From violent fist-fights to the death of his sister, there’s a sense that Villagers frontman Conor O’Brien is glad to see the back of his acclaimed debut Becoming a Jackal. As he embarks on his first British tour in support of its follow-up, {Awayland}, he explains why he’s decided to go experimental and make his ‘biggest, most epic statement yet’...
THE TOUR is coming to an ugly end. Shortly before they are due on-stage, tempers are expiring among critically adored Irish five-piece Villagers. And now a fight has broken out. Again.
Alcohol and cabin fever just don’t mix. Suddenly, frontman Conor O'Brien, who is in the middle of the scrap, looks less like the timid and tender twenty-something that we were led to believe he is. Suddenly, Villagers does not fit the box into which it was lazily squeezed.
Fast-forward six months and O’Brien is in less hostile form. It’s December 2012 and the young Dubliner is reflecting on that period that saw his band caught in a vicious circle of playing the same 12 songs for over two years. Such monotony bred contempt that filtered, not just into the band’s personal relationships, but into their live performances as well.
"I think we went on for a little bit too long," O’Brien says decisively, looking back at Villagers' tour of their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album Becoming a Jackal. "I remember those shows at the end that were not good at all. We were playing badly and we were physically beating each other up beforehand… We were just drinking and not playing well."
As we speak, the multi-talented musician is ensconced in his Malahide home on Dublin’s north-east coast. Looking forward to the New Year, he’s almost finished putting himself through the mental mangle of press interviews ahead of Villagers’ much anticipated second album (released last Monday), entitled {Awayland}.
Apparently the process of self-analysis that interviews can often bring has brought him into a state of self-doubt. Just over an hour ago he tweeted: "Final day of interviews/press before Christ's Mass. New year's resolution: try not to pretend to journalists that I know what I'm doing."
Everyone, however, wants to know what the new songs mean. So, as if he had been put before a tag-team of malpracticing psychotherapists, the 29-year-old has been asked to consider time and time again what new insights might be buried deep within his new collection of stories.
Our conversation is no exception. Among other things, he will talk about the emotional outpouring that gave rise to the song about his late sister, Aoife, who died suddenly just days before the release of Becoming a Jackal in May 2010.
The new record, {Awayland}, unveils a band that has changed utterly. Musically and lyrically, it bears little resemblance to Villagers' highly rated first outing. And that is by design.
"With Jackal, by the time we actually got signed, we had toured Ireland four of five times in a year. And then after that we toured for another year and a half," O'Brien says quickly, seemingly satisfied with the narrative that he wants to tell.
"The main songs that stuck out to me where the more melodramatic and emotional ones. But some nights I just really didn't feel like going there.
"That was an interesting thing to learn and then when I started writing these songs I had that in my head. I very much came at it from an I-know-what-I-don't-want-to-do perspective.
"I had no idea of what I wanted to do, so my experience of touring those songs was a bit of a springboard."
As with Villagers' debut, O'Brien wrote all of the demos for {Awayland} himself. But he had grown weary of the "preciousness" of Jackal, which was greeted with the much-repeated cliché that its writer was "an old head on young shoulders".
As his writer's block grew deeper, O'Brien knew at least one thing: Villagers was not about to make a name for itself as yet another raconteur of sad tales of modern malaise, the kind so perfectly - and beautifully - exemplified in tracks like Twenty Seven Strangers.
The best way to avoid that, he concluded, was to write from the point of view of a child, as is reflected on the album's cover.
"That was a project that I had for myself because I didn't really have anything else to latch onto in terms of themes or anything.
"As the songs developed I had a very strong idea that any theme that I wanted to tackle, I needed to come at it from a very naive angle, to see it as I had never experienced it in my life before."
"This time around I am a young head on old shoulders," he adds with a palpably cathartic burst of laughter.
But it would be a mistake to portray this slight-of-frame young man as the archetypal artist, locked in a noble fight against the quotidian and the achievable. The change of direction was also motivated by O’Brien’s own encounters with the pain of loss.
"I have experienced a lot of the things that I was romanticising about in the first album and they are not romantic at all," he explains. "They are horrible."
Of all the horrors to which the singer could be referring, he is talking about one thing in particular. O’Brien’s sister Aoife, who had epilepsy, died suddenly while he was in London preparing for Jackal’s release. That was all he had said about the tragedy until he wrote In a Newfound Land You Are Free.
“Obviously (Aoife’s death) was the biggest thing in my life for the whole period of touring Jackal. It was a very bittersweet feeling of suddenly being on tour but you are actually in the worst part of your life you have ever been in.
“I actually wrote the song in Canada on a boat and performed it that night because I wanted to. I think that is a more positive thing because it is a beautiful thing to be able to do.
“I don't know why I wrote it, but I remember it being quite a fluid experience. I remember just being on a boat and knowing there were three hours ahead, so I took a notebook out and it kind of spilled out while I could see the most beautiful scenery that I have ever seen on the way into Vancouver Island.”
