They've got love and they've got awards for their soundtrack and performances in Once. And they've got strong views about how Ireland is changing. Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová talk to Róisín Inglefrom the Czech Republic, where they are spending Christmas with Irglová's family
A love story at Christmas: once upon a time a musician guy meets a much younger musician girl. Neither are actors but a few years later they star in a small film with a tiny budget which proceeds, against all expectations, to wow the world. While promoting the movie the guy and the girl fall in love, or it could be they started falling when they were filming. Or maybe they were "falling slowly" for years, just like one of the songs from the film, which, as everybody knows by now, is a quiet gem of a modern-day musical about a Dublin busker and a piano player from Czech Republic called Once.
It doesn't really matter when it started. This week they are in the girl's home town in the Czech Republic, preparing for Christmas together, reflecting on a life-changing 12 months. "It's something I always hoped for," says the piano playing girl, Markéta Irglová (19), of her romance with the guy, Dubliner Glen Hansard (37), lead singer with successful Irish band The Frames, and, although he doesn't tend to shout about it, he was also Outspan in Alan Parker's The Commitments. "Everything good started happening when I met Mar, things straightened out," he says. "There is some kind of fortune around her."
This is not just another love story, however, and it turns out that Glen Hansard doesn't want this to be just another interview. On the phone from Valasske Mezirici, he wants to talk about his disappointment with Dublin, with post Celtic-Tiger Ireland generally, and he has no desire to hold back. Still he is cautious, knowing how his criticism will go down in a country, a capital that already has mixed feelings about him. In Dublin earlier this year, a poster of Oncewas defaced, with a P placed in front of the O, and for a while now Hansard has been pilloried in animations on the Eyebrowy website, which depict him as the self-regarding muso at the centre of a navel-gazing Dublin music scene based around Whelan's pub.
"It's important to get it right," he says of this interview in a text message after we speak at length. As well as a time of joy, this is also a confusing, transitional period for the Dubliner. It turns out global acclaim isn't sitting easy with the man who, over the past 17 years with The Frames, had become more comfortable with the notion of struggling than with success.
It's true that Hansard has had to adjust over the past 12 months. Once, the film made in Dublin over three weeks at the end of 2005 for around €100,000 in which he stars with Irglová, has brought him longed-for professional glory. Directed by his ex-Frames bandmate John Carney, it scooped one of the most coveted awards at the Sundance Film festival early this year. The Once soundtrack Hansard co-wrote with Irglová has gone double platinum in Australia and Korea, he is up for two Grammy nominations and last week it was revealed that two songs from Once are in contention for the Best Song Oscar, with the LA Timestipping Falling Slowlyfor the prize.
In New York, a city he used to enjoy getting lost in, he is now recognised as he walks the streets. Millions have been to see Oncein American cinemas. He has had the David Letterman experience. Hansard, finally, has arrived. Despite all of this, he insists he is "walking around with this huge sadness", which he says is a response to his newfound success.
"Don't get me wrong," he says, trying to explain. "I am absolutely over the moon; I couldn't be happier, it couldn't have come at a better time. For so long it has been us against the world - The Frames were kicking the world in the ass trying to get its attention. Then one day I made a film with John Carney and the world has turned around and said 'what?'. It feels very good but when you've been in a band and struggling to pay your rent, the weird thing is when success comes, if all you have known how to do is struggle then you are going to struggle with success.
"I find myself walking around in a daze thinking, God I feel really sad, why am I so f***ing sad?" he says. "The part of me who was struggling has died, so it's like mourning someone who has passed. In interviews people are now referring to me as a guy who is successful. Nobody wrote about The Frames for years and now Rolling Stoneis saying we are this great Irish band. I feel in between two places. I don't know what is ahead of me. My goal was to get somewhere and now I have got somewhere and before I set sail to my next destination there is this sense of sadness."
