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Hot Press -
One From The Heart - June 18 2004
The dark, romantic Raining Down Arrows is the latest milestone in the creative liberation of Mundy, a man whose thoughts on love, friendship and connecting with the audience are at the core of his music.
"I think it was the second time I did Witnness, in 2002.” Mundy is recalling a moment – not just any moment, but the moment – when he knew that the shift from major label drop-out to national success story was not too far away.
“God, I remember it really well. If I’d have messed up that gig, I was definitely going to have a really hard time. Before it I was getting sick with nervousness. And I remember, on the stage, the amount of goodwill and good energy that there was there towards me, and towards the music. I remember singing ‘July’, and nearly crying in the middle of the song with happiness. It was near the end of the gig, and I thought ‘This is going really well’. The crowd were singing it back. They were even hosing down the people in the tent. It was like a real, kind of; it was a real moment. And I knew it then. People just talked and talked about that gig.”
It wasn’t so long before this milestone that Mundy had been written off as just another casualty of the record industry. Having signed to Sony in 1996, the Birr native achieved a sudden international success thanks to the inclusion of his song ‘To You I Bestow’ on the platinum-selling Romeo And Juliet soundtrack. But it wasn’t to last. This initial burst of activity gave way to a long period of disillusionment with the music world following his sacking from the label.
A period of travelling in South America was followed by a back-to-basics gigging routine that saw him picking up his acoustic guitar and harmonica and boarding the good ship Bus Eireann for a gruelling series of shows all around Ireland. “I hadn’t much confidence, to be honest, before the album came out,” he recalls. “I’d been dropped, I had to go out gigging on my own – I couldn’t afford to bring out a band. I was really starting from the bottom again.”
His ascent to national recognition began to gather pace in the summer of 2002 with the release of his sophomore album, 24 Star Hotel. Containing hits-in-waiting ‘July’ and ‘Mexico’ (both picked up by radio and quickly becoming anthems on the festival circuit), the album’s initial pressing of 3,000 copies soon ran out. ‘Mexico’ and ‘July’ having also registered in the charts, Mundy embarked on a national tour, played Witnness and Lisdoonvarna, supported Neil Young and recorded a cover of Shakira’s ‘Whenever Wherever’ for the multi-platinum Even Better Than The Real Thing compilation (“Well, I don’t really have… breasts, as such,” he laughs, when I mention the song. “My breasts are small and humble [he examines his chest] but I’m hoping to get them smaller.”)
All the while, the success of his album and live shows was reinstating his faith in making music.
“I felt, like, if 25 or more thousand people like the way I’m writing songs on this album, then they’re likely to enjoy the next batch of songs on the next album,” he reflects. “And for me, it’s like I’ve been accepted and I can relax a little bit more.”
Not only has he been accepted, but Mundy has taken control of his own career – something that, as a spurned former-major label artist, he was determined to do.
“I’ve completely left the past behind me now,” he says, determinedly. “I’m my own boss and I call my own shots. I ring up a studio if I want to record in it, I call the musicians if I want them to play. It’s just really basic, but it’s easy, and it works.”
This independent attitude was something he cites as crucial to the making of his new album. Raining Down Arrows was recorded over two and a half weeks in the dusty environs of Austin, Texas, a location Mundy speaks of as his inspirational home. For one thing, it’s the place where he bought the infamous cowboy hat that would later adorn the cover of his platinum record 24 Star Hotel, and holds, for him, a certain musical pull.
Aside from a fascination with artists from “that part of the world”, over several trips to the town he became enamoured with the local scene and set about recording his album with the help of a husband and wife duo who played in several Austin bands. The studio of choice was ominously titled The Slaughterhouse – a remote location, seven miles outside the town.
“It’s quite deserty out there,” he explains. “Very dry land. You can hear strange sounds in the bushes. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions out there, lots of deadly things – a pretty wacky place to make an album. But it was great. Especially working with strangers, you can tell them what you want. There’s no familiarity there. It was a great exercise. Sometimes when I work with friends, the music gets lost because I’ve told them a filthy joke the night before and they’re still laughing at it and we’re playing this big sensitive love song and they’re playing it too hard or not really putting their heart into it. But when you’re a stranger working with a stranger, there’s more respect there.”
