Declan O'Rourke puts his incremental success story down to steady graft, learning the industry ropes with Paddy Casey, and writing in his dreams, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
It's the quiet ones you have to look out for; after his debut album, Since Kyabram, was released in 2004, Declan O'Rourke has been assiduously - if silently - getting on to the speed dial number functions of people as well known as Paul Weller, Eddie Reader, Kate Rusby, Snow Patrol and Paul Brady. Such stealth and assurance will continue once his new album, Big Bad Beautiful World, is released. It continues where the debut album left off, with songs as rich as dark chocolate melting into your ears.
O'Rourke was a late starter on the Dublin singer-songwriter scene, not so much an interloper as someone who just didn't realise what was on his doorstep until he opened the door, walked outside and tripped over it. With a family background that included living in Australia, O'Rourke was also open to a different cultural aesthetic, which might account for songs of his that straddle the distance between Melbourne, melancholia and melody.
THE SONGS HE started writing in his teens, he says, were no more than doodles, flighty things he's certain he would be embarrassed about today. In the late 1990s, when he was working on building sites in Melbourne, he recalls writing songs but not playing them to anyone. He had heard, also, "scary" stories about the nature of the music industry, and presumed it was next to impossible to nab a record contract.
"The general feeling I'd got from talking to people and reading articles," he reveals, "was that the record industry was a cesspit of pus and to stay well away from it. So I'd never really expected anything to happen, yet I had the ambition. I loved writing songs, and then I started performing them on my return to Ireland. I was home two weeks and the first gig I played was in Molloys in Dublin's High Street, as support to an Irish singer called Mark Dignam. So many well known names were at the gig to see him, and for the next year I went to as many open-mic nights as possible, landing supports to the likes of Gemma Hayes. And it went on from there. Every step up was an achievement, always looking at the next step ahead of me and really enjoying it. It hasn't stopped since."
O'Rourke's progress was, as he says, incremental; he was raw enough to view certain areas of the music fraternity in a naive light, but smart enough to know that if he didn't fuse his songwriting talent with a small portion of music industry acumen (presumably culled from working with his family's construction business), then he might as well go back to Melbourne and continue to mix cement. Going along to Imro workshops helped, he says, but things really started for him when he hooked up with fellow singer-songwriter Paddy Casey.
"I wasn't making a penny," recalls O'Rourke. "I was working on house renovations during the day and gigging at night, but working alongside Paddy was a mini apprenticeship, in a way, because I was able to see what was ahead of me. He'd be doing radio promo slots, which he would bring me along to. And then he'd bring me along to a few record company meetings, all of which gave me an insight into the way in which certain industry things worked. I saw then that the industry wasn't as difficult to engage with as I had first thought."
Before too long, O'Rourke swapped the shovel for the guitar and slowly built up a following through innumerable support slots and with the release of the slow-burning, haunting Since Kyabram. He regards the debut as little more than an introduction to different songs that he could subsequently take in different directions. "I also was trying not to be a moany singer-songwriter - I definitely didn't want to be put into that category. Another thing that I had learned from the industry talks, though, was to have a few tracks on the album that would work for radio and which would attract attention for the other songs. So I wrote a couple of songs with that in mind."
Immediate compromise in one so inexperienced could have led to either commercial embarrassment and instant riches or a reluctant pride in being able to construct songs to order. "There's the thing about selling out and so on," he relents, his face reddening ever so slightly (and he won't say which ones they are), "but when I wrote them I found I really enjoyed them. They were fun songs to play. Where I failed - although it doesn't matter to most people - is they didn't really mean much to me, they weren't really about anything. I like playing them, though, and people find their own meanings in them. This time around, though, I promised myself the songs would all be relevant and about things that mean something to me."
THE SUCCESS OF Since Kyabramhas certainly paved and eased the way for Big Bad Beautiful World, which looks destined to garner equal if not greater degrees of admiration and adulation. Support slots in the UK and Europe to the likes of Snow Patrol, Teddy Thompson, Badly Drawn Boy, Divine Comedy and Paul Weller (who O'Rourke especially thanks in the album sleeve notes) have alerted people to his way with dream-laden accessibility. Speaking of which . . .
"Funnily enough, I get a lot of ideas when I'm asleep. I apply myself to my songs quite a lot, and think about them so much that even when I'm asleep the wheels still turn. I dream quite lucidly sometimes, and quite a few dreams of mine have songs playing in them. A band playing, now and again. When I wake up I'm completely aware that a song has been played in my dreams, a song I haven't heard before. People tell me I sing in my sleep, too."
Big Bad Beautiful World is released on Sept 14. Declan O'Rourke starts a nationwide tour on Sept 19 at the Bog Lane Theatre, Ballymahon, Co Longford. The tour continues into October