The Brahe Wanderer

"There’s quite a lot there to digest”, says The Tycho Brahe’s Donal O’Mahony as he gives me the package on a wet November night. He’s not wrong. A 24-hour crash course in the Dublin trio involves not only last year’s This Is debut but also their current, expansive double album Love Life. Thank heavens for crappy traffic and long drives home.

When I meet up with vocalist Carol Keogh the next day (Donal is elsewhere, as is Diarmuid MacDiarmada) the first obvious point to make is that, given that they’ve only been together some 18 months, to produce three albums worth of material is pretty good going.
“There’s probably more than that knocking about as well,” she smiles. “We all have different methods of working, there’s pockets of activity going on in these different places which sort of triples what actually comes out. That’s the main reason… that and the fact that I think we’re addicted to writing songs.”
Recording at home also helps.
“There are very few restrictions apart from having to sleep,” she confirms. “There’s nobody watching the clock, saying we’re over time and losing money. But because there’s so much for people to digest on this album we realise that we’re going to have to plug it for a year, year and a half maybe. We’ll just have to sit on the new material we have for a while or find some other way to sneak things out. I love playing live and the fact that we now have ample material to choose from live, but I really start itching to start in the studio again.”
So Love Life could have been longer!
“Pretty much, we were writing songs up to a few weeks before finishing the recording. We’d agreed a release date so we knew that if we didn’t get it out by October at the latest we’d have to hold off until next year and we didn’t want to do that. We thought we were finished and then we went off to the Czech Republic and I came back and wrote another song so right up until we had it mastered we were adding bits. It’s just like making a jigsaw – it’s not until you get down to the final pieces that you can see the whole picture.”
To come up with such a weighty work on a second album suggests to me a great confidence within the band.
“It could be a great folly too,” she laughs, “I don’t know. We’re confident in each other’s abilities and that’s where the excitement comes from. I know if I hand something to the other two they’ll come back and surprise me and I’ll like it. We’ve all been around long enough to trust each other’s instincts as well as our own.”
Love Life isn’t a record that you’ll get straight away, it requires a bit of investment on the part of the listener before the full extent of its many joys are revealed. That, according to Carol, was part of the plan.
“You should be able to live with an album for a long time and still find new things when you go back to it,” she says. “I do think some of the songs are more immediate than others and they’ll be the ones that get replayed initially but I like the idea that people will have to spend time with it, which gives it more longevity and greater currency.”
Does she see Love Life as two separate albums?
“I don’t like to put too fine a point on it because you can’t separate love from life anyway, but the Love album is possibly more intimate and the Life part of things has maybe more spontaneity.”
At this point we should probably mention just what a fantastic record Love Life is. Ranging from gentle ambience to feedback-drenched guitar, from simplicity to complex drama, it pulls off the difficult trick of achieving a massive scope while maintaining an overall – and highly individual – identity.
“I do think it holds up,” Carol says. “I don’t think you can begin to explore themes as ridiculously huge and all encompassing as love and life without having a kind of schizophrenic thing going on. Bits of it are funny, some of it is lump in the throat stuff but it’s all done with a good heart. I suppose because we work for the most part intuitively our identity is going to come through, our individual personalities and whatever we form as a whole.
“Some people expected it to be more or less the same as the Plague Monkeys (Donal and Carol’s old band) and there are elements of course but I think we’ve diversified a lot since then in what we’re capable of doing. That’s as much from taking a break and coming back to it fresh, and also the fact that we have individually done different things that have developed and we have put into the music now. You bring it all back to the table. We don’t want to become bored with what we’re doing ourselves, want to keep ourselves challenged.”
Both the press releases for ‘This Is’ and Love Life make mention of a, not immediately obvious, influence. Fleetwood Mac. Carol looks a little sheepish.
“We are all fans… Donal is the biggest fan of all,” she says, shifting the blame. “We’re all going to see them the night before our Olympia gig so we’re going to be geed up on the Mac. They would be an influence on the sound rather than the songwriting.”
Still don’t see it myself, although there is a folk thing going on here somewhere.
“I was in college with Diarmuid and he introduced me to Steeleye Span, I think it was part of his parents’ record collection. I do like that pure vocal sound. When I’m singing I don’t think of it as folky but it has been said, maybe it’s just a quality in the voice. Plus I get compared to all the usual people…”
Does that rile her?
“It used to. It’s not so frequent now but for years I had the Liz Fraser thing like an albatross around my neck. She’s a wonderful singer, that’s not the problem, but I have my own identity. Then there’s Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell. They’re all brilliant. I’m OK with it, I just go yeah, yeah, whatever…”
The hope now is that Love Life will start to put these to rest.
“It will cancel out any of the immediate comparisons. I don’t think if anyone listens to this album from start to finish that they’re going to easily compare us to anyone else anyway.”
One of the key factors is the use of strings, not just as some shortcut to drama but as a genuine element in their overall character.
“On occasion we’ve deliberately shied away from using strings when it would have been obvious to do so. Kim Porcelli did amazing work on ‘Made In The Fire’, she transformed that song. She came in with this eight part cello arrangement in her head. I didn’t hear it until we were mastering the album but it knocked me out.”
Although Carol doesn’t consider Love Life to be a distinctively Dublin record, the place does have some degree of influence on her writing.
“I’ve lived here all my life so I’m very much defined by this city. There’s at least one song that refers to Dublin (‘Spike And The Wheel’). I write a lot on the hoof when I’m walking so I can actually pinpoint each song in terms of location, where it was conceived or where it was written. I don’t know how obvious that would be to anyone listening though.
“It’s something I think about a lot, the huge changes that the city’s gone through over the past few years. To be honest I don’t like most of it. It’s nice to be able to get a really good cup of coffee but otherwise… it’s become a bit hackneyed at this stage but it has lost a certain amount of character. I think people have become a lot gruffer because their lives and priorities have changed and sometimes that feels forced, not natural. We had problems before when we were in recession and people were on the dole but it was a different kind of thing, it wasn’t as aggressive. I could go on but I don’t want to put the city down because I love it. What’s happening in music is the most healthy thing about the city right now.”
Ah yes, the feted Dublin scene. While it is certainly the most vibrant it’s been for a while, how much of an effect is it actually having in the world of daytime radio and mainstream media?
“You have to chip away at it for a while,” says Carol. “It’s getting easier, there are more opportunities for exposure. It is possible to break through and break out and we are going to do our damnedest to do that and be realistic about it at the same time. I don’t think any of the bands around would be happy to be just selling a certain amount of records within a catchment area. I don’t see any reason why our music wouldn’t travel. It has to get through, it just has to… because it’s just good and if there’s enough of it and we keep doing it for long enough then somebody’s going to notice.

Love Life is out now on Konstantin Records. The Tycho Brahe play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin (Nov 21 – late show); The Warwick, Galway (27); Spirit Store, Dundalk (29) and Zoo Club, Kilkenny (Dec 13)