Also, the fact that there were so few people involved with the making of the record meant that the pressure to instil a ‘Mundy’ stamp on his music was not as strong as with previous efforts.
“When you have a big deal,” he muses, “you have your managers coming in and going ‘Turn that down, turn that up’, then you have the A&R guys coming in, then the head of A&R, the engineer and the producer are having a row in the corner, and you end up going ‘Stop! This is my music!’ This time I didn’t have anybody. And I think it sounds like that as well.”
The result is Mundy’s most accomplished work to date. Although for the most part bereft of the radio-friendly, hummable licks of ‘July’ and ‘Mexico’ (“I should hope so,” he quips), it bears the mark of an artist in transition. Themes of love and loss prevail, with song titles such as ‘By Her Side’, ‘Love and Confusion’, ‘Soul Mate’, ‘All The Love’ and ‘You Are The One’ fuelling the view that this album is Mundy’s answer to David Kitt’s recent loved-up release, Square One.
Musically, he’s also exploring new territory – experimenting with surreal effects, full-on-band folk, a broader choice of instruments and more extreme divisions of his own style. This gives the record something of a split personality, poppy one minute, folky the next, then dark and intense.
“There are a lot of love songs on this album,” he admits. “Some of them are from ages ago and some are quite recent. Actually, I think every song on it pretty much is a love song. Some of them are positive; some of them are negative. Was I in a relationship at the time? I’m always in relationships. Did that have an impact on the direction the record took? I think love has a big impact on me, in general. With women or with life or with whatever. It affects me in a great way. Sometimes you have new found love and it’s amazing and it’s perfect and it’s everything, then you have the difficulties in a relationship, then you’ve the end, then you’ve the ‘Can’t live without you’ thing. And they’re all from different times, but there is a time when they all fit together on a record. And I didn’t think about it, it just so happened that they all asked to be recorded together. Is this album my Square One then? No, it’s not. It’s my dark, romantic album.”
It’s also his most direct. Instead of meticulously constructing a collage of sounds, Mundy has succeeded in tapping a more direct line into his creative well – an aspect of his sound that’s echoed in the fluidity of his songwriting.
“I want to be as ‘Mundy’ as I can,” he explains. “I don’t like to edit it too much, I just let it flow out, just flow, and I try not to stop it although I dry up for months and months and months without writing anything. I never try and force it. It doesn’t come out right. It comes out contrived and all those funny bits… they wouldn’t come out if I tried. It’s like if you haven’t cried for two years or something and when you start crying you just let it go, you don’t try to cry another way. If you’re laughing from your heart as well, you can hear it. Some people laugh fake and you can tell. That’s like songwriting. If you do it from your heart, you can’t go far wrong.
“I don’t read into being a singer too deeply, though,” he adds. “All that ‘You’re a singer and you change people’s lives and you make them feel a certain way’ with your music… If you look into that it can be a little bit freaky, so I just skim over the top of it and try not to… [pauses] It can be quite heavy, y’know what I mean? Like, just the idea… people have come up to me and said certain songs have got them out of depression and that can be a little bit scary. But I suppose it’s better people are saying it got them out of a depression rather than into one.”
While he shies away from the emotional link he has extended to listeners through his records, he is quick to point out the power of playing to and connecting with a live audience.
“The best gig I’ve ever seen was Bruce Springsteen in the RDS last year,” he says. “Now I don’t love all of his albums, but when he plays, he puts more than 100% into it. He bleeds for his crowd. I just think hats off to him. Me and Glen (Hansard) went to see that gig and the two of us were like, ‘Oh my God’. I love watching Neil Young play live too, he really gets into it. I just love people who really lose themselves in it. I try to do that myself. There are times when the band and myself are locked in together and we’re into taking a song on a little trip. It doesn’t happen all the time. Thing is, if the audience helps you go there, you can help them go there and this electricity thing happens and there’s a whole… I don’t know what it is… It’s just a big ball of energy. It’s a great thing. That’s what musicians play for, that thing.”
