The Other MTV

Other Voices, RTÉ's Dingle-based music showcase, is back for its seventh series. TONY CLAYTON-LEAlooks at the evolution of this inspirational musical melange and finds out why the artists love the town, the company – and buying glue with their Guinness

SO HOW does a television show that started off with the best of intentions – to highlight the late 1990s/early noughties phenomenon of the Irish singer-songwriter – maintain the level of quality that made it so interesting in the first place? The answer is it doesn’t.

Initially, Other Voices, which was first broadcast in the winter of 2003 (recording took place in December 2002), hit the nail on the head, with the likes of early contributors such as The Frames, Maria Doyle Kennedy, David Kitt, Jerry Fish, Katell Keineg, Paddy Casey, Damien Rice, Gemma Hayes, Emmet Tinley, Paul Tiernan, Interference, Mundy, Nina Hynes, Mark Geary and Damien Dempsey constituting a movement that subsequently sorted out the contenders from the also-rans.

As the years passed, however, the series could easily have been called Similar Voices, such was the preponderance of Irish names rattling around Dingle and performance space of St James’ Church. Up until a few years ago, the series was in danger of stagnating to the point that its presence became little other than a below-average inclusion on RTÉ’s winter schedules.

But then, about four years ago, something very peculiar happened, something that the show’s detractors (I raise my hand here) hadn’t foreseen: Other Voices reverted to its original intention of showcasing genuinely interesting music; same-old Irish acts no longer formed the spine of the series. It became engagingly weirder and hipper; it became something that genuinely intrigued, via a selection of acts that had been sourced at various music industry events.

“It starts with me going to SXSW [South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas] in March,” says Other Voicesmusic producer/booker Aoife Woodlock, over a drink in Foxy John’s (where, as Richard Hawley points out, “you can buy a pint of Guinness and a bucket of Bostick at the same time”). “I do the binge gigging there with a group of Irish people, some of whom tip me off with certain bands they reckon would be perfect for the show. It’s scratching the surfaces of many areas, knocking on doors, listening to new music.”

Woodlock receives hundreds of CDs, demos, MP3s, and sifts through them for possibilities. If her response to what she hears is instant, “then I’m onto something”.

Is it as much to do with her own musical tastes, then, as what she instinctively regards as being good for the show? “It’s difficult to say that what I choose for Other Voices isn’t my own musical taste, because a lot of it is – people on the series this year such as Temper Trap, Megafaun and Jesca Hoop, who was someone on my radar for quite a while.”

Word of mouth is crucial, too. “Hoop had been living in California, so we couldn’t have afforded to fly her over, but she’s now living in Manchester, so bang, she’s here. The Elbow connection helped, of course – Guy Harvey, a great supporter of the series, introduced me to her. And Richard Hawley came over because Guy had told him he had to do the show; Richard then said to Brett Anderson that he had to do it, so there’s a community involved.”

In terms of booking acts, Woodlock deals with record labels, musicians and their management – the latter on a 60 per cent basis. Labels, she says, haven’t always got the promotional budget for their artists (and basic entourage) to get to such a remote town as Dingle; they also need to be paid for their performance, put up in decent accommodation, fed, watered, and so on. Factor in other inhibiting features (we’re guessing here, but we’d safely bet these include certain record labels using whatever promotional budget they have to bring their acts over to Ireland to appear on a more mainstream programme such as The Late Late Show, rather than on what they perceive to be a niche music series), and you have occasional frustrations of trying to book acts that are deemed by Woodlock as perfect for the Other Voices audience.

“There are limited outlets in Ireland in terms of where your music can go, your interviews, your live performances,” she says. “And there are only a certain number of slots available for entertainment programmes. The primary frustration is that some people don’t get what we do, not even after seven years.”

The guy with the moustache who gets what Other Voices does is Philip King, a man who is wont to throw a line of a Seamus Heaney poem at you, following through swiftly with a Gaelic proverb. King is the primary motivating force behind the series, the man with the connections, the phone numbers and the innate skill of an assertive networker whose favourite sentence, it seems, is: “Let me introduce you to this person.” He had his work cut out for him last year – the first year since its inception that RTÉ has not allotted funding to Other Voices. Cue a bout of King’s lateral thinking and commercial nous, and primary, empathetic sponsorship/funding from Imro, InTune, Fáilte Ireland and Microsoft.

