MayKay: ‘I’m bad at knowing my worth. I’d like to be a lot braver’

Mary-Kate Geraghty knows the difference between the worry of being out of work and the luxury of taking a day off. “To be idle,” she once said, “there is no rest in that.” As a fully paid-up member of the gig economy workforce, the singer/performer/presenter (known to all and sundry as MayKay) has jumped from school and college to co-founding and performing in various bands, collaborating with many musicians, and presenting television shows.

In a rare hour of downtime, she is wrapped up in black as she walks into a Dublin city centre hotel. She is not so well known that heads turn, but charismatic enough to be studied for several seconds. She has, as Lloyd Cole sang, cheekbones like geometry, and she carries herself with purpose, instinctively learned, no doubt, from almost two decades of singing and performing.

She says that while at secondary school she never had any plans to forge an anxiety-ridden career in music. Her school, Dublin’s Mount Sackville, was at the time, “quite focused towards classical music and classically trained singers. There wasn’t alternative music in the school at all. When we were choosing our subjects for the Leaving Cert, I was very much encouraged towards sciences and languages and very much discouraged from music.” In fairness, she adds, “they were just trying to push me towards subjects they thought I was strong at. I can’t believe I’m at the age now, I’m 37, where I can say this, but it was different then. BIMM (Brighton Institute of Modern Music) Dublin wasn’t there, and while my parents were incredibly encouraging, in general there didn’t seem to be a career in music unless you were going to be a U2 or a Sinéad O’Connor, and they were as rare as hen’s teeth.”

Geraghty’s slide into music arrived when she left school to study medicinal chemistry at UCD. She switched to Philosophy at Trinity College, but dropped out (as did her friend Jamie Fox, in his final year, studying journalism at UCD) to seriously commit to their band, Fight Like Apes. Formed in 2006, the band released their debut EP the following year. The songs on How Am I Supposed to Kill You if You Have All the Guns, she recalls, were never meant to be heard. “Initially, we couldn’t believe that anyone even liked the sound of it. I thought Jamie was so special, and then when he thought I was equally special, I was like, well, if he thinks I am, then I must be.”

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So began a 10-year music industry experience that went from the ridiculous (via sometimes deliberately misspelled EP titles such as David Carradine Is a Bounty Hunter Whos Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch) to the sublime live shows that covered bases from kinetic and distorted to intensely exciting, with a brashness that became difficult to sustain over time. The primary focus of the band was to make their live shows as exhilarating as possible, Geraghty says. That they most certainly did. “We knew that was our sweet spot.”

Three albums were released – Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion in 2008, The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner in 2010, and in 2015, the rather less frivolously titled Fight Like Apes. The final months of the band were, Geraghty admits, as half-hearted as the first few years were full-bodied. They had “never quite made it to a point of being completely comfortable financially”, while the shift from the traditional norms of fans buying their records to streaming their music added fiscal insult to injury. A proposed third album launch show on the grounds of Charleville Castle in Tullamore, Co Offaly, was announced only for it to be cancelled.

We started the band when I was 18, 19, so it was my whole adult identity. That’s why it took us so long, I think, to let it go

The band was trying – hoping, Geraghty rationalises – to find “more interesting ways of playing and ways of being more in control. We were so excited about the idea of a little festival for a night, but the more we got into hiring the buses, paying for insurance and generators, getting a bar license, all these things, we had to make the tickets really expensive. When we put them out, we realised it wasn’t going to work so we quickly pulled the show. So that happened and then Fight Like Apes just petered out. That’s the bit that was really hard to let go, because we weren’t a petering-out type of group.”

Justifiably, a sigh emerges. “We started the band when I was 18, 19, so it was my whole adult identity. That’s why it took us so long, I think, to let it go. But the battery wasn’t just running out, it was dead. The industry got more difficult for us and the excitement went out of it. What a business to be in if you’re not excited – there’s nothing there for you if there isn’t that inner drive.”

