Into The Arms Of America

s the standard hotel interview scenario as the record company person solicitously nursesmaids the pair of us. Alongside the debris of earlier dialogues the biscuit-tray, the drained coffee-cups, the empty Perrier and beer bottles is a copy of a Rolling Stone record review, hot off the fax-machine, a glowing notice that describes my companion as a decidedly artful musician who s gathered a reputation for his electrifying live shows and whose soaring major-label debut album is a dazzling entrance.
Later, standard practices continue as this decidedly artful musician ponders the trappings of his newly-discovered fortune with typically chirpy bemusements like his Burlington Hotel suite with its round double-bath, hardly on the Playboy Mansion scale, but far from where he was reared and the limousine the record company charters to convey him home whereas once, he took public transport.
And this is a guy who also needs two bases, one in New Jersey, the other in Dublin. But he isn t some tax-exile tourist, a passage migrant wintering out in Ireland. This is an Irish emigrant who s sustained by and has gained from his double-life. Barry Moore renamed himself Luka Bloom and finally found fate giving him a wink, a friendly nod and a free pass.
His story is both heart-warming and an example to anyone who s ever felt their career has been stuck in an Irish bog. Throughout the Eighties, the old-style Barry Moore was numbered among Dublin s also-rans, a charming man but one of life s support acts, a junior member of the Irish folk contingent who seemed trapped in a perpetual state of transition.
Caught between generations, codes and cliques, Moore knew the Irish singer-songwriter school had got stultified and needed to be rescued from its ingrained habits. But without acceptance and clout, within the new rock circles, he found few allies who sympathised with his vision.
So, in the last throes of desperation, he changed his name to Luka Bloom and high-tailed it to America. Lo and behold, the Dublin duckling was transformed into a New York swan, returning with a Warners contract and a skilled, light-fingered album, Riverside, that s genuinely innovative in its spare but sleekly atmospheric mix of acoustic guitar and responsive percussion.
So, Luka, cad a tharla?

It would take a prodigiously sainted man not to score some points about his previous neglect. It would also take an insensitive, tactless journalist not to realise this Luka Bloom story starts in the sump of his earlier Dublin disregard.
When I changed my name, he says, I had surrendered to the fact that I wasn t going to create anything in Ireland that would let me perform and record in an international arena. So I just decided to get out. And initially, it was very painful because I am, and always was and will be, very rooted here for family reasons and just reasons of loving living in Dublin. But I just felt in this unbelievable rut.
Psychologically, he felt stymied by the incestuous nature of the Irish scene. His face had become too familiar. In America it was different. I didn t have the psychological baggage of the Hot Presses and In Dublins and other people around who I would allow myself to get fucked up about, he observes. You know how so many people in Dublin are so self-conscious because you write songs and you walk down the streets and you see those people who would be reviewing those songs when you perform them. So there s this constant sense of being closed in. A sort of Valley Of The Squinting Windows thing. And in America, I was completely liberated from that.
Actually his name-change, first suggested by Billy Bragg s manager, Peter Jenner, happened in Ireland. Equally he actually left Ireland twice, the first time temporarily just after he recorded his 88 debut album, Luka Bloom, for Mystery Records, a trip taken deliberately, he stresses, because he could only get used to being the stranger, Luka Bloom in a strange land.
But that album was a victim of the political and contractual shenanigans between Mystery and their Irish distributors, WEA that flared after the multinational s former managing director, Clive Hudson s departure. It wasn t so much released as limped out to the shops and hardly helped his cause.
Besides he now says, that album sounded out of date three months after I recorded it though I don t mean to denigrate the people involved in it. It s more a reflection of me it s just that my whole mentality changed very dramatically within three months of going to America.
Possibly decisions were still in the balance when he first returned home to Ireland but the Mystery/WEA feud forced his hand. At the time, Luka recalls, it was very traumatic but it also proved to be very productive because it precipitated a sort of a rock-bottom of despair which made me sever all my relationships with everybody in Ireland in a professional capacity and, like the other emigrants, jut get out of here.
In America, Luka now believes he was in the right place at the right time for the first time in my life. Tracy Chapman and Michelle Shocked had launched the new acoustic aesthetic but there were few males to match them. Certainly none with Luka s combination of freshness and his hard-won performing experience and expertise. This time, the drudgery of hiking himself and his guitar around Ireland actually worked to his advantage. He agrees: I couldn t have done what I m doing now when I was 24 I would have blown it. And assessing his American competition, he continues, calmly and without any over-inflated sense of himself:
To be honest, most of the solo artists I encountered in America, were still doing Simon And Garfunkel stuff. You re absolutely right. The standard of solo performance I ve encountered in America hasn t been all that great. But I also have to say to you that the reason this particular situation happened for me was because I never worked as a solo artist. I think of my instrument as a band, as an instrument of noise. I don t treat it like a six-string Gibson traditional thing. I think of it as a means to make noise. My whole outlook is to try to create the dynamic of a band. And that s what makes it different. I don t think it was just because I was working in a more difficult arena in Dublin.
Luka will own up that he suspected it was a propitious time to try his luck in America. Otherwise he had no masterplan beyond a determination to avoid demos and instead promote himself through live performance. The Mystery album didn t enter his scheme.
He found a management team in Glenn Morrow and Tom Prendergast, the latter a transplanted Limerickman, and won support slots with The Pogues, Hothouse Flowers and The Violent Femmes. Finally, without any reference to Dublin, Warner s New York office bit.
The years of neglect in Ireland initially made him suspicious, Luka now concedes: I went in to my first meeting with Warners totally suspicious, aggressive and uptight and they listened to me for twenty minutes and then they said, we don t know what you re talking bout, we ve come to your shows six or seven times, we love your gigs, your songs, your approach, we want to sign you, what s your problem?
So I kind of went Oh! And since that time, everyone who s worked with me on this record has worked with a view of understanding and then fulfilling my dream and we did it.

