The 9th life of Damien Rice

All together now: Number 9…Number 9…Number 9. All things to all people, that number. White Album fans will recognise it as the weirdo Ono-nian track on The Beatles sprawling double set. Dante elected it the lowermost rung in his cross-section of the Inferno, to which he consigned perpetrators of compound fraud and the treacherous to kinsmen, country, guests, hosts and masters. Nick Tosches wrote floridly and at length of the illimitable nine skies and mystical power of tripled threes in his novel In The Hand Of Dante. Bible scholars, Kabbalists, numerologists, mathematicians and mystics have long eulogised the divine number’s aesthetic and mathematical perfection.
For Damien Rice, it represented the most obvious choice of title for his second record proper, the long awaited follow up to his two-million plus selling O, the Shortlist-winning debut that came in at an impressive No. 2 People’s Choice in last year’s hotpress all-time Irish album poll.
“At the point where you’re finishing an album there’s a title that’s the strongest, that’s sitting there and feels like it’s right,” Rice says, by way of an official communiqué. “Other options were A Hen Will Sit On An Unfertilized Egg, and You Love Her, You Even Love The **** You Hate About Her. So we went with 9.”
The sound you hear is a sigh of relief from label MDs, marketing departments and publicists – to be swiftly sucked back up when they learn that their charge has decided to forego all interviews, touring and promotional duties in order to maintain creative impetus right into the recording of a third album. But then, Rice has never played the supper seal. At the height of O’s success, he was telling the press, “I’m not promoting my record, I’m protecting it.” Nor has he fought shy of rows with his management, label and even his own band.
“We weren’t really a band when we recorded O,” Rice reflects, “whereas on this record everybody was pretty much involved from the beginning. From the touring that we’ve done together, everyone has a more intuitive feel as to what we like and what suits the songs. I’ve really got some momentum at the moment. I’ve moved straight on to the next record and I’m anxious to press on with that, so I’m putting aside any notions of tours or interviews for the time being.”
Once again, he’s the man who wasn’t there.
“He didn’t actually talk to anyone in the UK on the first record particularly,” laughs Christian Tattersfield of Warner Music, Rice’s parent company in Britain. “I think people have got the headline point of how he doesn’t want to do interviews, but actually in the UK he didn’t really do anything after the beginning anyway. He did a few TV performances. Also, he never played another gig really after Brixton Academy, which was at about 80,000 records. Whether he plays live (on this record), I suppose we’ll wait and see. What people say and what they do aren’t always the same thing. I hear he is going to tour, I hear he wants to go and play in Brazil, but tomorrow he may not want to.”
This writer should have first met Damien Rice – or Dodi Ma as he was known then – back in 1997, when I interviewed his former band Juniper. I was scheduled to meet the members for a HP piece, but on turning up at Bloom’s Hotel, was greeted by the rhythm section. I later learned that Rice’s band mates were somewhat uneasy about their singer’s more, shall we say, ecological tendencies, dominating the conversation. I remember thinking that such disunity didn’t exactly bode well for the combo’s long term prospects.
So it proved. Feeling constrained by Juniper’s conventional big rock sound, preferring to write broodier tunes like ‘Eskimo’ in his spare time, Rice realised the jig was up the very night he fulfilled the longtime of ambition playing Dublin’s Olympia in 1999. The show had gone well, band and management were chuffed, but Rice felt like he’d sleepwalked through the gig, and soon after tendered his resignation. His former bandmates went onto form the hugely successful (in Ireland at least) Bell X1.

Rice, by his own admission, had always been a stubborn and willful character. Born on December 7, 1970, his parents were inner-city Dubliners, who decided to move their son and his two sisters to Kildare in order to give them a better quality of childhood. Damien met his future Juniper comrades at school in Celbridge. All five classmates went on to Trinity College to study engineering. Bored, Rice quit after a year and worked for nine months as a secretary in a local boys’ school, and studied piano and clarinet part-time, before doing a stint as a barman. When the other members had graduated, Juniper scored a record deal with Polygram/Universal and were touted as the next big thing for a while on the back of a couple of impressively produced but rather insubstantial stadium rock singles ‘The World Is Dead’ and ‘Weatherman’, recorded in Windmill Lane and Abbey Road.
