thinks he broke his parents' hearts by trying too many activities as a child. The singer-songwriter says he “threw himself headlong into one hobby after another. Karate, tennis, the tin whistle, Scouts… I’d make them buy me whatever I needed for that hobby, and as soon as they did, I’d move onto the next thing.”

The two hobbies that stuck were art and music. His interest in art was inspired by his maternal grandfather, a signwriter with a passion for painting.

“Our house and my mother’s sisters and brothers’ houses were all filled with his paintings,” says O’Rourke.

Declan, pictured here at age 2, is the second of four siblings. 

His grandfather died when O’Rourke was four years old, leaving his grandson a set of brushes and paints.

O’Rourke didn’t know what to do with them at first, but gradually became enthralled by drawing and painting pictures. He imagined himself “becoming an artist like Constable or Van Gogh” when he grew up.

His interest in music was inspired by his parents’ record collection and their family singsongs. The collection spanned Irish acts such as Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, Motown, flamenco, and blues, and O’Rourke was “obsessed” with it all. The singsongs were occasions at which everyone was expected to perform.

“Young or old, nobody was spared,” says O’Rourke. “Everyone took a turn, and everyone was applauded.”

Apart from a brief stint in Dublin’s Liberties, Ballyfermot was home for the first 11 years of O’Rourke’s life. His grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins all lived within a few hundred metres of each other there, and he remembers those years fondly.

“We had such a colourful community of people,” he says. “Lovely old people, neighbours we leaned on, and of course the nosy ones who would peek out the window and tell on you if you did anything. There was so much interaction.

“There were even times when the whole street would hop on a bus to go to Butlin’s together.”

O’Rourke is the second of four siblings. He laughs as he describes himself, his older sister Tammy, younger sister Niamh, and younger brother Edward as “four black sheep; we’re all so different, but we complement each other. We understand and support one another.”

Their mother Marian was a stay-at-home mam, and their carpenter father Declan was the main breadwinner. When his work dried up in the recessionary 1980s, the family uprooted to Australia.

“There were ads in the paper inviting skilled people to emigrate, and my mother had a brother who had been living in Melbourne for years,” says O’Rourke. “My parents were only 33, and this was an opportunity for them to improve the prospects for our family. So they packed up us four kids and moved to the other side of the world.”

Declan in his Coldstream primary school photo. Circa 1988.

O’Rourke was 11 when they moved, and the four years the family spent in Australia were formative ones for him. Especially formative was a visit the family paid to a friend who was a priest in a place called Kyabram. During that visit, O’Rourke started to strum on a guitar owned by one of the other priests who lived in the parochial house. That priest taught him some chords and gifted the guitar to O’Rourke when he was leaving.

“That visit marked the beginning of my relationship with the guitar and inspired the title of my first album, Since Kyabram,” he says.

His love of the guitar intensified at secondary school, where he would spend lunchtimes in the music room, learning licks and riffs from similarly musically obsessed kids.

Tearing himself away from that at age 15 when his family moved back to Ireland was difficult. O’Rourke jokes that “the stakes were higher as I was leaving friends and girls I liked behind. Feelings and hormones had kicked in.”

However, he still had music, and the older he got, the more determined he was to become a professional musician.

“From the summer after the Junior Cert, I’d play guitar every waking moment of the day, and never considered any other career,” he says.

He is grateful to his parents for not trying to dissuade him from what many might consider a precarious path, and thanks them for “always giving us the freedom to do what we wanted”.

O’Rourke believes he also absorbed important life lessons from his father and mother. He regards his father as “the more ambitious force with a go-getting attitude that encouraged me to take my talents as far as I could”, while his mother is more empathetic.

“She taught me to be mindful of people and never to hurt anyone. I think the two forces of ambition and empathy are very complementary, and I hope they describe the two sides of me.”

When he left school, O’Rourke wanted to pursue his passion for music, but wasn’t sure that was possible in Ballyfermot.

“The bands and musicians I’d been playing with there didn’t have access to a scene beyond Ballyfermot,” he says. “I needed to break out and grow in a new direction.”

He had friends who were moving to London, but that city didn’t attract him. Instead, aged 19, he opted to
return to Australia.

The feeling he associates with that time is excitement. “Tammy had already gone ahead of me, so I moved in with her,” he says. “I’d kept in touch with a lot of my old friends, so I knew people. I knew there was music. I knew there was sunshine. I wasn’t at all scared of what lay ahead.”

What lay ahead included a return to Ireland five years later, and seven acclaimed albums.

• O’Rourke’s eighth album, Oceanic, is out on October 16. His nationwide tour in support of that album begins in the Cork Opera House on October 8. See www.declanorourke.com for details.