Supporting Irish Musicians and Artists

The late summer sun is shining on Camden Street, as I make my way past slumbering Whelan’s, past the delicious Diwali restaurant, and meander into The Last Bookshop for a browse. A secret passage at the back of the store trails through the bustling Cake Café, and pops me out on Pleasants Place, where a trio of Nepali chefs smoke and shoot the breeze, while The Morning Bakery packs up for the day.

Positioned about halfway down this quiet street, dwells the warren of rooms that is Camden Recording Studios.

I ring the bell, co-owner Cian Boylan warmly greets me, leads me through a small reception room, through a narrow corridor, past a deconstructed drumkit neatly shelved, and into the main recording room. Here Hot Press photographer Miguel Ruiz, kneeling on a giant Persian rug, is setting up his photo shoot. Studio A is a grand place – spacious, elegantly furnished, well-lit – good enough for the likes of Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd, who have both recorded here.

Miguel shoots Cian playing the studio’s beautiful New York Steinway Model B grand piano, surrounded by a boodle of vintage and classic gear.

Camden Recording Studios. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Through concertina doors sits the control room and its splendid Neve Genesys G32 analogue console, a menagerie of buttons, dials and lights. It’s here that – to let the recipient of the A New Local Hero 2024 award know the delights that are in store when they come to record in this very hideaway – we chat about all things Camden Recording Studios.

Folks have been recording in these rooms since 1990, when it was designed by the architectural-acoustic guru Roger D’Arcy and used by Brian Masterson’s Windmill Lane Recording Studios. Remarkably, since he now owns the joint, it was the first studio that Cian ever recorded in. “We did a whole album in a day, on a Good Friday I think, because we got a good deal,” he recalls, laughing at the memory.

Since taking the studio over in 2015, Cian, along with fellow co-owner Bressie and chief engineer Conor Brady, have continuously improved the space. “We’re still working on it,” Cian smiles. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I ask about his duties, he replies with the kitchen-sink.

“I do production, arranging, composing, orchestrating, musical direction, and songwriting with people. Session work as well and then running this place.”

Cian possesses a remarkable CV. Sinead O’Connor, Bono, Gregory Porter, Rufus Wainwright – he’s worked with them all.

Couple that with a Master’s Degree in Jazz Music Performance from the Dublin Conservatory of Music, as well as studying Film Scoring under the late Don Brandon Ray - head music supervisor at ABC and founder of the UCLA Film Scoring course - and the result is one hell of a serious sonic dude.

No wonder the likes of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Sofia National Orchestra and The Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra have all tapped into his skillset. Cian’s musical journey began when his older sister started piano lessons.

“I was just drawn to it,” he reflects. “She’d be practising her pieces and I’d be picking them up by ear. I was only five and I asked my mum if I could get piano lessons.”

GRAMMY AWARD WINNING

Except for a distant relative who was a jazz professor at Berkeley, Cian’s family weren’t musicians, but both his parents loved music. Growing up, he was surrounded by a wonderful diversity of opera, classical, jazz and rock spinning on the home record player.

He skipped through the grades of the Royal Irish Academy classical piano syllabus, scooping up saxophone along the way. “It was the ‘80s and sax was king,” he grins. He began gigging in his mid-teens, his mother dropping and collecting him to and from an Italian restaurant in the city, where he played piano. After school, he detoured into a vaguely remembered “management science maths degree”.  That led to spending the guts of his twenties working for global behemoth Accenture, taking sabbaticals to record albums or go on tour.

“They were very supportive actually,” he explains. “I’d turn up to a job at, say, AIB headquarters, leaving a big keyboard at reception and leave at five o’clock to catch my gig that night.”

When he started getting loads of session work, something had to give. It was Accenture.

“As the piano player,” he explains, “you tend to be the one that takes care of business. You’re writing charts for people because you’ve got all the core skills that some of the other guys in the band don’t usually have. So, when I left Accenture, I’d already been doing string arrangements and things like that. But not really knowing exactly what I was doing yet, I decided to study film composing.”