While this synergy is the driving force behind most musicians, it does come at a cost. Mundy knows all too well just how low you can get in the pursuit of the moments that make it all worthwhile.
“I went over to the States a couple of times on my own, staying in hotel rooms on my own, not knowing too many people in the same city,” he remembers. “It can be very lonely, sitting in a hotel room, trying to eat a bowl of soup on your own just to keep your energy levels up. I think you need companions. Going around with your guitar on your own, doing gigs – it’s not good. I’m the kind of person… I don’t like to look inside too much. If you’re a thinker at all, sometimes you can create a situation that really isn’t there, and it can evolve into panic. I think it’s a bad thing to look too hard into yourself, cause you can get lost. And a lot of people do that and it can become a disease. I tend… [he pauses for a moment] Is he singing my song?”
Low in the background, we can hear The Frames playing ‘To You I Bestow’ in nearby King John’s Castle, Limerick, where Mundy has just finished his set. The fact that two thousand people are this very moment singing the words to his song serves as a poignant counterpoint to the dark times he’s recalling.
“I think Glen’s expecting me to walk out on stage, but I can’t!” he laughs. “The Frames have been very good to me. People give out about a lot of things, but The Frames really have a good heart, very generous people. Jealousy – there’s a lot of small talk around Dublin, and everywhere. Anyone gets a bit of success and people start talking bad things… These guys deserve more than they get sometimes. More success, I mean. When I moved to Dublin they were one of my favourite bands. The Mary Janes were another, Interference another. I used to save up all my shekels, go busking all week, to go and see these guys.”
These days, he’s more likely to be on tour with them, fondly reminiscing about times on the road in America with Paddy Casey, or treks across Australia with The Frames.
“That sort of stuff blows my mind,” he grins. “Going to all these amazing places and getting to share them with your friends. You can’t get better than that. Meeting the rock stars and going to the parties can be fun, but only if you’ve got somebody to share it with. Like, I could meet Glen in ten years’ time and be like, ‘D’ya remember that night in Sydney with such and such’ or be with Paddy and say, ‘Do you remember that night in Baltimore and whatever happened’. That’s the special stuff.”
Mundy’s Raining Down Arrows is in the shops now.
Hannah Hamilton
IMRO - Oh My My Mundy
It takes a brave, committed and assured soul to enter into the oft baneful pit of making music. Here those ghoulish aspects of the music business lurk aplenty waiting to mislead and feed upon the novice cohort, where careers are prone to being as the saying goes, nasty, brutish and short.
As an artist Mundy may have gone down a few times, a victim of the unholy alliance of doubt and expectancy, but like a true champion he has arisen from the knocks to deliver a sucker punch sending those fiendish ogres retreating for cover to eat that tasty pie of crowish humility.
And this folks is what happens when you come armed with scepticism to the 24 Star Hotel.
Subject to that 'difficult second album' syndrome and a piece of work which Mundy admits has been hidden in his drawer for two years, 24 Star Hotel has aged like a fine wine, its contents laden with musical potency and from which over 4,000 people have sampled its congenial content by virtue of acquiring the album. As more attention is brought to bear on our hero so continues that bouquet de Mundy on its natural journey kindling the senses and capturing hearts and minds at every turn.
Mundy sadly does not reflect this romantic musical metaphor when we meet. He's drinking water and informs me that he is suffering from the excesses of his recent birthday. He has only just turned 27 but what he has accomplished thus far in such a short space of time is nothing short of remarkable.
The multifold adventures of Mundy in a nutshell firmly attest to this; boy with guitar leaves hometown (Birr) for the big city, bright lights (Dublin), boy's music attracts much attention, boy signs to major record label (Sony), boy releases first album (Jellylegs), boy has song on Romeo and Juliet soundtrack (To You I Bestow), boy begins second album, boy is released by major record label (boo!), boy carries on (yeah!), boys founds own record label (Camcor), boy releases second album to great success, boy is interviewed by IMRO news!!!