Going to America changed Luka Bloom s fortunes; it also affected his music. Riverside may be bare but it isn t spartan or impoverished. Like Mary Coughlan s forthcoming album which was recorded in London, Luka Bloom s music has been refreshed by the change of partners and venue. Too often, Irish singer-songwriter albums can fall victim to a false democracy where everyone pitches in with their stock licks. But Luka s New York players knew the value of underplaying, understood that sometimes a song needs only a kiss on the cheek.
His own philosophy was also transformed. Nobody would have connected the old Barry Moore with rap yet in the new guise of Luka Bloom, he actually performs an LL Cool J song, I m In Love . Says Luka, I deliberately set out to learn a song that would be known to people but that in being known to people and knowing where it came from, it would automatically take me out of that folk bag so people would know this guy s not trying to be the next James Taylor.
Living in Hoboken, New Jersey, only a mute hermit could avoid rap: I didn t do that stuff in Ireland because I wasn t exposed to it. But being in Hoboken, just outside of Manhattan, that s the music I heard on the street all day with the kids coming down the street in their cars with the roofs off and these huge powerful systems in them. So it s LL Cool J, Tone Loc and Neneh Cherry all day.
But I m In Love isn t included on Riverside. Luka thought it might deflect attention from the remainder of his work: I wanted to make an album about just me and my songs.
Riverside is a genuinely Transatlantic album, sometimes tempered and transfixed by an emigrant s wonder at America. An Irishman In Chinatown , a waggish crowd-pleaser live, doesn t have the weight to survive continual listening on record but both Hudson Lady and Dreams In America are more substantial exactly because they re less literal. Of the latter, Luka explains:
I wrote it as a result of encountering for the first time, the vastness and sheer physical beauty of America because when I travelled with the Hothouse Flowers we had one long drive through the Rockies. I was just completely overwhelmed and I suddenly realised that when people talked about the greatness of America, it wasn t just a right-wing political thing.
In the song, I wanted to create a panoramic feel but I wanted to do it acoustically and that was the exciting challenge And I also wanted to write about the fact that as an Irish person, you always find yourself thinking about the emigrants and the pioneers. Apart from the fact that they wiped out a civilisation of wonderful people, there s this other aspect of them which is very beautiful this great spirit that took them across the continent. And I wanted to capture that sense of rootlessness and loveliness and sadness that you always find in America Because you also find that if people had an Irish or a Russian background, they re very nostalgic about it.
Luka Bloom is equally expansive explaining other songs on Riverside. Like The Man Is Alive , whose first verse recalls his father s death when he was only 18 months.
It was the newest song on the album and it was also the most important because it covered the most important subject-matter in my life. It came about because of a very strange meeting I had with a woman in Vancouver who d had the identical experience. And we also had the same birthday as it turned out And she was also a songwriter and the youngest in her family.
There were so many similarities but what was different was that she had an entirely different attitude to her father and his death I actually learned something from her that opened up a relationship with my father that I d never had because I realised that my father didn t go and leave me behind. Everything he left behind, he passed on to different people who passed it on to me.
Potentially more controversial is The One with its stinging refrain why should you be the one to go out on the edge/Do you really want to be another dead hero? Luka concedes the song was inspired by Shane MacGowan but he insists he had other targets in mind. Like the voyeurs and parasites on another man s wound of fame.
I said to somebody earlier on that there s an aspect of the rock n roll life that s very reminiscent of boxing. Like there are people who derive a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching other people go under.
He also defends himself against accusations that the song merely restates the obvious: I know that and from a critical perspective, that annoys and bores people And it sounds throwaway. But sometimes the obvious is not so obvious. And sometimes the obvious is needed. I didn t want to write an intelligent, deep, thoughtful dissertation. I wanted to articulate a genuine sense of anger.

Luka Bloom s American sojourn has made him caustic about aspects of the business. Tracy Chapman, or more accurately her entourage, get the back of his hand: To be honest, I actually think that was something that was very seriously manipulated, that actually became a very cynical exercise. Like the fact that she was a young black kid from Boston was really exploited on her behalf in a way that may have been detrimental to her. I found myself not trusting or believing it after a while.
But maturity and his new horizons also brings the gifts of insight. Like the time he first encountered his Iranian percussionist, Ali Fatemi.
You don t have to pursue anything in New York. Just simply living there means you re bombarded by the rest of the world. If you don t have time to see the world, just go to New York So I found myself being invited to see this Iranian combo in Columbia University and it was just two guys. And it was in this reverent, church-like environment though the music was light-hearted just like a folk club and only afterwards did I realise it was total improvisation, a sitarist and this percussionist with finger drums. And sometimes when I closed my eyes, it just sounded so Irish or so potentially Irish.
I think, like everything else, my ears have opened up a lot, he says. I used to have a very arrogant attitude to music which, like all arrogance, is born out of ignorance. I felt I didn t really need to listen, but one of the things I discovered in New York was the joy of listening and the joy of learning. All the possibilities that you can do anything with a song.
Looks like Luka Bloom has found his world, his oyster and his pearls.