Glen Hansard has been a boon to many a busker’s career – for James Walmsley, he’s proving a bit of a nuisance.
“Myself and my friend Megan Riordan are putting a band together at the moment – it’s called Black Wing Bird, and we’ve been doing things for about a year-and-a-half. Now though, she’s been cast in a lead role in Once: The Musical, so
she’s out of commission for a few months!”
As the winner of DublinTown Unplugged – a competition run in conjunction with the MusicTown festival that took over the city in April – James carries the title of Dublin’s Best Acoustic Busker. The day of the contest, he stripped ‘Dirty Diana’ back to basics, injected ‘Because The Night’ with all the Springsteen-y angst the Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions had, and teamed with Megan for a couple of original tracks that left the judges in little doubt that he deserved the crown.
It’s not the only tag that James carries. He’s also an accomplished actor, writer and comedian, perhaps best known as the frontman of musical comedy collective Dead Cat Bounce. As he embarks on a new chapter of his career, it seems pertinent to ask, was comedy a vehicle for musical ambitions?
“It was something we fell into really,” he laughs. “I don’t think anyone would have planned that as a career! We started out doing sketch shows, introduced music to our set, and it started to take over. It was what people liked, and it was pretty marketable. We toured a lot for about five years.”
Indeed, the adventures with Dead Cat Bounce saw James travel to Montreal, Melbourne and most places in between. They went down a storm at Edinburgh and wowed TV audiences on Republic Of Telly. After a while, though, the laughs from the crowd weren’t quite echoed by the band themselves.
“We got a bit bored of what it was,” he admits. “There are limitations to doing musical comedy all the time. I think that’s why 90% of musical comedy acts end in suicide.” He pauses: “I mean, I’m not sure that’s an empirical fact...”
The sort to always have something else on the go, going off-road was an opportunity for James to indulge some of his other passions. With his DCB buddies, he scripted the rollicking feature film Discoverdale, which collected awards from all corners, and another film is currently in the works. He toured a solo show as well, but the time also afforded him an opportunity to take on a unique musical challenge.
“For various reasons, we’d found ourselves in some amazing recording studios over the years. But I was tired of doing the big, multi-track thing – or low-key bedroom recordings – and thought there must be a nicer way of recording. I had a friend who was a producer, and some songs that I had put together over the course of a few years. I had an idea of getting good musicians in a really nice room and seeing what we could do.”
James and co. decamped to an old Georgian house and recording a series of tracks on one microphone, in one day – you can hop online to check out the tunes. James says that, while it was something of an experiment, he was delighted with the results. So much so that the simple, stripped back approach is the backbone of Black Wing Bird.
“We’ve both done a lot as part of four-piece bands and the like,” he explains. “The idea now is to do something that’s just the two of us – Megan on piano and me on guitar. There’s no limitations, more an attitude of seeing what we can do. The stuff we’ve been writing has grown out of that and it’s been an interesting process.”
We’ll have a chance to catch what they’ve been up to at the Project Arts Centre on May 28. Unfortunately, with Megan’s theatre commitments, it’ll be the last opportunity for a little while. Still, between script-writing sessions, it’ll offer the opportunity to see Dublin’s Best Busker do his thing on the city’s streets.
“It’s a nurturing city, in terms of music. There’s an awful lot of very good stuff coming out of Dublin. Even in the past four or five years, I think you can see a step up in terms of what people are producing.”