Oh! the dizzying stuff of fantasy, the compelling light-headedness of it all, the 'I must pinch myself just to make sure this is all real' scenario, boy must be dancing on tables!!? Well actually no, he's still here supping away on his water, taking time out in the pit lanes away from the perpetual circuit of the music business. Animations seem to be reserved for ruminations retrospect.
'Y'know I'd hate to have a record deal now and go through all the same stuff again', he retorts in a weary fashion reflecting upon his rapid ascent to distinguished eminence as an artist and the subsequent break-up with Sony, his first record company. 'Now I know what touring is like, having a record deal is like, what the mistakes are like and there's some mistakes I'll never make again'.
These resonant the tones of a mature head on young shoulders but it's a bit too soon in his career to see 'Mundy's Memoirs (How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Set Up My Own Record Company) hit the best seller shelves at your local bookstore just yet!
Such a recollective volume inevitably will include the period surrounding the first album 'Jellylegs' in 1996 where Mundy was propelled into the sphere of international success largely due to the subsequent inclusion of the track 'To You I Bestow' on the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack. 'That period will always be important to me because that was where I did all my groundwork', he stresses, 'but Jellylegs was something that I wrote back then and although I love the songs dearly, they are just a photograph and I would do them a lot differently now that I know more about the studio y'know?' The pressures on the young Mundy to satisfy the model recording industry equation (quick marketable product + exhaustive promotion= sales=profits) are soon laid bare;
'The album itself was made in two and a half weeks and so even before I had an idea of what type of album I wanted, it was already made and then I had to go out and promote it!'.
With the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack selling in such large quantities worldwide (11 million copies sold!), was there ever the fear that you would become an artist known for only one song? 'Oh yeah! With 'To You I Bestow' and 'Gin and Tonic Sky' to a lesser extent, I was always worried that I was just going to be labelled with these songs forever'. Well fear no more sire for thou hast excelled thineself in the fine art of captivating melody! 'Yeah well all the new ones seem to be going down way better, so onwards and upwards!'.
How true! Albeit there has been a six year interval between both of Mundy's albums where he has toured, recorded, split from Sony, travelled, set up the record label and finally released the new album, you wouldn't think it from the reaction of his audience. Experience it firsthand and you will marvel at how our hero's euphonic anthems such as 'July' or 'Anchor the Sun' can captivate an audience to move as one single seismically charged mass unit except that the epicentre in this eruption is quite a lot of fun actually!. 'I lost my confidence following the Sony situation and gigging over the last two years has really helped me feel at home'. 'It's good to see people coming just to see me now not because of any hype and that's reassuring', he says beamingly.
24 Star Hotel is a particularly accomplished piece of work and deeper appreciation will point towards the direction of a new musically mature Mundy, of an artist who weaves intricacies into the structure of his work while never losing sight of that crucial underlying melody. Songs like 'Drive' or 'Mayday' smack of an artist brimming in confidence and who can carry off such feats with utter conviction.
As compared with the first album, Mundy acknowledges the time factor involved with 24 Star Hotel which in the end allowed him to make the album that he genuinely wanted; 'It's a lot different this time round and this album took a lot longer to make and I understood more about the studio and the job of a producer'.
And it's not only in the song writing department that our hero has asserted his fledging self. By setting up his own record label, Camcor, he has by default taken on board a whole new set of responsibilities, is there a clash now between Mundy the musician and Mundy the businessman?
'Well yeah I mean no!', he states ambivalently, 'I don't look upon my music as a business, I look at spending the money and the time on it but business is like signing cheques or whatever y'know?'
And for those who don't know, Camcor is the name of the river in his native Birr, 'to me the name just sounded cool, I owed the river something from looking into it, swimming in it, drinking beside it, kissing beside it, I may as well use it for something else!'.
