Hail, hail Barack and roll

While the rest of Belfast in the late ‘60s was gearing up for decades of conflict, Bap Kennedy was more interested in observing the ongoing space race – part of a lifelong fascination with America.

“To me, America was a magical place,” he recalls. “I’d learned to love it from the songs of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley and from cowboy pictures. Back then, it seemed every kid had to get a cowboy outfit for Christmas. I was really excited by the space race, the idea that men were going to walk on the moon was magical to me. The fact that the US had recently had a President called Kennedy might also have had a little to do with it.”
The moon landing, although a spectacular technological achievement, turned out to be a bit of a let-down for many people. As Kennedy remembers: “There was this huge build-up. Like a lot of people, I thought the world would be totally different from that point on. The euphoria lasted about five minutes. And then people went back to their normal lives – as if it didn’t really mean very much or hadn’t happened at all.”
His new album Howl On, released on his own Lonely Street Discs, contains several references to the Eagle landing. One song is called ‘The Ballad Of Neil Armstrong’, while ‘Irish Moon’ namechecks Michael Collins [no, not that one]. As Kennedy explains, “Although everybody knows Armstrong was the first man to walk the lunar surface, Collins seems to be the forgotten member of the crew. He was left in charge of the spaceship circling the moon while the other two actually got to go down. Back then, I thought Collins was an Irish guy. I thought it was great that he seemed to be in charge of the whole thing. I hoped he’d get home safely, that he wouldn’t get pissed and screw the whole thing up!”
He admits that his early obsession with America meant that he paid little attention to what was happening musically in Ireland or the UK.
“I didn’t really pick up on any of that,” he recalls. “I was obsessed with all things American. I remember the first record I ever bought was the soundtrack to Kid Creole with Elvis in it.”
However, after he’d visited the US a few times he became somewhat disillusioned with the country.
“At first it was great going over and seeing all the things I’d dreamed about. After a while I began to react to the way America seems to homogenise everything and I became less enthralled with it. I didn’t really get back that positive feeling until Barack Obama came along and made it okay to like America again. That’s when I got the idea of doing this album.”
On that score, and given the album’s positive reflections on the US, I ask Kennedy if it would have been as easy to release it if George Bush was still in the White House, especially since Bush had made the USA the most vilified country on the planet? Probaby not, he says.
“The whole idea for the album came together during the Obama race to the White House and it all seemed to fit. Practically overnight, Obama single-handedly changed the way America is perceived around the world. That’s an extraordinary achievement, and the album reflects the sense of optimism that he’s helped to generate. Suddenly we got to thinking that maybe there is hope for the world, that we can think in positive terms again.”
Since Bap had previously recorded in Nashville, it seemed odd that he chose to assemble such an overtly-American album in Belfast. He doesn’t quite see it that way, though.
“It’s possible that it would have been a different album had I done it in Nashville. All I can tell you is that the process of writing and recording it became quite straightforward once I got the idea in my head. It’s also possible that it’s easier to do something like this at a remove from the source of your inspiration.”
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Bap Kennedy launches Howl On in the Black Box, Belfast on July 4.