Marian Bradfield

THERE’S NOTHING wrong with a late bloomer. The truth is that bypassing the teenage angst and anger phase can be as useful as a dose of vitamin pills in the longevity stakes. And Marian Bradfield bears an able testimony to that theory. After garnering a nomination in last year’s Hot Press awards (in the category of Best Solo Performer Of The Year) for her eponymous debut she’s hit the ground running and is shaping up for a mighty gallop any day now.

Album number two is already on the racks. Tonight Is Just For Us is a Tapestry for the ’90s, replete with Carole King sensibilities and enough of Bradfield’s own female intuition to fuel another half dozen tape reels – should she care to try.

Despite her novice status, Bradfield was in little doubt about what she was aiming for with the follow-up album.

“I had time to plan the second album,” she says, “so I had very clear ideas about what musicians and what instruments I wanted on it. I was dead certain of one thing in particular – and that was that I didn’t want to lose the acoustic feel of the first album. So I went into the studio with loads of little bits of paper and I planned to put them together like a jigsaw – but of course it didn’t work out like that! It turned out even better than I could’ve planned.

Holing up in Monasterevin isn’t exactly everybody’s idea of inspirational locationing – unless you’re Eddie Gallagher I suppose – but MTS Studios metamorphosed into Bradfield’s late night spiritual home as painlessly as a sugar pill in a baby’s mouth, and before long Chez Marian was peopled by all manner of string and keyboard well into the early hours of each morning.

“It’s an odd sort of place, MTS,” she explains, “because it’s an old converted stables, but the people down there are totally mad and great craic! All it took was for (co-producer) Martin Murray to peep at me from behind the glass with his sheep’s eyes and I knew I’d have to do a take again. It was so relaxed. I really enjoyed the whole thing.”

She also came to the second album with a bank of experience and ideas that’d been stored over a year of gigging. That same experience of treading the boards over the past 12 months has left her with no illusions about the underbelly of the music business but she’s adamant that her Donegal base is what keeps her sane amid the chaos of it all.

“There’s great peace here,” she insists, “and I have to come back here because it focuses me like no place else. And I’ve got so much support here too. When I was going to Dublin to do the Mike Moloney show there were little old ladies from down the road stopping me before I left and wishing me luck with it. Sure they’d have had to poke up and down the radio to find it! But they did, because when I got back they were telling me how they heard me and it was great!”

Another significant boost to morale was the Hot Press nomination.

“I tell you,” she grins, “I was like a child who’d been told that I could eat ice-cream for the rest of my life! It was the first time in my life that I had been nominated for something that I did for myself. They were my songs, my words, my music and I can’t even begin to tell you how much that meant to me.

Of all the tracks on the album, Bradfield constantly returns to one in particular that carries more weight for her personally than any of the others:

“‘A Strange Unlucky Child’ is a song that I wrote in two hours flat and it had me in tears by the time I had it finished,” she explains. “It’s a song about a child who I saw many years ago who was severely disabled, who couldn’t speak, and it struck me how everybody doesn’t have perfect kids, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not beautiful.”

It was a song that demanded a haunting ambience and one that she finally saw come to light with the help of Liam O’Maonlaí’s fired vocals.

“I need someone who could put passion into it and one day I was on a radio programme with Liam and as soon as I heard him, I knew that he was the voice that I needed. And to my amazement he agreed to do it. I was gobsmacked when he said ‘OK’. When it came to the recording he put the exact hauntingness, the exact passion that I was looking for. He has so much passion – I think he did a magnificent job and the song sounds even better than I ever imagined it.”

As for her plans now that she’s got two recordings under her belt:

“I’m satisfied as long as the albums show a progression, a maturing along the way. And from what I’ve heard from different people so far, I think I’m managing to do that – so I’m happy with that!

• Siobhán Long