Later he suggests this in-between stage, this confused point, is probably not a good time to be doing interviews. But at the same time he has a lot to get off his chest. For starters these days Dublin makes him feel claustrophobic and Ireland is not, certainly in the near future, the place he wants to call home. "I am so proud to be Irish but there are so many problems with the Irish at the moment. Our nation is in a state of not knowing who it is right now. There's a painful change going on. It feels to me there is this caustic atmosphere. If I ever go to Whelan's now, which is rarely, I have to say I feel a dead energy," he says.
He won't refer, in this context, to an economic boom or a success story, and prefers the term "economic upheaval".
"I think it has been damaging," he says. "Everybody has just suddenly realised they can have what they want and they are all acting more like Americans. There is a different atmosphere than there was when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. The Irish are not cool people, Italians are cool people, and people from London and New York are cool. We aren't, we are a heady kind of people, so an Irish person wearing an FCUK top with Deisel jeans and Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses - we just look like idiots. I don't think we wear that stuff well."
You get the sense he can't get over how it happened, how Ireland went from being "not that far away from being a third-world country to being like pigs at the trough". He doesn't understand how having made "a bit of money" from the film he still can't afford a house in Dublin.
"I find it depressing the way we treat ourselves . . . the country is being divided into small lots of expensive apartments, new roads, new cars . . . the Government is almost forcing us to pull up to standards that we can't afford, that are beyond us, so there will be a collapse. We could do with some humility here."
After a busy year, Hansard and Irglová are "adamantly on holiday". The Czech Republic has been a bolt hole for Hansard since he became friends with Marek Irgl, Markéta's father, a publisher. Six years ago The Frames played a music festival in the town and were guests of honour at a garden party held at the Irgl home. Hansard returned there in 2002 when, dossing on his mother's sofa in between flats, he had become disillusioned with the Dublin scene.
"I had difficulty with certain things," he says. "I guess in your own country you can get trapped in that small-town mentality. I needed to spread my wings, needed to experience being out of Ireland. In the Czech Republic I was living in a little cottage, going to the bakery in the morning, buying my newspaper. I enjoyed observing the culture, I used to like being the observer, it's important for the songwriting process. Back at home being relatively recognisable, I wouldn't say famous, you can't really observe as much as you used to. I mean I still get called Outspan . . . it was nice to escape that for a bit."
He currently lives "between Prague and Kildare", where Marina Guinness has let him live in part of her home. He has no specific plans but is contemplating a move away from Ireland to Barcelona, or New York, Paris or Prague. "It's just that idea of taxi drivers taking the piss with fares, and paying stupid amounts of rent, and it's always raining, and everybody talks to you like, 'who the f**k are you?'," he says, adding that it can be a chore some days - "when I'm tired or feeling thin-skinned, I swear they can smell it" - to walk down Dublin's George's Street because of the abuse he gets.
"I don't want to be all 'poor me', and I have to say Irish audiences have been incredibly supportive, the only patrons of our music for the past 17 years, but there is this sense of ownership where people feel they can come up and tell you their opinion . . . tell you how to do your job . . . and it can get irritating when someone calls you a prick for no reason."
He remembers having a conversation with "a bonafide Irish rock star" about this issue. "His take on it was that the Shamen never mixes with his people, he stays on the outskirts of the village. The way the Shamen works is he operates under a sense of fear and respect. You never see him eat or wash his clothes . . . he has this gravity, there is a respect, but that doesn't exist in Ireland, in Ireland everyone is a Shamen," he says, and it feels like a deeply Eyebrowy moment.
He is not all doom and gloom and talk of the rightful position of Shamens in our society. He says in Ballymun, where he grew up, he has never had anything but encouragement from locals. And he recounts with genuine wonder the story of Onceand Sundance last February. How Carney, Irglová and himself had booked flights home from the festival on the Friday even though the award ceremony was on Saturday. And how they began to get a sense that it might be worth sticking around. And how they changed their flights and won the award, and how he rang his mother who works night shifts in an old folks' home and how she cried proud tears. And then how Fox Searchlight came calling to distribute the film, and Stephen Spielberg was inspired by the movie and they did a publicity tour. And how on the publicity tour he and Irglová fell in love.
