Streets apart

Now firmly entrenched as a member of the London-Irish Murphia, Bap Kennedy - long-distance rock 'n' roller, survivor of several record company purges and the brother of sweet Brian - finally looks set to come out from below the rock he has been sleeping under for the past five years. Bap's journey from 1980s also-rans, Energy Orchard, to the present day and a well-received new album (Lonely Street) has been interrupted by the usual level of rock star excesses and mess-ups, but he's peering out of the semi-darkness, generally optimistic and no longer on his uppers.

The Energy Orchard experience, he freely admits, was a bit of a nightmare. The band initially comprised Bap, his brother Brian, and a few other Belfast mates who formed the band in London in the mid-1980s. Brian soon left the others to their own devices, and took off for a slow crawl up the ladder of success to wear hair extensions in Riverdance. Bap and the lads, meanwhile, tried their best to affect typical rock-star poses while simultaneously playing blustering Big Music a la The Waterboys and Simple Minds.

"It was a pretty painful experience, a learning curve that had to happen," says Bap on a rainy Sunday afternoon in London, his voice almost as grey as the clouds, and still brogue-heavy despite 15 years in the capital. "From it, I learnt to work with like-minded people. That really helps when you're making records. I learned a lot about the business and what not to do, if anything. In the studio with Energy Orchard it was quite a longwinded, drawn-out recording affair - songs that were over-cooked and over-long. That was down to us not being fully up to speed with things. We learned as we went along."

Energy Orchard signed to MCA at a time when the likes of Happy Mondays and Stone Roses appeared: fairly instantly, the band was out of date. "Classic bad timing! One week the record company wanted us to be the new U2, but the week after they wanted us to be Dire Straits. They just didn't know who we were, and we were more confused than them!

It was all over for the band by 1994, but Bap had at least one influential friend - Steve Earle, who Energy Orchard once supported. Unfortunately, Earle hadn't been around for a couple of years but his comeback record of 1995, Train A Comin', proved particularly influential for Bap.

"I got a copy of it just as Energy Orchard had wound down, and it sounded like the stuff I was interested in doing - an old-fashioned country record. I got in touch with him. He had regard for me as a songwriter and I went over to Nashville to make a record (Domestic Blues) on his label.

"Everyone who heard it thought it was great. That surprised me, because I really thought Energy Orchard was my best shot at success in the music industry. The band had lasted for 10 years and that was a big chunk out of my life, so I never really thought it would happen again. When Steve asked me to go to America, I thought, why not? I had nothing else to do, I had no aspirations, just a load of songs. Lo and behold, it got better."

Theoretically, at least. Domestic Blues wasn't released for two years because of record company wrangles, and depression set in once more. Bap went back to working on London building sites and supplemented his music industry habit by sideline producing and management.

He was also instrumental in launching The King (huge-in-Germany Belfast postman Jim Brown impersonates Elvis Presley doing covers of famous rock songs: "Too straight to be side-splitting, too dumb to be good music," opined Q).

Despite these forays, Bap says he had no way of making money. "I was absolutely skint! I felt I could do nothing apart from music, but music was making me no money whatsoever. In fact, it was only causing me grief. But then my record came out in America, received rave reviews, and Steve Earle rang up and told me I had to come out to tour for a couple of months."

The US shows and audiences gave Bap a warm glow, but he returned to "the usual apathy" in London. It was then he did the smartest piece of work in his life to date: he started up his own label, Lonely Street Discs. "I'm actually making a living now, selling records on the label to America. It's great - you call all the shots, and there are no disinterested parties in the middle, not giving a damn and making mistakes. Everything comes from me, even down to how many seconds there are between CD tracks."

His new album continues the assured country/folk vein of his solo debut and the follow-up, Hillbilly Shakespeare. And his musical style - like his overall demeanour and character - seems totally different from his brother's.

"We're like chalk and cheese, we really are," he admits. "It's hard to believe we come from the same family. I don't want to be tabloid fodder - I saw what happened to him. He's more of a showbiz, pop-star guy, which is great, fair play to him, but I'd prefer to be an anonymous songwriter. Of course, the in-built contradiction is that in order for me to get anywhere, I have to promote my own work. I'm glad I have the chance to do it, but I don't want to be a pop star.

"It's very boring, believe me. That's for Brian and Riverdance, flapping about with a cape on."

And the possibility of a sibling collaboration? "Brian and I worked together to the extent where we don't really want to work together, but I wouldn't rule out a collaboration at some point in the future. He's in New York now, so I'm keeping my eye on Ireland seeing that there's now a gap in the market for a Kennedy!"

Bap Kennedy's new new album, Lonely Street is on the DTK/Metrodome label