Despite the storybook details in his description of that journey, O’Brien is reticent to acquiesce to cliché. Those three hours were not simply some kind of therapy. Instead, he prefers to see the song as indicative of the change of perspective that was forced upon him by that very tragedy.
“There is a brilliant poem by W. H. Auden called The More Loving One, which has beautiful lines about the stars not caring and learning to live with the divine darkness. That is the way I feel in general about the lyrics on the album.
“They are all about not letting the ups and downs of life make you create a crutch for yourself. Or trying to find an alternative to religion for yourself. Or trying to live with that void and realising that the utter meaninglessness and shortness of our lives is what makes us all the same.”
It is hard to say why, but O’Brien manages to say such things without sounding uninteresting. He doesn’t sound like someone who is groping blindly for profundity. He sounds convinced.
While Newfound Land is stained with experience, Earthly Pleasure is closer to the self-imposed brief for {Awayland}. With every sentence, O’Brien’s description of the song sounds more and more like something that a child might conjure up ex nihilo.
"I think I have always had a strong imagination. I like to take things places," he says, clearly happier to talk about this topic.
"Earthly Pleasure was the most fun thing that I have ever had to make because it is about a man being naked on a toilet while his world breaks down. Then he finds himself in the Brazilian War of Independence and he has to shoot people with a gun.
"Then he suddenly shoots someone and realises the primal feeling of actually killing another human being and is confronted by his imaginary creator who is a goddess figure.
"And she lets him down because she is too busy doing her make-up. So he realises his mortality and puts his clothes back on."
Perhaps the message is not clear in this particular story, but in general {Awayland} will disappoint those looking for another lyrical and musical dose of fatalism.
The last part of that claim is important. It is not only the lyrics of {Awayland} that mark its departure from Jackal. In fact, the music has undergone an even more thoroughgoing revolution.
ASIDE from O'Brien's own need to "learn new techniques" and "develop as an artiste" for the prospect of a second album to remain attractive, the album sounds radically different because Villagers is no longer "a solo vehicle for Conor O'Brien".
This time around, the frontman is just that. O’Brien may have provided the raw material, but the finished product bears the mark of all five men, something for which the frontman is thankful.
"The demos for this album were very different. They all sounded like (first single) The Waves.
"But we got rid of most of it when recording the actual versions because some of it sounded like a My First Electronics Kit kind of thing. It was a little bit amateur sounding.
"Other parts were not adding anything to the songs… They were all groovy experiments really.”
If music genres were put on a map, ‘groovy experiments’ would be some distance from the painful seriousness of Jackal. It makes one wonder whether O’Brien might have been under a certain kind of influence while imagining up those demos.
“I smoked the odd joint while I was writing,” he replies. “But that was about it.”
In stark contrast to the behind-the-scenes clashes that had come to make up the end of the Jackal tour, the studio scenes that O’Brien describes are populated with enthusiastic colleagues working towards the common good.
In one case, he remembers saying "make that song gloopy" to bandmate Cormac Curran, the music teacher who could "translate that into the mechanics of music". In another, he talks about their collective decision to nuance their snare sounds by putting towels on them.
"I said to them all: 'Let's make this the biggest, most epic statement that we possibly can because who knows, maybe we will be too tired to do it again in a few years,'" O'Brien adds with another quiet laugh.
{Awayland} is, ultimately, a risk. It is hard to picture the crowds that gathered to hear Villagers perform the likes of I Saw the Dead as being impressed by My Lighthouse and Rhythm Composer.
And that is a possibility to which the band members have already been alerted. When {Awayland}'s first single, The Waves, hit YouTube, the fans were waiting. And they were not happy.
“I was mastering the album on the same day that The Waves came out and one of the guys texted me to ask if I had seen YouTube yet and I said: "No, not yet, I'm busy."
“He responded with: "They are saying it's like Dylan's gone electric”. It was very negative. People were like: 'Ah lads, what are you doing? You have betrayed us. The purity of the acoustic guitar is no longer. Where's the honesty?'"
But O'Brien remains unmoved in his positivity.
"There is a real sense of optimism in the camp at the moment," he declares. "Everyone is buzzing to go on tour because we felt like those new songs really energised the new audiences when we were supporting Grizzly Bear, much more than the other ones did."
It is fitting that O'Brien should refer back to Villagers' debut. While Jackal was a tight and rigorously professional record, {Awayland} is loose and in need of manipulation.
So when O'Brien takes to the stage on the first night of the {Awayland} tour, he might, for example, allow his recent infatuation with bossa nova visionary João Gilberto to shine through. The next night he could be channelling Julee Cruise, another of his current favourites.
At the very least, Villagers can now be more than "the timid and tender twenty-something Conor O'Brien". That, perhaps, is the real reason why the band's frontman speaks about {Awayland} with such enthusiasm.
It is certainly why he believes that those intra-band brawls and those sorry-sounding gigs will be left in the past.
Villagers play The Wardrobe, Leeds (February 12); Gorilla, Manchester (13); The Institute, Birmingham (14); The Trinity Centre, Bristol (16); TOM - The Old Market, Hove (17); Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth (18); Village Underground, London (20 & 21)