After quitting the band, Rice took off to busk around Europe, ending up in Tuscany, gazing at the vineyards and olive groves and generally trying to figure out the meaning of life. He briefly considered jacking in music to become a farmer, before concluding that whatever ailed him wasn’t going to be cured by a mere job change and relocation.
He returned to Dublin, made a demo and sent it to his second cousin, A-list composer and producer David Arnold (John Barry’s successor as scorer of the James Bond films and Bjork’s collaborator on ‘Play Dead’), who invited him to record in London’s AIR studios. Rice took Arnold up on the offer, but wasn’t satisfied with the results, so he repaired to his own flat in Dublin to put together a cottage industry set-up, recruiting compatible musicians (including waifish vocalist Lisa Hannigan and former Black Velvet Band bassist Shay Fitzgerald), playing the odd gig in places like Whelan’s or The Stables in Mullingar, and recording songs on an eight-track home studio.
The result of these sessions, the self-financed O, was launched on his own DRM imprint at a Vicar St release party on January 31st, 2002. Vicar St booker Bren Berry remembers the night well.
“I can remember the packaging all arriving that night and everybody frantically trying to put it all together at the last minute,” he laughs. “Very expensive, but Damien has very strong ideas about everything he does. When he went to a major record company he demanded that it continue that way, even though they had ideas otherwise initially, I think. He doesn’t settle for low standards in any area. I remember when he took The Frames on tour with him to America, and on the first night, to challenge himself, he said, ‘I’m going out solo’. He really puts it up to himself.”
O was a remarkable record, as much in the Brel or Simone mode as the post-Frames Irish singer-songwriter school, but beneath the skin of songs like ‘Cannonball’ and the aptly titled ‘Volcano’ festered a slow, seething anger. The arrangements were by turns bare and baroque, the melodies sweet, almost schmaltzy at times, the words bitter. Couplets such as “Why do you say hallelujah / If it means nothing to ya?” were typical, Rice’s volatile vocals alternately complemented and contradicted by the shadow presence of Hannigan. It was a very ambivalent record about love, encapsulated by the “Can’t take my eyes off of you” refrain of ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ being concluded by the whispered kicker, “until I find somebody new.”
Indeed, Rice had recorded that tune several times, but was never satisfied, and decided what he really needed was to sing the lyric directly to its subject, the ‘blower’s daughter’ of the title. Only problem was she wasn’t talking to him at the time.
“She happened to call over one night,” Rice told The Times in May 04. “We had some food and just before she left I invited her to the room where I had the mike set. I said: ‘I just want to sing you a song’. I just sat in front of the mikes and pressed record and played her the song.”
O was an auspicious debut by anybody’s barometer, but the climate was right. The Frames’ defiantly DIY ethos had created an audience and a network of venues in which the Whelan’s mafia could prosper. Former pariahs and Grafton St dropouts had now assumed some power and clout in the industry. Emblematic of this: the late Mic Christopher’s ‘Heyday’ being used in a strikingly sympathetic Guinness ad, assuring it national anthemic status.
“I definitely feel part of something, and I didn’t a few years ago,” Rice told Hot Press's Fiona Reid in December 02. “There’s this huge warm, encouraging group thing going on. Over the last two years, there’s just been this whoosh in the number of people doing amazingly well.”
Yet Rice, the quietest of quietists, a whisperer as well as a screamer, soon outstripped his mentors. With virtually no promotional budget or marketing campaign, O entered the Irish Top Ten on its release and went platinum before the end of the year. Its author capitalized on the momentum by touring incessantly at home as well as in the UK, playing the V2002 and Finsbury Park festivals, supporting Counting Crows in Scotland, headlining his own London and New York shows and – crucially – taping a KCRW session in San Diego and Later With Jools Holland slot that winter, before returning home for a number of homecoming December shows, culminating in three nights at the Olympia. Even more impressively, X Files star and nerdboy pin-up Gillian Anderson was namechecking Rice’s on her website.