Though he has faced many testing trials, one can't but have admiration for Mundy as an artist determined to the last in pursuing his intuitive musical path. Emerging unscathed, he always speaks about his music lovingly like something akin to a favourite toy that those big bully record companies deprived him of temporarily but where his unshakeable and exemplary fortitude has eventually won out.
'From now on I just want to keep making albums and just keep writing', he emphasises. He may have gone AWOL for a while but to hear the music again kinda reminds you of that bowl of cornflakes you ain't had in ages. It's time to wake up and taste that sunshine again folks 'cus you might just have forgotten how good it can all be.
Justin Dowling
cluas.com - Mundy interview
Ronan catches up a contented, contract free Mundy...
This week, Irish singer/songwriter Mundy returns to the record buying public's purses with the finest 15 minutes of music you're likely to hear this year. The 'Moon Is A Bullet Hole' is the first official Mundy release since his appearance on the 11 million selling 'Romeo And Juliet' soundtrack. The Birr born man has been busy since then of course, but the fruits of his labour are unlikely ever to see the light of day. For this year Mundy was dropped from the Epic / Sony roster. "Being dropped was a relief" a chirpy Mundy told me when I caught up with him recently.
'The Moon Is A Bullet Hole' takes its title from a spoken word song that Mundy (real name Edmond Enright) had written for a follow-up album to 1996's 'Jellylegs'. The album has never seen the light of day though. Sony, it seems, weren't too impressed with the results. "They didn't know what to do with it" a relaxed Mundy tells CLUAS from his Dublin home, "that Britpop thing was big at the time but it was not for us. I think they wanted me to be pop really. The Romeo and Juliet thing (Mundy's Youth-produced To You I Bestow) took everyone by surprise. We made a video, kinda like the Cardigans one with clips from the film, but the label didn't know what to do with it. Maybe it looked too flash! We'd toured by then and I suppose timing was a factor, I dunno…"
Mundy's inclusion on the multi-million selling 'Romeo and Juliet' came about as a nice surprise. "Yeah, Nellie Hooper rang up. He liked the track, there was a romantic feel to it that he liked and there was a US tip in the production." To You I Bestow" was produced by Youth, the legendary ex-Killing Joke bass man and DJ oddity, the main man of Dragonfly records and producer of some note. "He was a nutter. A cool, far out, individual. The sound was big alright!" remembers Mundy. After the success of the tracks inclusion Sony wanted more. Mundy started working with producer Tommy D (Catatonia, Finley Quayle) and a 12-track album was in the can. The album was to be the nail in the coffin for Mundy and Sony. "They just didn't like it. It went a bit stale for a while and then early this year I was told I was dropped." He says almost misty eyed. "It was a pain in the ass really, I wasn't too happy about it. The album was such a laugh to make, but no one heard it which takes the fun out of it really." So would he sign for a major label again? "Only on my own terms" he adds quickly "I might let someone license my stuff. I won't want to sound like the traditional 'I've been dropped, my record company doesn't understand me' person, these things happen and people say stupid things, but everything's rosy now, I couldn't care less. It was tedious then but the pressures off now."
The pressure's off indeed. 'The Moon Is A bullet Hole' in some ways deals with the dropping incident. The standout track, the one that's gracing the nation's airwaves at present, 'Mayday', could well have been written about the whole Deal / No Deal thing. It's a stunning opening to the EP, and even Mundy himself concedes that it "could" have been written about his scale to the dizzying heights of success and his subsequent 'fall'. Maybe the rejection of his second LP could account for the lines "I'm losing fuel real fast and I need some backing up…let me down." The relentless tours (over the years Mundy has supported acts as diverse as Neil Young, Alanis Morrisette, David Gray, Cast, Manic Street Preachers, Van the Man and Mansun to name but a few) could account for "I can't remember why I came / and there's fever in my cabin Lord / and I'm hanging from the mane."
