I’ve just been reading about the Arctic Monkeys, who skipped a group encounter with the assembled Parisian media to go visit the Eiffel Tower, only to resurface a day late for the interview.
Well this is Dublin and Cara Dillon only manages to be 15 minutes in areers, but she’s infinitely more apologetic. The Pat Kenny Show has kept her waiting to do her slot, and almost made her miss the checkout deadline in her hotel as a result. So she sits down flustered, with baggage somewhere in the wings, leaving her other half, Sam Lakeman, to the practicalities.
This is pretty much the only baggage you’ll find around the Derry native, who is refreshingly direct in that peculiarly Northern Irish way. She’s happy to be doing the rounds promoting her third album, After The Morning. The lead single is garnering healthy airplay and Dillon is looking forward to becoming an overnight success, after a decade of hard work.
Greg McAteer: There’s a perception of you springing fully formed from nowhere.
Cara Dillon: Not at all. While I was still at school, I was in a band called Oige and then in Equation. We were signed to Blanco Y Negro when I was 19, but they kept us in the studio for six years working with different producers. They wouldn’t let us play live, they kept saying, “We’ve something special here, let’s keep it back and make a big splash when the record comes out”.
Did you grow up with music at home?
My older sister, Mary, was in a group called Deanta. I sang unaccompanied in the pubs around Dungiven as a teenager, and got very excited whenever our Derry neighbours The Undertones were on Top Of The Pops.
How did you end up on the same label as Arcade Fire, Babyshambles and The Strokes?
Well, Geoff Travis had been the A&R for Blanco Y Negro and he asked us to go with him to Rough Trade. It’s been great. Whenever we play anywhere you get these kids with piercings and you know that they listened to the album because it's on Rough Trade. They’ll come up to you after and tell you how great it is that they now feel they can go to a folk club too.
Have they been supportive as a label?
Very. They don’t exactly know what we are, but they think we’re cool and just let us get on with it.
The new record has some fairly personal tracks on it.
While we were making it my father was very ill and I got the call to go home. I was driving up from the airport and every couple of miles my sisters were ringing asking “Where are you?” But I got to be with him before he died. A few months later I was in the kitchen and ‘October Winds’ just came to me and I ran upstairs and said to Sam, “I have to record this now and I don’t care if we never do anything with it.”
And Paul Brady?
I was really nervous asking him to do the duet on ‘The Streets Of Derry’, but he was great. He just came to my home and did it
It wasn’t all done at home though?
‘The Snows They Melt The Soonest’, for instance, began at home. We really knew what we wanted for it, so Sam was there with the sample pads but it didn’t sound right. I said to Geoff that I thought it should have real instruments and a few days later we were in Prague with an orchestra!