Bloodied but unbowed, Geraghty soon joined full-time the forward-thinking electro-pop group Le Galaxie, with whom she had previously collaborated. When they foundered in 2019, she had by then caught the attention of the Dingle-based music festival and television series Other Voices – not just for her command of the stage while performing with Fight Like Apes and Le Galaxie (both of which had been on Other Voices line-ups over the years), but also for her ability to instinctively converse with musicians and artists.

“I got approached as a musician that they liked and who understood the show. What they wanted was peer-to-peer conversations ... and [me] speaking to an audience as an actual fan. They let me learn on the job. ”

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A musician talking with a musician is different from a journalist doing the same thing – trust is crucial, isn’t it? “I think so. I get the things that they do. Obviously, the Irish musicians know you and they know your background so there is an innate, instant trust factor. It can be a tricky thing, to try and get a musician to talk about music when they’ve chosen that as the medium of communication. Some of them genuinely don’t know how to explain it, and I respect that. If someone is struggling to answer something, I’m like, just don’t answer. It’s up to us in those positions to let that person be themselves and show people who they are, because that’s what makes me want to go and watch music.”

As someone working on both sides of the fence, does she think musicians like being interviewed by journalists? “There is this perception of the media that sometimes they’re looking for something on you, which I don’t think is the case with a lot of music journalism.” She has been misquoted herself in the past. “I have seen interviews that have been printed and thought, that wasn’t how it felt when we were talking.” It’s a tactful observation. Such diplomacy comes from being raised by a writer (her mother is Irish Times journalist Kathy Sheridan), “so I have no excuse to not have known what I was doing at any point. Anyway, I don’t have a big enough profile, so there’s only a certain level of mess I can be put in.”

Like any determined self-employed multi-hyphenate, Geraghty has a fistful of fingers in many pies. Work with Other Voices continues apace. “There’s a lot going on this year,” she understates. With a new series scheduled for broadcast on RTÉ 2 at the end of February (which will feature acts that played in St James’ Church in Dingle last December, including CMAT, Kae Tempest, Villagers, Mick Flannery, Murder Capital, ØXN, and Gurriers), Other Voices, now in its 22nd year, has long since outgrown its origins as the music and culture festival that only Irish people knew about. The last decade, in particular, has seen its roots extend deeper into Ireland (with annual events at the Guinness Storehouse and UCC) and also across the UK, Europe and the US. The abundance of exceptional Irish music talent, meanwhile, has steadily found its way onto the line-up, replacing the need for higher profile international acts that were once the festival’s primary calling cards.

In 2024, the Other Voices brand and tagline (”songs for the head and heart”) remain as relevant as ever, with MayKay continuing to co-present and interview. Something magical takes place within the intimacy of St James’ Church that is almost unquantifiable, she says. “You can sense in the room when an artist is going to be extraordinary, which is something you get each year. It’s a quality that transcends everything.”

This year will also see her release her own music. “I need to take the advice that I would shove down everyone else’s throat, and just do it.” A podcast is also a possibility. “I’m chatting to musicians and people involved in the business all the time, so I should just put a microphone on!”

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Meanwhile, Fight Like Apes returns for another (temporary) full nelson in the ring. The band isn’t in the comeback business, she affirms. “We have a show in Dublin’s 3Olympia in April, and that’ll be us done.” Really, truly? “I think so, but I’m very reluctant to say never say never.” Outside work there is her committed activism with, among others, Irish Artists for Palestine. “It will always be a thread throughout everything I do from now on. There’s no way it won’t be.”

In everything she does, she carries a self-awareness of what she does well and what she could do better. The former includes making people feel at ease, “with talking or singing, which is something I would have thought incredibly boring when I was in my 20s. The more work I’ve done with Other Voices, however, the more I’ve performed with different acts on stage, and written with different people, the more I value it, because I’ve now seen it puts me at ease as well.”

The latter? “I would say I’m quite bad at knowing my worth,” she says, before she heads back home to her hungry dog. “There are lots of ideas I have and things I want to pursue, yet I’m very good at convincing myself that I wouldn’t be able to do them. I’d like to be a lot braver, creatively and professionally.”

Other Voices returns to RTÉ2 on February 29th. Fight Like Apes play Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on Saturday, April 6th.