King allows that Other Voices has mutated and grown, but what remains is the same: at the heart of the series is music that needs to be given a platform. “It’s an unfolding, if you like, from initially having people like Damien Rice, Gemma Hayes, Mark Geary, Paddy Casey to inviting people – for example, Elbow – who may have arrived at a certain point in their careers and who wanted to do something different.

“What we’re interested in with Other Voices is not having the normal barriers of artist and audience. So, say, you’d have Brett Anderson sitting over there and the guys from Temper Trap sitting over here, and then traditional singer Brendan Begley would sing. So an exchange happens in this community of musicians, and that happens because there’s a sense of anticipation and expectation.”

He highlights this exchange by recalling a session that took place during the recording less than two months ago in Dingle: Irish rockabilly gal Imelda May jamming in the front lounge of Benner’s Hotel, singing songs that she learned while growing up in Dublin’s Liberties. It isn’t too fanciful a notion of King’s when he says that what happened in the room was “an intimate musical conversation and dialogue that could have taken place 100 years ago. It was intact, there was trust present in a community that had left all the business outside the door, and allowed people to engage in a very emotional, entertaining, funny and fulfilling way.”

King has to go – he’s a busy man – but wouldn’t you know it, here comes a proverb. “There’s a saying: You don’t sing the song, the song sings you.”

There’s another change this year at Other Voices – John Kelly is no longer around; his replacement is last year’s co-host, Annie Mac. Unaffected and enthusiastic, this second time around, all on her ownio, Mac is more in the swing of things.

“I know what to expect – particularly the long days,” she tells The Ticket. “It gets easier when you know what to expect. I had more time to prepare for the bands, and to live with the albums, which is good. Winging it interviewing bands is not a great idea.”

Her favourite bands this year include Temper Trap and Antlers, two decidedly different types of act. “The mixture of bands is great, from mainstream acts like Snow Patrol to really obscure, underground bands that deliver truly challenging music.

“And everyone,” she adds, on a closing note that could well be the innate philosophy of Other Voices, “is given the same time and the same treatment – it’s a great leveller”.

Other Voices: what the artists say

JESCA HOOP

“I’m not sure what to expect, but it seems a family affair. I was in bed last night when I heard music in the lobby, so I came down and they were singing traditional songs. As an American, you are disconnected from traditional music as played by the people your heritage stems back to. So that was a treat.”

FIONN REGAN

“Playing in St James’ church is good; the acoustics and the natural reverberation in the room are great. A room is an instrument, too. I especially like driving over Connor Pass; I get a great charge when I do that.”

CONOR O’BRIEN – VILLAGERS

“I remember doing it with The Immediate and Cathy Davey, and Villagers last year, so this is my fourth time here. I think it’s different from other television shows; Dingle is awesome, an amazing place, and the journey here, just looking out the van window, is like you’re going into a little world of its own.”

RICHARD HAWLEY

“Foxy John’s – I salute you!”

BROTHERS MOVEMENT

“We’ve wanted to do Other Voices for so long. I see it as one of the only shows that matters. I look at it as the Irish Jools Holland, except they interview the acts in very strange locations! We were interviewed in a really old barber’s shop, with swinging chairs and a red and white pole outside.”

SPEECH DEBELLE

“I should have been here before, because I was born on St Patrick’s Day. We went to the church but we haven’t been around too much yet. It seems nice, though, the people are unbelievably friendly here; coming from south London it’s a nice change. You say hello to people and they say hello back to you. In big cities like London, everybody is a stranger, sometimes an enemy.”

• Other Voices commences its weekly broadcast on RTÉ2 next Wednesday February 3rd, with exclusive live sessions and interviews with Snow Patrol, Speech Debelle and Adrian Crowley. The Imro "Other Room" act of the week is Low Mountain. For further details, visit www.othervoices.ie