The vast majority of Irish people probably don’t have all that very much to thank the Catholic Church for, but acclaimed singer-songwriter Declan O’Rourke is a notable exception. When the Dubliner was just 13 years old, and living with his family in Kyabram, Australia, a local priest recognised his obvious musical potential and gave him a gift of a guitar.

“I always wanted to be involved in music when I was a kid,” the wonderfully corkscrew-haired musician recalls. “I was always kind of singing and stuff like that. And it happened to be a priest who gave me a guitar. It was a very nice gesture. I mean, I’d had a few guitars over the years – Santa brought me a couple of things, but all I did was bash them or break strings – but the priest actually showed me two chords as well. And that was the beginning of
the journey.”
O’Rourke’s musical journey is still ongoing. Fifteen years after that divine priestly intervention, he released his aptly titled and well-received debut album, Since Kyabram, in 2004. Today, we’re sitting in a snug in Neachtain’s Bar in Galway on a quiet Tuesday lunchtime (when not in Dublin, he spends much of his time in nearby Kinvara), and the musician is sipping tea and all set to promote his third album, Mag Pai Zai, released on his own independent label following an unhappy experience with a major.
Thing is, though, he’s not really the self-promotional type. Quiet, modest, laconic and self-deprecating, he’s definitely not on a hard sell. “There’s a few things there, alright,” he shrugs, when asked about the album’s themes. “Bit of love and storytelling and stuff. It’s a bit of a healing record in many ways.”
Healing from what?
“I dunno,” he laughs. “Probably just early thirties change of life – and lifestyle. I’m going ‘how the fuck did I get here? 35!’”
A former flatmate of Paddy Casey’s, he reckons he’s been making a full-time living from music since about 2003. “I had real jobs for years. Worked on sites and stuff. Worked with my dad. I struggled for years. But I always had this stubborn refusal to give in.”
His debut album was a hit both at home and in Oz: “Yeah. Some people like me there in Australia. But I don’t think I’d live there again now. I’d like to spend a month or two there a year. Probably in the winter!”
Following his debut’s success, O’Rourke was signed to the ill-fated V2 Records. He wasn’t especially unhappy to be dropped when his sophomore album, 2007’s Big Bad Beautiful World, performed less well than expected. Indeed, he asked for it: “It was a relief. They were nice people, but it didn’t really happen and we did a few things wrong. It didn’t really get a chance, I felt. I’d signed a five album deal with them so that one didn’t work. And when they were starting to go under, we kind of asked them would they let us go. I got on great with the MD there, and he said ‘yeah’. And they almost gave me back the record – almost. So close. Now the master is probably buried in a warehouse somewhere.”
There were some great moments in the meantime, though O’Rourke didn’t necessarily recognise them at the time. When Paul Weller rated his song ‘Galileo’ as one of the best songs of the new millennium, he didn’t even twig the former Jam frontman’s lineage. “I think that took a while to trickle through,” he says. “I didn’t really know who he was. That happened because of V2 and I didn’t take it too seriously, but when I eventually played a show with him, I was amazed that I knew almost every track.”
While the V2 implosion obviously didn’t help matters, the four-year break between albums can largely be attributed to a lengthy bout of writer’s block. The new album was a long time coming.
“I think I went for maybe a year-and-a-half without finishing a song,” he admits. “I was trying, but nothing was working. It was a funny time in my life. There was a bit of a fall-out with all the people I was working with, so I started with a clean slate. Just me and my brother, Edward. He’s my manager – he’s been nicknamed ‘the baby-faced assassin’ by a couple of people. He’s really good and obviously has a
purer interest.”
While O’Rourke also has two musical sisters, as things turned out, his younger brother contributed significantly to the new album. “Edward actually co-wrote a couple of the songs on this album. He wrote and played the piano. It was a new thing for us, an experiment, but I was delighted with it.”
While it lasted, writer’s block was a major problem. “Persistence brought me out of it in the end,” he says. “It was a very scary kind of experience. For ten years or something, the songs were always coming. I was always chipping away and there were always loads of half-written songs that I could finish if I wanted. So I didn’t know what was wrong. I couldn’t get a grasp of it.
“Actually for a while I was thinking, ‘maybe you’re supposed to have a little break after so long, maybe it’s normal and I should just roll with it’. That was fine for a while. But after seven or eight months it was getting scary.”
Booze wasn’t the obstacle. “I gave up drinking about halfway through the writer’s block – about two-and-half years ago. I wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker but a big part of it was around the time I hit 30; I started to get these desperate hangovers. Even from just a couple of drinks. It was kind of depressing and I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. In my twenties I could drink for Ireland, and never feel a thing.”
Drugs definitely weren’t the problem, either. “I don’t take any drugs,” he confesses. “I had a bad experience with acid when I was about 19 or 20 and living in Australia. I’d been having great fun with drugs before that, smoking bongs every day and all that. But I was really into The Doors and I really wanted to try acid. I’d taken it a couple of times before and it hadn’t done much for me. But I was drunk when I took it this time and I had a really bad trip. It was a big thing in my life at the time. For the next year or two, I kept getting these panic attacks. I didn’t even know what they were at the time. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I couldn’t talk to
my folks on the phone about it because they’d be worried sick.
“Anyway, long story short, I eventually just came out of it. I actually felt stronger for it. I felt if I could beat that on my own, I could beat anything. But I could never smoke or take acid again. I did smoke some stuff a few years later, thinking it was all behind me, and it was another terrible experience. So – not for me.”
The new album was recorded last year between Dublin and New York. “I had a lot more fun making this record than any other. Which is really saying something because I’d had great fuckin’ fun making the first.”
The rather strange title, Mag Pai Zai, comes from a line in one of the songs (“He saw the whole wide world through a magpie’s eye”). “It was just a bit of fun,” he grins. “I had it as a working title when I started recording and it stuck the whole way. I tried to shake it a couple of times, but didn’t come up with anything better. It has a nice ring to it, I thought, and it also sounds a little oriental. The title of the first record was a little like that as well. I don’t think it does any harm to have something a little
bit obscure.”
After years of highs and lows, O’Rourke reckons that the recession could well be a good thing for wistful singer-songwriters of his ilk. “I think there’s a bit of a return to folk and stuff. It seems to be what people want to hear at the moment,” he reflects. “Recessions can be great for music. It makes people a bit more honest and reflective. They start to express themselves a bit more or go back to the arts. With the boom, not just in Ireland but everywhere, it’s like people wanted to escape into all that dance music. When they’re earning money, they don’t want to think too much. Now that we’re back to basics, though, they want to hear the real stuff again.”

Mag Pai Zai is out now on Rimecoat Records. He tours the country in late May. See hotpress.com for details.