"Yeah, there's some truth there all right" Mundy says, "with 'Jellylegs' it got to the stage where you're, you know, just looking at the signposts to see where you are. Looking back it was good but there were stages when the same set 14 nights in a row can be tiresome. With the record company thing, you get a feeling that you're up too long, you want to get down and then I got let down fairly handy." Whatever, 'Mayday' is a stunning song. To quote The Frames, it's the "perfect opening line", the perfect re-introduction to the public. Sweeping strings, a paranoid feel and a lyrical grace beyond his 25 years catapult the song into the bracket of "instant classic."
'Mayday' it transpires was one of the first songs that Mundy recorded after being dropped. He took time out ("a few gigs here and there") and eventually he got a call from Andrew Phillpot, a member of the live incarnation of Depeche Mode. "I'd no LP, no deal, but this call to carry on came through and we did the EP." More so out of pride than anything else ("Fans were always asking me when am I going to do something, they wanted to hear anything"), the EP was recorded swift(ish)ly and the results are tremendous, well worth the four year wait. 'Healthy' is a lush string augmented track, pastoral in its feel and reminiscent of the late great Nick Drake. It is, as he says himself "a tremor of the heart" of a song. A healthy encounter that's not that healthy turns out to be 'amazing' in the song. The production is sweeping on it. "With the strings, I could hear them in the guitar from the early demos, they suited it to perfection but it still sounds orchestral acoustically."
Working with Phillpot has given Mundy a new lease of creative brilliance. One listen to 'The Moon Is A Bullet Hole' confirms this. Closing track The Last Time could be the motto on which Mundy 2000 could make it again. "It's about stop taking your time, there's no time to lounge about and complain, you got to just go out and do it." That's what Mundy will be doing from now to Christmas. A full Irish tour is planned for October and November. He may also be playing another hometown gig in Birr. This summer he played at the vintage festival there. Was he nervous about playing the hometown? "As nervous as I'll ever be" he laughs. "I play there regularly in the folks place, but not on the scale of this summer. It was nerve wracking, you know yourself, there'd be people there wondering 'how's he turned out?' and stuff, but after the first song it was grand. I'd got used to crowds again." The help of David Gray was probably to thank here. Gray brought Mundy on tour with him for his breakthrough UK tour in April. "I'd been slow getting on the road and David offered me a slot, it was cool." What does he think of Gray's almost fairytale success? "It shows what Chinese whispers can do, people just heard about him and without the aid of major label money he did it." Gray, if you remember, was dropped by EMI not too long before 'White Ladder'. Will history repeat itself with Mundy? After the David Gray tour Mundy headed off the US with former label mate and good friend Paddy Casey. "We shared headlining duties, and quite a few beers! It was a cool tour, it was great to hang out with Paddy and play, great stuff" remembers the Birr man.
In the meantime, 'The Moon Is A Bullet Hole 'is out now on Mundy's own label Camcor Records that will hopefully expand. "If we make a few pound with it hopefully we can put it back into the label and help some other acts" says a contented, happy Mundy. We finish by talking about the current state of Irish rock. "It's fairly smoking. You either want to play music or you don't and thankfully there's a lot of people doing just that" He mentions Witnness as a gauge as to how good Irish music has become. With over two thirds of the acts on the bill being Irish it felt like a vindication for the country's music scene, not only in rock, but in dance and pop. Among the many acts that tickle Mundy's musical taste buds David Kitt is mentioned. "It'll be interesting to hear what he does after 'Small Moments'. It's a great album and he's got the vibe upstairs. He'll do well." Does Mundy have any advice for anyone else out there? "You can't buy the knowledge. I wouldn't go through the Sony situation again, so watch yourselves. If you want to do it, just do it," he concludes.
With 'The Moon Is A Bullet Hole', the long overdue return to action from Mundy is as refreshing and timely as you can get. An album is promised, in the meantime some of those second album songs may see the light of day as a few more EPs, an album is also promised. If it's as good as 'The Moon Is A Bullet Hole' then Sony, like EMI today with David Gray, may well be regretting ever letting go of this natural born talent.
Ronan Casey |