By the start of 2003, a year after O’s Irish release, the singer had secured a number of heavyweight international management and licensing deals, which went some way toward relieving the stress of heading up his own mini-corporation. English and American A&R scouts hadn’t given up the search for a songwriter to ‘do another David Gray’, and Rice had the stuff. He hooked up with Bernadette Barrett and Rob Holden, the team behind Gray’s success, to handle business in the UK. Deals followed with EastWest in Britain (where O went on to sell over 300,000 copies) and Vector in the US. Until then, traditional trade routes and routines dictated that Irish acts pick a market – either the UK or America – and get stuck in. Rice managed to pull off a simultaneous two-pronged attack.
“I was given a CD-R of O by Bernadette or Rob Holden many moons before it came out in Ireland or anything,” remembers Christian Tattersfield. “The clincher was seeing him live, he was spectacularly good. It’s a great record and will be seen as a classic, but it didn’t make sense 100% until you saw him live. There definitely wasn’t any pivotal moment; there were lots of small moments like doing Glastonbury, or doing ‘Cold Water’ on Jonathan Ross or Closer coming out, or ‘Cannonball’ getting on the radio, but it definitely didn’t have a big moment, it just sold, slowly but surely, over a long time.”
Marty Diamond of the Little Big Man agency, Rice’s American booking agent since his earliest Stateside tours (and who also masterminded campaigns for David Gray, Franz and Snow Patrol among many others) never had any doubts that the singer had the potential to crack the US.
“My first live encounter with Damien was at a UK festival when he was playing in a tent,” he recalls, “there were a handful of people, it was very early days, and he was staggering. I knew at that moment that I needed to work with him. He just decimated me, it didn’t matter whether there were ten people or 10,000 people; it felt like he was singing to me.
“America requires hard work, and Damien has made a tremendous commitment in terms of time and energy to cracking this market. The way things react in the south is different to the west and the north-east, it’s like a whole bunch of different territories, so unless you’re willing to dedicate the time, it’s hard to crack it as an entity. You can’t play 12 or 14 dates and then just repeat them. And his shows are amazing. Transcendent. He tears at your heart strings, the emotional tension in his singing and writing.
“That’s the thing that careers are seeded in; it isn’t about being an inside joke or having your tongue wedged firmly in your cheek – careers are built on relationships, and Damien’s is built on the one he has with his manager and record label and agent, but more so it’s the relationship he has with his fans. It’s the same experience that I had standing in that tent. He feels that he is singing to each person individually, not as a collective, and people take ownership of his words and his spirit. Van Morrison’s done that well, Bono’s done that well, Chris Martin, there’s a laundry list of people, but if you look at them, they’re all true artists.”
In spring of 03, Rice played a number of selected Irish, UK and European shows before embarking on a full scale marathon American campaign in May, helped in no small part by KCRW music director Nic Harcourt, who had been playing Rice’s songs on his hugely influential Morning Becomes EclecticK show well before the disc’s U.S. release, with nationwide stations following suit. Rolling Stone and Billboard ran glowing features, and Rice was invited to appear on Conan O’Brien and David Letterman. It didn’t hurt his profile when Colin Farrell and Britney Spears had been spotted snogging in the audience at his Troubadour show a couple of months before either. And despite the singer’s reluctance to shoot promo videos or engage in press gladhandling, it was no longer an event to see Rice and Hannigan cropping up in tasteful black and white, singing ‘Cannonball’ on VH1.
That summer’s European festival run took on the air of a victory lap. His acoustic set at Witnness was more love-in than live show, notwithstanding a tailored-to-fit cover of ‘Creep’. And the ultimate accolade: Ulrika Jonsson got married to the strains of ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ that August. Indeed, the singer’s celeb fanbase was rapidly expanding to include Elton John, Wayne Rooney and Dido, who also professed herself astounded by Lisa Hannigan’s vocals.