He is shy about this part "because it's nobody's business but we discovered this was a nice thing, it's been a very enjoyable idea so far, we just feel very fortunate." Does he worry about the age difference? "When I let myself think about it I do - she was 13 when I first met her and when I put her forward for the part in the film years later I had no idea I would end up having a romance, but it happened and I am rolling with it. If you meet someone in your life who makes you happy you have to go for it."
Irglová, with her gorgeous Eastern European accent mixed up with a sprinkle of inner-city Dublin, is more forthcoming. A classically trained pianist, she has happy memories of jamming with Hansard who used to get her up on stage to sing the Frames tune Star, Star. "Everyone falls for Glen," she says. "He is so charismatic and just a very nice person who makes beautiful music. I took it as a certainty that his music would happen in a big way for him but I didn't realise that I would take any part in it. I am so happy that I did play a part . . . it was weird that it happened in a way that didn't include the band. I don't want the boys to feel left out but I think they are smart, grown-up men and they know the success is already translating to the band. There is no jealousy, they are just very cool with it all."
The way Irglová tells it, the relationship was inevitable. "I have to say I'd always been fascinated by him and felt a strong connection. When I was younger I knew it couldn't happen, so I put it away . . . I did have feelings for him, strong friendship feelings; it was out of the question that anything would have happened then, I wouldn't have gone there."
She says they felt something changing during the making of the film. "It was the longest period of time we had spent together up until then. After that we went our own ways and came together to publicise the film and that was when it felt like now might be a good time. Everything happened really naturally and organically, just getting to know each other."
Her father, Hansard's friend, is supportive of the relationship but Irglová is not dismissive of the 18-year age gap. "It is a big gap," she agrees. "I would understand if he felt uncomfortable about it but I don't feel like that. I always saw this as something that would happen in the future. I always knew we would end up together, I had some kind of hope for it."
When the next few months are over, the possible Oscar, more touring for the film, she will leave this part of her musical life behind. "Music has always been a hobby, although I will probably always be involved in Glen's musical activities. I don't want a career out of this, I think I will end up working with children," she says. Hansard, who says he is wary of "cashing in" on Once, is looking forward to reuniting with The Frames.
We had been talking about why there is an anti-Frames mentality among certain people in Dublin and a couple of days later he sends a text: "I think the reason people give The Frames a hard time is that we never went out and did a Snowpatrol, and because we didn't bring home the success the press turned on us," he writes. "And it's something we genuinely never wanted to be honest. We didn't want to be the biggest, fastest, loudest, and that confuses people. Maybe I let people down by staying true to my idea of success. I thought all the bands in Ireland were part of a 'community'. I was wrong. If it's a race I'm not running. Art shouldn't be reduced to the stakes of a sport. There is no best. No number one, only truth and lies. And people are smart and they know the difference."
Hansard and Irglová will be back in Dublin for a New Year's Eve Frames gig at Vicar Street. They are looking forward to it - Irglová to spending more time in the adopted country she feels has a certain "magic", and Hansard to being with the band and back among the loyal fans of The Frames and, despite all his criticisms, just to be home in Dublin celebrating the turn of the year.
The day after our interview, he says he wants to make something else clear concerning his critique of modern Ireland. "I just want to add that the way I am feeling about the country is that I am heartbroken - that's my emotional perspective on what is happening in Ireland," he says. "I don't want to be one of those people who whinge or complain because it doesn't get anybody anywhere. The reason I am being hard on Ireland is because I love it and because I love being Irish. It's just when I see what has happened it breaks my heart."
When we speak again he has just been for a walk with Irglová in the countryside. He says, not for the first time, that he is confused. Hansard has spent a long time on a journey, struggling to make it to a certain point, and now, having arrived at that point, he is unsure about what lies ahead. "It's probably not a great time to do interviews," he says, and you can hear the rueful smile in his voice. "And the last thing I want is to be just another mouthpiece sounding ungrateful because the truth is I am grateful and I feel incredibly lucky. It's a very interesting time."