Sweet songs of the new gloom

Singer-songwriter Barry McCormack brings the Irish folk ballad bang up-to-date with his state-of-the-nation album, 'Small Mercies' – and he's hanging on to the day job for the sake of his art as well as his life, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA

SITTING AT a table on the mezzanine in Bewley’s in Grafton Street, Barry McCormack seems right in his element. He may have spent a year in Paris teaching English (not knowing a sentence of French), but you get the impression he’s most content sipping coffee and staring out the window at Grafton Street below, checking this character, clocking that person, and wondering what kind of lives they’re living.

McCormack is a shoestring-budget singer-songwriter; such is the lack of commercial demand for his work that if he chose to write songs and sing them for a living he’d be homeless. The day job, then (teaching English as a foreign language), is what keeps him in bread and loafers; outside working hours, McCormack toils for hours on end, writing songs that few people hear yet that are rich in observational detail and folklore.

“Folk balladeer? I suppose so . . .” McCormack is reluctant to define what he does, yet from his entry into music as a member of the fondly remembered Dublin band Jubilee Allstars (which split up about 10 years ago) to his three-year cycle of solo albums, he has not only embraced the genre of the Irish folk ballad but enhanced it – by doing in a contemporary context what folk music is supposed to do: place history in a social context, and connect the threads between the commonplace and the macabre, love, murder, romance, sex, humour, life, death, and town planning.

As if through a haze, McCormack recalls the days of Jubilee Allstars, a band, he says, that was lower than low key, but that comprised “three very opinionated, arguing brothers”. The band was signed to a Dublin-based independent label (Lakota), and offered a no-fuss mixture of Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Brendan Behan. McCormack understates it when he says, “our biggest tour was three dates in the UK – London, Sheffield and Edinburgh. I have no real tour stories, just tales of being hungover in a Little Chef outside Grimsby, or whatever towns were along the route to Edinburgh”.

He released his debut solo album, We Drank Our Tears, in 2003. In 2006, the follow-up, Last Night As I Was Wandering,slipped out. Night Visitingwas released in 2008. His latest album, Small Mercies, continues the run of under-the-radar records that are rooted in a tradition that began in another generation altogether. According to McCormack, his work is an acquired taste – We Drank Our Tears, he says, with a glint of humour, has been called "the Nil By Mouth of Irish music".

He admits that Dylan is something of a touchstone. He also mentions the obscure Sunderland band Leatherface as an important contemporary influence, and tips his hat towards Planxty's 1979 album, After The Break, which contains Christy Moore's masterful reading of The Ballad of Farmer Michael Hayes.

His early releases, McCormack claims, are records "by a guy just trying to learn the craft. With Small Mercies, I think I have". Recorded and mixed by Stephen Shannon, Small Mercies features McCormack with a full band for the first time since the Jubilee Allstars days.

Dublin remains a potent focal point in excellent modern folk tracks such as Hard Times (Drunk at the Kitchen Door), I Remember Kent Station, The Dogs On The Streetand The Ghosts Of Pigtown. All in all, the album is something of a state-of-the-nation commentary as the songs tell tales that are salutary but in a sympathetic way. "I wasn't a Celtic Tiger hater," says McCormack. "Most of my friends still live here, they have their families here, still holding on to their jobs."

Small Mercies,perhaps tellingly, ends with Spring, a song that astutely documents Ireland's entry into recessionary times ("the blind had led the blind and the inept the inept, and when it all went south, Christ, how Jesus wept") yet posits an optimistic outcome ("I couldn't take the spring from the air, nor that feeling when the light has returned and the darkness is gone"). McCormack glances out the mezzanine window into the sunny, bustling thoroughfare that is Dublin at work, rest and play. Spring, he says, virtually deadpan, is his Beautiful Day. "You just have to listen out for the anthemic sing-along bit." He works on Grafton Street, though, and it's time to be going back to the daily grind.

“I like getting up in the morning and being part of the ebb and flow of Dublin city,” he says wistfully, a poet at night and a pragmatist by day. “Having more of an ordinary life is better for a writer if you want to write observational story-songs.

“It’s certainly better than being stuck on a tour bus. You get to walk through the city. You see things.”

Small Merciesis released through Hag's Head

Barry McCormack's all-time folk favourites

LUKE KELLY

"When I come home after stout-induced whingeing in the pub, I watch Luke Kelly on YouTube. There's a great clip of him, Ciarán Mac Mathúna and Benedict Kiely in a studio, and Kelly is telling the story of how he got the song Raglan Road from Patrick Kavanagh, and then he sings it. You can see how he totally understands the song."

JOHN PRINE

"He's an incredible songwriter. Kris Kristofferson once said of him that he was so good his thumbs would have to be broken. Again on YouTube, I watched him sing Hello In There, which he wrote when he was 24. I don't know how people can come out with such brilliant stuff as that when they haven't been toiling away for years."

AL "BURT" LLOYD

"He was Ewan McColl's mentor, and he worked on whaling boats in the 1920s, and started to write sea shanties. He recorded an album, with musical assistance from Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, called Leviathan! Ballads and Songs of the Whaling Trade. It's an amazing album – Lloyd has a great, salty voice that is also quite gentle."