Rice and band returned to the US for an autumn tour, jetted back to Europe for a winter jaunt, then re-crossed the Atlantic for second US leg in November and December, playing venues as prestigious as the Filmore in San Francisco. His American stock was boosted considerably in October 2003, when O won the Shortlist (the North American equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize), beating out The Streets, Interpol, Sigur Ros, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs among others, to take the statuette from a panel that included Chris Martin, Dave Matthews, Erykah Badu, Tori Amos, Flea, The Neptunes, Cameron Crowe, and Spike Jonze.
“I don’t know that the Shortlist win had a lot of actual effect on his career, but it was a validation from a core group of people,” says Marty Diamond. “I represent other people who have won the Shortlist, like Sigur Ros, and to the masses, that Shortlist thing doesn’t mean anything, but certainly among key radio programmers and journalists and other artists, it’s absolutely a validation.”
2004 began with a ‘serious artist’ buzz-cut and a number of Vicar St shows, before becoming a virtual replay of the previous year’s punishing touring schedule, with exhaustive trawls across the UK, Europe and America. Rice also signed on for the When Bush Comes To Shove concerts in The Point that June, and in the run-up to the shows, recorded a limited edition single with Christy Moore entitled ‘Lonely Soldiers’, proceeds going to the Irish Anti-War Movement.
“This was a spontaneous last minute decision,” he explained. “I contacted Christy, sang him the song over the phone, we recorded it the next day, mixed it the next, and sent it off for manufacturing the next.”
The single was followed by a collected B-Sides album in August, a stopgap for fans baying for new material. Then, in November 2004, Mike Nichol’s film Closer was released, and it all went a bit barmy. The inclusion of ‘The Blower’s Daughter’ in the critically acclaimed and commercially successful menage a quatre drama, starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen, plus a heavily-rotated promo video, gave the song and its parent album a second life; O entered the UK Top Ten more than two years after its original release.
It wasn’t your typical movie-record company synergy either. Nichols had envisioned the tune as integral to his film even before he signed the all-star cast. Nevertheless, Rice subsequently regretted the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack, just as he’d protested the UK record company’s 2004 remix of ‘Cannonball’.
“I wish we hadn’t jumped on the back of that particular bandwagon,” he told The Independent. “The album had done enough, it had already been TV-advertised, and I didn’t want it to be again. I wanted it to be stopped altogether. But, you know, I didn’t want to fight over it.”
It was a rare capitulation.
“You have to bear in mind, ultimately he okayed both of those things,” Christian Tattersfield points out. “He’d already remixed ‘Cannonball’. And I think because they became quite big things, they were possibly things that he was uncomfortable with, but it all blew over. Damien hasn’t really suffered from being uncompromising, because ultimately a lot of the compromises that artists make are just short-term moves that don't really help their career.”
“He’s definitely focused, we’ll use that terminology,” says Marty Diamond. “But you know what? I don’t find Damien stubborn. He asks a certain thing of the team, and that’s what you go out and do. Somebody who gives you direction and tells you what they want isn’t stubborn, he’s incredibly focused and determined. Those are all good things. I’d rather someone who has an opinion than someone who says, ‘Ah, I dunno; what do you think?’ I think in the years that I’ve worked with him we’ve only had one difficult moment and it just happened to be… every room is different and he got into a room and the way it was set up was something he disagreed with, and as a team we corrected it.”
In the aftermath of the film tie-in, Rice underwent something of a period of self-imposed exile. He moved out of his parents’ house, bought a car and took out a mortgage on his own place. Not that he was out of the spotlight for long. There was a cameo on Tori Amos’s 2005 album The Beekeeper, duetting on the wonderfully titled ‘The Power Of Orange Knickers’.
There was also the small matter of a friendship – some said romance – with actress Renée Zellweger made him tabloid fodder for about five minutes when she visited him in Ireland.
