MacD on Music: Coming Around Again

Derry may be lacking a lot of things (motorways, investment, trains to Dublin, etc.), but one thing we’re certainly not short of is decent gigs.

As you may have noticed over the past few columns, there’s plenty of brilliant music happening in the city.

This week, I’m talking to yet another of the excellent artists playing here, Derry’s own Mairead Carlin, who’s playing her first ever solo headlining gig here (hard to believe, I know) on the 26th of this month in St. Augustine’s. I spoke with Mairead recently about the gig and her own personal journey that brought her to this point.

“This is actually my first ever headline solo gig at home, which is lovely.

“I’ve always done support act, or when I was with Celtic Women, that was obviously part of a group, so it’s lovely to come home for the first time in many years and do a proper gig at home. So, when Kieran at Music Capital approached me about it, I’d actually been working on my own music for the first time in so long, so it seemed like serendipity that he would see if I would be interested in doing my own gig.

“It seemed like the music gods were coming down on me and saying ‘you know what? You want to do this at home?’ So yeah, it was such an honour and I’m really looking forward to it. For me, I’m thinking about the arc of the kind of music I’m going to perform. In my head it’s going to be like a journey of my music to date.

“It’s going to be songs literally from my childhood, that I learnt at home, through to stuff that I recorded with my record label, Decca at the time, to some Celtic Women music and onto the future and what my music’s going to sound like moving forward. That’s the idea I have in my head. It’ll be a really intimate gig.”

“Obviously it’s part of the Lūmināre Festival, so it’s going to be lots of beautiful candles. I’m going to have a pretty much full band. It’s going to be a piano player and multi-instrumentalists as well. There are two other guys: a guy called Cormac Crummey, who’s honestly one of the best guitarists I’ve ever come across, but he plays everything else.

“He’s going to play banjo, fiddle, everything and then another guy called Matthew Campbell, who’s also a multi-instrumentalist. It’s going to be super acoustic. Very intimate, very earthy, very rootsy. Just a really chilled evening.”

Mairead says that this will be her first time playing St. Augustine’s: “It’s so weird. Obviously, growing up in Derry, I used to walk around the walls all the time and I used to see it, but I’ve never actually been in it. I’ve never played St. Augustine’s before, but I’ve been to see Donna Taggart when she did her gig, and it was honestly just beautiful from start to finish. The sound is beautiful in there. I’m definitely intending to go to a lot more in there.”

After that, we spoke a bit about her musical life up to this point: “I started singing when I was four. I went to my first singing lesson and never really looked back. I think I always knew that I wanted to be a singer.

“I just loved performing so I literally came up through the ranks the way every Derry singer does. I did the Derry Feis since I was a baby. I think there was one year I was entered into 47 competitions, which is just ridiculous. I was that kid. By the time I’d finished college [Trinity College of Music in London] I’d got signed to Universal Records and recorded my debut album with them, which was a dream come true.

“But sometimes dreams don’t work out, and by the end of my second year with them, they decided to not pursue that. It’s something that I openly talk about because I think it’s important to show young artists that it might seem like the most incredible thing in the world, and yes, being signed to a major label is wonderful, but there’s also life outside of it.

“In those moments, where you feel like ‘this is the end for me’, what I did was I went back and started teaching singing to young kids which gave me life again because, to see in their eyes the light that I had in mine when I was their age, with none of the other crap that comes with being part of the music industry, as wonderful as it is, it reminded me of why I was doing it in the first place.

“Then, out of nowhere, I got the call for Celtic Women, and I stayed there for eight years, and it was the best eight years of my life. I just loved every single moment of it.”

Now solo again, Mairead Carlin will be playing St. Augustine’s on Friday, 26th May. She can be found on Facebook and Instagram @maireadcarlinsings.