Getting personal

He approaches interviews as if they were a firing squad, but, according to Siobhán Long, Mick Flannery's eloquence shines through in his songs

THE TOM WAITS comparisons are already wearing a little thin for Mick Flannery's liking. Establishing himself in the music business with a name that would sit more easily in the country-'n'-Irish scene, Flannery is not given to short, sharp soundbites or to throwaway observations on life's deeper meaning. But that's not to say that he's a man without a mission. In fact, at the grisly old age of 24, this stonemason from Blarney, Co Cork, has already (self-) produced two of the best collections to come out of this country since George Ivan Morrison was a boy. And that's without, for even one fleeting minute, succumbing to the crass expectations of a music business that thrives on three-minute disposability and sonically stripped MP3 downloads.

Flannery approaches this interview as if it's a Kilmainham firing squad. Shoulders hunched, fists clenched and teeth gritted, he makes no bones about the fact that he'd rather subject himself to root-canal treatment than have to expound on the whys and wherefores of his music.

By his own admission, he's not much of a talker. Taciturn by nature, what he wants to say ends up on a lyric sheet but rarely sees the light of day in his daily conversation. So, probing the depths of the mind that spawned such minor gemstones as Goodbye, an uncompromising exploration of the chasm that separates sex and love ("Not to make it all sound vain, You lay the man, You lay his name . . . But lay no claim"), is more of a white-knuckle ride than a saunter through the man's scintillating repertoire of original material. Still, his curiosity about the human condition is at the root of many of his songs.

"People interest me," Flannery admits, reluctantly. "Their mannerisms and where they got them from. I have an uncle, and he's very articulate. If he says something I don't understand, I always have to ask him, even if it makes me look stupid. I always want to know what that means, you know."

One of Flannery's greatest gifts is his ability to telescope vast horizons of ideas into succinct lyrical postcards. Near or Far has tucked within its small but perfectly formed three-verse scaffold a trio of vignettes that alight in turn on the suffocation of wealth, infertility and domestic violence - this is either a virulent snapshot of life as Flannery sees it, or a canny attention-deficit-disorder amalgam of jagged-edged thoughts that barely exist long enough to be captured momentarily. Apart from his own admission that such songs might be blithely written off as sheer misery, he acknowledges that his writing pattern doesn't follow anything as pat as the desire to communicate a message or address a particular issue. If anything, Flannery's songwriting approximates to a complex and progressive linguistic striptease, one that unveils its many layers gradually, instinctively, and with intent.

"The music and lyrics of that song came together pretty quickly," he says, and then pauses, reluctant even to attempt analysing his own working methods. "I dunno, I think it's rhythmic. I started off like I often do: I mumble first, just gibberish, searching for syllables that match and then fit. I did, after a while, make sense - as much as I could. We'd have rehearsals and we'd be playing the song, but I wouldn't have finished the lyrics. I'd be singing it, but there would be no distinctive words. I'd have a good idea of the vowel sounds and certain strong consonant sounds that I think fit to the tune. So if you've a longer note, it's nicer to sing a broad vowel on it. It just sounds better in your head. But obviously none of it is about me: I'm not married and I don't have a kid. But once it started, and I had explained a certain situation, I thought: 'Well, that's it, that's all I have to say about that, so what's the rest of the song going to be about?'

"It doesn't sound as romantic when you dissect it, but it did take a long time to get it right and I changed it a lot, moving the syllables and trying to get some internal rhymes as well."

FLANNERY'S DEBUT CD, Evening Train, released in 2005, visited that netherworld known as the concept album. Ostensibly a snapshot of a week in the lives of gamblers, drinkers and hard livers, it could quite easily become a companion piece to Tom Waits's own Orphans: Bawlers, Brawlers And Bastards. Both are sprawling compendiums, pen pictures of lives lived on the outside track, where the blink of an eye can mean the difference between victory and oblivion.

"I always liked playing poker," Flannery says, smiling sheepishly, "and figuring out if I was right about what a fella was doing. Sometimes that led to me losing a lot of money, but I always liked watching the better players at the table read the weaker players. It's a vicious kind of game in that regard, but it just interested me the way they manipulated people."

Flannery's music is swathed in deception. Tales of abandonment, loss and barefaced lying abound. Things are never quite what they seem. This back-catalogue reads as if he's had more than his share of colourful relationships to contend with. There's fodder here that might be eked from a lifetime's heartbreak. Autobiography isn't everything to a writer, though, as Flannery knows well.

"I've had a couple of relationships, but I wouldn't say they were any more colourful than anyone else's relationships," he says. "Maybe I'm just a dickhead and I put it all bluntly into songs. Some people don't talk about it - I don't talk about it."

So is it easier to write about something in a song than talk about it? "Yeah, because you can get away with it. You can call the album White Lies and then just walk away - it never happened. I have to admit that came to me after I decided on the name for the album. I thought, 'oh yeah, I can use that as a get-out clause!'.

"But I couldn't say for sure that I believe everything I've written. In a year's time, I might look back on a song and think, 'what am I saying there? I don't think that'."

HAVING CHOSEN TO do a concept album for his debut (one that could have soundtracked Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven), Flannery's second collection shows he might be edging closer to a more personal form of songwriting, albeit one that could shadow a cast of Annie Proulx characters, as confused in Cork as they are in Wyoming (or anywhere else for that matter). He's willing to admit that autobiography lurks within, but on just how much of it, he refuses to be drawn.

"You know, it's weird," Flannery says, loosening up and raising his eyes from the table for the first time. "I hardly ever talk to people, right? The only people who really ask me questions about myself are interviewers. So now I find myself talking about myself, and I'm not comfortable with it and I'm not used to it. I find myself saying things that I've never said before - even my mother doesn't know, and next thing it's in the paper. She's reading about me, and my brothers are, and I'd say they're saying, 'what the . . . ?', and they probably think they don't even know me any more. It's not that I haven't known all these things about myself before, but I'm just not too happy seeing them in black and white in a newspaper."

Maybe he could consider this kind of personal excavation a form of therapy then, just to get himself through this media ordeal? Might that be the solution for this natural introvert who just happens to write magnificent, sweeping songs that people want to know more about?

"Well, the confidentiality clause is gone right out the window, so I'm not too sure that'd work," he says with deadpan accuracy. "But yeah, the songs on White Lies are definitely more personal, and when I first started singing them live, it was edgy, but I've gotten used to them. It's definitely hard singing them to a local audience, knowing that what you've said could get back to someone who might figure out who the song's about."

Does he care a lot then, about what other people think of him, or his music?

"Maybe I do, a little bit too much, but I don't know", he says, hesitantly. "I've seen people do interviews and they're media-trained. They answer like a robot. I don't know - do I want to be like that, ever? Or maybe I'm just being too honest with you now. That can be dangerous."

White Lies is on EMI; Mick Flannery's Irish tour details on www.mickflannery.com