FOR A YOUNG man of 24, Daithí Ó Drónaí (best known by just his first name) is something of a veteran of the Irish dance music scene.
His parents and grandparents, who live in the Burren area of Co. Clare, near Doolin, are all traditional Irish music mad, and from the outset it seemed Daithí would go down the same route.
He picked up the fiddle at a young age, and was taught by his family, never learning to read music, just to play by ear, which enabled him to approach sound from a different angle later on.
“It gave me an edge to pick things up by ear. I do a lot of producing now which is a very different game altogether. It helped a lot because I could listen to different styles and sounds because my ear was trained to do that.”
Described as a “fiddle-playing, house music-making, loopstation-tweaking, button-pushing, hair-flicking bundle of energy” Daithí is as high-octane as the music he makes. He talks a mile a minute, speeding through what was actually a slow and steady transition from trad to house (with a small pit stop as a bass player in a heavy metal band along the way).
He studied TV and Radio at college in the Irish-speaking area of Carraroe but half way through his course he realised he was more interested in playing music and today gigging and recording is his full time job, as well as his all-consuming passion.
As a teenager, when playing the fiddle lost its appeal, he found himself drawn to the speed and the groves of dance music. It was only later on he saw a way to marry the two, a move that has become his stamp, his signature.
“The fiddle wasn’t being used a lot,” he says speaking about the time he picked it up again, but he found the instrument was a way to interact with the crowd.
“I see a lot of dance and electronic acts behind their laptops the whole time and it’s very impersonal. It’s hard to draw people in so I use the fiddle almost as a dance move. You are using it to perform and then I try to use as much of the elements live as possible…people really get into it.”
The tricky part about his unique infusion of the traditional and the technological is getting Irish trad into dance without making it cheesy.
“You don’t want it to turn into Cotton Eye Joe,” he laughs, but traditional music has also given him a vast and untouched playground. “There is a massive library of Sean-nós singers…a big bank that no one has gone near. It’s fun.”
Ask anyone who has seen Daithí live at big festival gigs like Castlepalooza or Electric Picnic, or even in tiny rural venues like Adams pub in Dingle, Co. Kerry where dancers jumped up on the bar, will tell you it’s impossible to stand listen and stay still.
He describes the feeling of playing live as “better than any drug” adding that being in front of large crowds is “always what I wanted to do.”
But after the crescendo, surely there must be a post-show comedown? “I’ll come off stage feeling like a million bucks,” he explains, “but by the time I’ve packed up all my gear and I’m back in the car I’m wrecked.”
In 2014, signed to Sony Music Ireland, Daithí released his debut album In Flight, a project that was three years in the making.
Featuring collaborations with tipped-for-big-things but relatively unknown vocalists (including London-based Irish singer Raye) it was built with one goal — to get people dancing. “That’s how I wrote it, that’s how I thought about it. It’s what I would like to hear if I was on a dancefloor.”
The label must have been doing cartwheels, I say, knowing that they had signed an artist with an unapologetic pop sensibility. He agrees. “That’s what I like in dance music; I was fascinated with getting everything down to three minutes and making this short, sweet beautiful thing.”
Despite the Sony backing, the album was made in Cork, in a mate’s parents’ garage. “With dance you don’t need the big flashy studios anymore, you can build the whole thing in any studio and it can sound good.”
The album has enjoyed radio play in Britain and Ireland but 2015 is set to be a bigger year for Daithí. And it’s a good time to be in dance music.
Ireland is, as he says, quite “band heavy”, not many people are doing pop-fused dance music, so he has a USP, and with the likes of Disclosure now headlining massive festivals like Primavera, dance music is having a renaissance.
When he started out at age 19, it was a different story. Festivals were great for attracting passerby audiences, but his gigs often started with an empty tent. For the last two or three years, he’s had large crowds waiting for the show to start.
The next step in taking his music further than home — releasing the album in Britain and the US and a string of gigs in 2015. He’s loved playing London and Liverpool before and is hoping the reception will be as good here as it has been at home. “The album had good coverage in UK blogs so the interest is there.”
Last question, for a man responsible for making so many people get up and dance, how would he rate his own moves? “As a dancer I’m terrible, but it doesn’t matter,” he jokes.
