An Irish actor of some note, recently having starred in romantic comedy One Night In Bath, homelessness drama Love Without Walls (for which he wrote the soundtrack) and due to be seen alongside Steve Coogan playing Irish world cup team goalkeeper Alan Kelly in Saipan, McNamee now makes his debut as a singer-songwriter with Glass And Mirrors via his own label. Describing himself as “a romantic football fan who writes songs” with influences ranging from The Pogues and Christy Moore to Coldplay, the album draws on life as a struggling artist living in London and, as such, opens with ‘Clapham Wine’, a drinking in consolation number written for a friend following a break-up, which, arranged for piano and guitar with cello and fiddle, lays out his Irish DNA and vocal brogue as it builds in power as the emotional pain fades (“Now I sip on all the new days/ I think about you less/Sat up on my mountain in Inverness”).
Again anchored by piano with fiddle and cello colourings, ‘Another Life’ with its soaring title refrain is a what might have been ballad (“In another life/We grew so old and we danced all night/You were my morning light /The warm of spring when the winter bites… You were my darling wife/My blushing bride in another life”).
Continuing down the path of broken relationships and painful memories, it arrives at the broken mirror on ‘Donegal Hill’ with its bruised romanticism (“at the loch I see the room where we laid/The pub we drank/The day we sank /As my football team played/And we were waiting on our friends’ wedding day”), now a reflection of how things fell apart (“The broken mirror, by the castle, up in Donegal/It is still broken as I am”).
The mood’s no cheerier on the falsetto-sung personal scars carved into ‘Leave My Home’ and its weary acceptance that “It’s pointless to remain/Within the place you know/The people and their faces know your show” and the admission “I was in the wrong… It broke me to leave my home/I loved her in the end/I loved her at the start/I miss her in my bed and in my heart/And when I read a joke/That she would like to hear/There’s mayhem in the space between my ears”.
Ronan Stewart on Uilleann pipes and whistle, the tinkling piano Irish waltzer ‘Even The Moon Belongs To You’ is also looking back on things lost (“I’m sad that the French place is gone/It’s a corner of time where my heart does belong/You by the light of a candle/It’s not a thought I find easy to handle”), the lyric nodding to Irish folklore with a reference to Gráinne Mhaol, a woman of notable power in sixteenth-century Ireland who earned her Gaelic nickname after shaving off her hair when her father refused to take her on a trading expedition to Spain because it would get caught in the ropes.
Featuring Luke Maher on piano and trumpet, the strummed title track concerns a dark period in his life, plagued with self-doubt (“strings on wood and skin tied set to play/But I am scared to touch them”) and the feeling he’d wasted his life (“Staring out a window, isn’t walking through a door… there’s not extra time/No subs from the line”) and everyone could see the misery behind the masks.
While the bulk of the album is cast in ballad shapes, there are more raucous moments, the first, again with trumpet and pipes, coming with ‘Wokingham’, its urgent rhythmic drive reflecting the heart giddy feeling and fire of being in love (“I’m a very lucky boy that you fell to me from the sky”), even if the object of desire is currently unattainable (“let me know, if you and your sound fella fall apart/I’ll jump any height across the world to go and catch your heart…Oh I bet you’re so in love with him, he’s rich or something/Is he?”). There’s a lovely note too in his talking of flirtation through shared musical tastes (“I lay down with you and hummed the tune of Isle of Innisfree/Then you said you liked the sound of Frank/We shared a favourite ode/We both delighted one for my baby and one more for the road”). And, as the line “I don’t think much of Shakespeare/You don’t think much of your father” shows, he’s got a wry whimsical streak too.
Fuelled by pipes, drums, penny whistle and bodhran, that’s followed by another rouser in the form of the Pogues-punchy punk shanty ‘Magpie With A Mullet’ (“Down in Westport harbour, /There’s a rake of things to do/There’s a shop/John Lennon’s island /And there’s time to think of you/There’s the lighthouse and a boxing club, and an island sunset too/There’s a magpie with a mullet/And he talks of only you”) and, again a line in matching humour (“I went sit and eat a bacon sandwich by the sea/When the magpie with a mullet landed down and spoke to me/Now don’t you miss your love he said/She’d love it here with you/ I said /You’re right fuck off but also that’s a lovely mullet too”), even if it turns out to be a song about the narrator drowning himself after being dumped.
Clocking in at six minutes, written when he just 17, the Christy Moore influences evident along with a touch of Van, ‘Clones Fireman’, with just piano, cello and Fabrizio Toccaceli’s guitar, was inspired by the story of his grandparents who met a week before she moved to England. Pen pals for five years, when they lost touch he, the County Monaghan fireman of the title, decided to go over and find her. Unsure if she was in London or Birmingham, he flipped a coin at Holyhead and ended up in the West Midlands, where fate reunited them for a long life together (“50 years down the line/He’s collecting me from school on time/Every Monday night, a dinner, talking of the rare auld times/Nights in pubs with mulligans and talking of the scene/McGuigan’s titles, and times of the boys in green/And she’s bickering and moaning /But you still see that smile/He’s still the boy from Clones”).
There’s more romance glowing on ‘Falling In Love For The Day’ which, with tin whistle, fiddle and cello, is, as the title says, about an impetuous passion for someone you’ve just met, and planning out a future despite potential obstacles (“My family won’t like you and I won’t like yours/But I’ll see the romance in that story of course/How you’re made of gold and I’m just made of bricks/And we differ in class, fuck your dad’s politics”).
That doomed mismatch notion also informs the autobiographical ‘Rose Of Marylebone’, a jangly guitar song about how he fell in love with a girl from a wealthy background and the nice part of town, he a bit of rough driving her around in his crappy van, but how, feeling out of her league, it never came to anything when it ironically might well have done (“I told her I’d wished that I’d said my piece/When I dropped her home before/She recalled, in her gut, butterflies/Said after I left her in town and she was sat alone/She did yearn for my return straight back to Marylebone”).
Glass And Mirrors ends with a final twin fiddle and bodhran belter, ‘Man Complete’, a number (with another nod to Sinatra) about him getting his shit together (“I’m ghostly gouling selfish fooling all over the fucking place… I’ve lost the patience with myself/I’ve lost the day to do be do be do/So grab my hand/Grab my seat/And sit me down/On the soil of man complete”). This album is ample proof that he most certainly has.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.niallmcnamee.com
‘Another Life’ – official video:
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.