“Renee is hilarious – she’s super smart,” Damien told Hot Press’s Adrienne Murphy. “We hung out together and got to know each other a bit. She came over to Ireland and we hung out here for about a week, went to Galway and drank some pints of Guinness. I went over to her place in the States and hung out there for a couple of weeks, then came home, met up with Lisa Hannigan and we started writing ‘Unplayed Piano’.”
The ‘Unplayed Piano’ single, released in June 05, was co-written with Lisa Hannigan after Rice was approached by the US Campaign for Burma and asked to donate a song to the Free Aung San Suu Kyi 60th Birthday Campaign, a global initiative to free the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize recipient and leader of the National League for Democracy Party. Aung San Suu Kyi had received 82 per cent of the vote in the country’s elections, but was denied power by the ruling dictatorship and placed under house arrest.
Rice submitted to a couple of interviews to promote the single, but for the next year continued to keep a low profile until the summer of this year, when he embarked on a double-header tour with Fiona Apple, further delaying the completion of the follow up to O. Then, last September, the singer curated his own stage at the Electric Picnic, and word trickled through that the second album, 9, written and recorded on and off over a four year period, had been completed in an intense period of midnight oil-burning over the previous six months, and was now being readied for release. Rice’s profile received another boost last month when he performed two songs at a celeb-heavy New York concert promoting the ONE campaign to make poverty history and Ali Hewson’s ethical clothing company Edun. “What you’re about to hear and see is like being at a Bob Dylan gig in the early 60s or a Cat Stevens gig in the early 70s or James Taylor, or something extraordinary,” said Bono in his introduction. “Damien Rice is able to still and distil the storms into a quiet reflection.”
First impressions of 9 confirm that the recordings reflect that quiet intensity. While hardly a radical sonic departure from its predecessor, it does contain moments of startling rawness, while retaining the debut’s essential broodiness and beauty.
“I started with the notion that this album was going to be a ‘heavier’ record than the last,” says Rice. “We went to record a load of the heavier tracks, but then we put down something like ‘Grey Room’, listened back and went, ‘Ooh, we like that’. And then we put ‘9 Crimes’ down and we really liked that. When I played tracks back in the studio I was just drawn to certain songs.
“With 9 we didn’t actually do that much recording, but it was spread out over a period of time. Much of it came about by accident. I just follow my nose and end up somewhere where I really want to be. I think I needed to get this collection of songs out of my system and I am quietly aware that they’re fairly similar to what we’ve done before, but then, so what? I really like them.”
Certainly, if you’ve got any scabs on your heart, 9 is just the record to prise them off. The songs veer from the self-coruscating chamber folk of ‘The Animals Were Gone’ to the slow and heavy dynamics of ‘Elephant’ to the petulant rage of ‘Rootless Tree’. The overall impression is of a statement withheld until it couldn’t possibly be withheld any longer.
“The key event that got the record finished was probably the band getting frustrated with waiting around for me,” Rice admits. “It’s one thing somebody on the outside saying, ‘Oh, when’s he ever gonna put out another record?’ But it’s another thing when the band members sort of walk away from you with a sense that they don’t believe that you’re ever going to do it. I think it was in that moment that I kind of had that classic feeling of when someone tells you that you can’t do something, I usually take that as a challenge and I like to prove to the person that I can. That was probably one of the biggest things that actually got this record going. I’d say that was the key in a way, because it was after that that I really knuckled down. It sounds really immature, but then writing songs is immature.
“In writing songs you’re expressing your emotions,” Rice concludes, “but very often they’re immature emotions although you may write them in a very eloquent way. I think somebody who is very balanced and is sorted out in life don’t see any issues with the rest of the world. Whereas when you don’t have yourself sorted out, and when you’ve got issues and you’re turbulent inside and struggling to find a balance, then you see all those ‘issues’ on the outside and they bug you. You write about them because they’re frustrating you, and it pours out. But in a sense I feel that although it may be a beautiful means of expression, writing songs is, innately I think, immature. But it’s exciting, so fuck it. Who says that being mature and wise is perfect anyway?”

9 will be released on 14th Floor Records on November 3rd.