This Bird Has Flown

I nab Wallis Bird stage left in the curtained and cosy Live Room at The Music Show, moments after she wraps up a typically enthralling performance of her intricate yet raw folk. Still slightly breathless, the diminutive singer is nevertheless expecting me, all smiles. She’s also thankfully ready to talk, and by the end of our lengthy conversation, is apologising for talking quite so much, putting it down to “too much smoke.” The only problem? It would appear the one thing that the endlessly active Music Show doesn’t have is very many quiet areas. Go figure. So we wander through the cavernous venue, our progress slowed by young, beaming fans stopping Wallis every few feet. She has time for them all.

We finally end up in an empty space, plonked on the hard floor behind some boxes which shield us from the noise. Back in Ireland to start the campaign for her third album, the Meath-born, Wexford-bred star is currently based in London, though it’s in her nature to flit from place to place. In a Hot Press article some four years ago, she seemed particularly fond of her Brixton abode, which she described as “the best house in the universe.” Does she remain there to this day?
“Well, I got dumped…” she starts as my heart sinks. “So I had to move out of that house shortly afterwards! It was amazing when I had that article in Hot Press and then I had to leave the place less than two weeks later. It was really nice to have that piece though and I still go back regularly because my mates still live there. I’m in East London now, the Bethnal Green area.”
The life of a touring musician means you seldom stand still out of sheer necessity, but Wallis Bird has always had that wanderlust.
“I get really, really tired by habitual surroundings,” she nods. “When I’m home for too long I get very, very itchy. I get antsy. So I tend to move around quite a bit. Ever since I left school I was just eager to go… anywhere. It’s getting out and meeting different people and cultures, that’s where I think all my inspiration comes from.”
Never more so than on Wallis Bird – self-titled because she feels it is her “definitive statement” thus far – which moves her creative focus from a romantically personal field to more politicised terrain and draws heavily on a sense of place. It’s a work of contrasts, reflecting her movements while writing it. She began in the expansive, wild Irish west, and moved back to a claustrophobic London in the midst of last summer’s riots.
“I wanted to be in complete isolation. Absolutely nobody contact me. They couldn’t anyway. Remember that Christmas when the roads were closed? I was stuck out in fucking Connemara for ten days. No phone, no internet…”
Did she find it perversely enjoyable?
“‘Perverse’ is a really good way of putting it,” she grins. “It was like going to a weird spiritual retreat. I don’t live a normal life, as in the nine-to-five. I’ve often put myself in situations where I’ve no money to see if I can still survive. I’m trying to think outside of materialism and consumerism. I just started listening and I found there were these sound beds, or inner rhythms, happening at the same times daily. The wind would sound a certain way depending on its direction. If it went from east to west, it would blow through the gate and make it whistle. Then there were crows that would turn up every day and sit outside my back window. The ocean would start to get heavier at certain times… all these natural rhythms. I said to myself, ‘Press record and see what happens.’”
An altogether more tranquil experience than the one that awaited her in the English capital.
“Yeah, from total freedom to something else entirely. You go from standing at the ocean, so you don’t know where the world ends, to coming back to your flat, and having 20 people hiding out from the cops. It was mad, just sirens all the time, intense fights happening in neighbouring houses. It was fucking crushing sometimes. Then after the riots, there was this really ghostly quiet. Everybody hid out. You could only hear sirens moving away from the city, as the riots moved on. The city became a ghost town. The lyrics came immediately from that. Then the whole album came incredibly easily.
“I knew I didn’t want to sing about myself or have everything through my own eyes,” she continues. “It’s very boring to me at this stage. All I wanted to sing about was modern society and how we’re shaping it. So I documented a lot of conversations I had with people who were hiding out during the riots. At the same time, the lyrics are fairly generalised ideas of what we were all feeling, because I don’t like pointing the finger at people. I’ve had the finger pointed at me many times.”
In what way?
“Oh, y’know, when I go into this barrage, giving out about the Catholic Church,” she sighs. “People would say, ‘Well why are you still a Catholic? Why don’t you count yourself out? How come you still go to church at Christmas and sing?’”
And how does she feel about the Church now?
“It’s rotten from the inside out. The Catholic Church is a law unto itself. But in saying that, I’ve four friends who are priests and are doing it purely based on their faith. That’s their love. I can’t take that away from them. They’re just a horrible fucking company. It’s sickening and I hope it’s banned or it just crushes itself. The Pope is comical. The guy’s got six inches of bulletproof glass around him, what does that say? He actually thinks he has a direct link to God. Yeah, cool, man!”
Moving back to matters musical, given her anti-materialistic stance, what’s her take on the financial dire straits the recording industry is in?
“I’m hopeful, definitely. I just think there needs to be a lot more panels and stuff like The Music Show going on. Debate. And something needs to be regulated so artists can continue. Otherwise you have what’s happening here, with governments cutting funding. Rich people doing it as a hobby. Michael D. Higgins is a good man, though. A man with a bit of intelligence, who’s not a shyster. And a lot of musicians now are feeling a bit more empowered. Getting really empowered by people up on their thrones falling on their faces. We got so much money that we became incredible arseholes. I was sick of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger, people coming up asking you if you want a big bag of coke when you’re working in construction.”
I never knew Wallis Bird worked on a building site. “No, I didn’t!” she laughs. “But a lot of my relations would have found themselves in those positions. To stay awake because the hours are mental. Builders would go out, do tons of shots and everything else, they had so much money.”
That does sound like a bit of a health and safety violation.
“Yeah, well did you see the houses that they built?!”
I did, but on the bright side, at least no-one’s living in them. Our conversation winds on for a time, touching on classical music from Japan, her father’s vinyl collection, her adoration of Jape (who has been blaring in the background for the duration) and including a nifty Bob Dylan impression, before she finally reaffirms how much she loves the prospect of going on tour once more.
“Jesus, I can’t wait! I love being domestic, washing the dishes and cooking, but I have to hit the road. The road is really all I know to be honest. We can talk about the economy and how grim things are but the artists I’ve met have just continued on. That’s the life we lead. People tend to go back to art and creativity when all of the money is gone.”

The Wallis Bird album is out now