With production jobs flowing in, Cian’s home recording studio gradually became more sophisticated.

“The bathroom was wired,” he laughs. “Everything was wired. Recording uillean pipes or drums at 11 o’clock at night, the neighbours were actually very nice about it. But it got to the point where I needed a proper space, and this place came up. It was only the space upstairs. The rest of the studio was rented to somebody else.”

Camden Recording Studios. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

Showing me the upstairs space, we pass through the wonderfully apportioned Studio B, co-workers strolling by carrying laptops, and into the Dingle Distillery bar and venue. Yes, you read that right - the joint has its own speakeasy, which the likes of Joy Clark, Dana Masters, Cathy Davey and Liza Hannigan have all performed in.

Upstairs, Studio C is a mass of wires and equipment, over which Grammy award winning mix engineer Ruadhrí Cushnan is hunched. We hustle in and out, Miguel taking shots, and Cian telling us that he initially shared the space with Bressie, whom he’d met at a music festival. When the folks below told them that they were moving out, the two Studio C occupants decided to takeover the entire building.

Camden Recording Studios. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

RIDICULOUS TALENT

We get out of Ruadhrí’s domain, check out the small suite of Studio D, and go back downstairs, past a classic Prestige Jukebox. Camden Recording Studios was in part inspired by Electric Lady Studios, the almost mythic recording studio in Greenwich Village, New York.

“You walk in, and it feels like it’s your living room, or it should feel like it’s your living room,” says Cian. “I wanted it to be a place that’s all about creativity, that sets people’s nerves at ease. It’s a place someone can hang out for days or weeks and really want to come in to work. It’s also a place run by musicians for musicians.”

It is that. Vintage keyboards lie cheek by jowl with guitars, guitars and more guitars. Cian points at a keyboard: “A strange looking blue thing that once belonged to The Cure.” We talk about how the ambience of legendary recording studios – Stax, Sun Studios, EastWest Studios – hold some of the magic of the records that were recorded in them.

“We had Taylor Swift’s band in,” Cian says. “Not Taylor. They walked in and immediately said, ‘This looks like a place we can make music.’ And the MD, David Cook said to me, ‘There’s a few places like this in Nashville, we weren’t expecting this, as these places are few and far between.’ That was a lovely validation.”

The room is no stranger to big kahunas. Bryan Adams, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Jon Bon Jovi have all been in. Early in Boylan’s tenure, The Jesus & Mary Chain shored up for four weeks. Jack Antonoff has worked on Taylor Swift stuff and on his own Bleachers project here. Florence Welch. Hozier. Van Morrison. Jazzy does most of her work here. CMAT wrote most of her first album in Camden.

“We’re getting a lot of bands coming in doing a three-day session, doing an EP; or for one day, trying to get a single done,” Cian explains. “And by and large, they’ve been great. There’s some ridiculous talent out there, the likes of BIMM and The Academy of Popular Music in Cork have made a big difference - artists are coming in prepared. They know what they’re doing. They can all play great. They’re not fazed by being in a recording studio.”

Camden Recording Studios. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

In addition to recording, mixing, mastering and producing music, Camden also produce podcasts, audiobooks, voiceovers and assist with songwriting, composing and arranging. They work with film companies like Netflix and Disney for audio dialogue replacement. The recipient of the A New Local Hero Award, a central feature of Irish Music Month – an initiative of Hot Press and the IBI – will be in illustrious company recording there.

“We’re absolutely delighted to be a part of it,” Cian enthuses. “We got to work with Brad Heidi last year, which was great.” And the resulting single, released by Rubyworks, and supported by the participating radio stations all over Ireland, went to No.1 in the Irish Breakers Chart. It was exactly the kind of start that every artist or band dreams of. Here’s looking forward to this year’s model. There’s some ridiculous talent out there alright. One of them is going to be very lucky indeed...

• The ‘A New Local Hero’ finale night, featuring six of Ireland’s finest energing acts takes place in The Academy, Dublin on Tuesday, 15 October.