IN THE Hollywood version of his life, Brian Deady would be depicted as the kid who sought refuge from a troubled home life in the record collection of his parents, drinking in the soul albums of Al Green and Otis Redding, marvelling at Smokey Robinson, rushing home from school to hear Marvin Gaye.
The real-life version is a little less sepia-tinted. “I got into the Prodigy at 15 and it changed my life,” the tall, blue-eyed Corkman laughs, as he pulls up a chair in a bustling Cork city centre hotel, shaking the rain from his sleeves. “Then I got into the Dre stuff that was hot at the time; Doggystyle, the album. I got into soul by tracing the thread of the samples all of those rappers used.”
The people around us hunched over their mugs of tea seem unaware of it, but one of Ireland’s most talented musicians is in their midst. Despite a lack of marketing or even the backing of a record label or PR company, Deady’s star is finally beginning to ascend, thanks to his recently released second album, Non-Fiction. Its lead single, Clap Both My Hands, is a jaunty little soul-pop number that has been dominating Irish radio stations for the past couple of months.
One of the most remarkable things about the Skibbereen native is his rich, deep soul voice, brimming with character and sounding like it’s been steeped in a vat of whiskey and caramel. Now 37, he started “messing around with words” that would eventually become rudimentary songs at 15 or 16. “The radio was always on at home, and I got a lot of comfort from music,” he says. “But I never really got into playing an instrument. I played the tin whistle at school and hated it. At 13, I won a poetry competition. I thought I was going to win a car or a house or something, but I came out of the Skibbereen library with a box of watercolour paints.”
Deady is what you might call an unlikely success story. The second eldest of 10 children, his family broke apart when he was 15. “I kind of drifted for a little while, and that wasn’t working, so I went into foster care,” he says. “But I was too old for that and I couldn’t settle. My family situation was all over the place; my father moved to Cork, my mother was still nursing kids and she had her own troubles, so there was no security at all.
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“I left foster care, came back home, but that didn’t work . . . so I went back to the social services and told them I essentially didn’t have anywhere to live. There was a B&B up the road that I liked. I said, ‘Can I live there?’ They said, ‘OK.’ So I moved into a B&B at 15. It was a weird time, obviously, but at least I had some security.”
He is matter-of-fact about his past, refusing to use it as an excuse, or to look for pity. “I was lucky, in a way,” he shrugs. “I know other people who were in similar circumstances and who didn’t have that net of security, or didn’t have things fall into the right place for them.”
He was always told he had talent as a singer, but pursuing music didn’t seem like a viable career. At 17, he did spend some time busking on the streets of Cork, having learnt “about six chords” on the guitar. “I suppose I must have been trying to pursue some musical path,” he says, smiling. “[The past 20 years have] been different configurations of trying to go after music.”
After years in various jobs and on the dole, Deady eventually wrote what would become his debut album, Interview, released in 2009.
“When I look back at the subject matter and the style of what I was actually trying to make — it was me, but it hadn’t been developed,” he says. “I was only presenting a certain side of things. It wasn’t entirely me; I hadn’t dug. I thought, ‘OK, my sound is an R&B guy,’ and I was being an R&B guy because of that. There was some of the soul and gospel stuff that’s on Non-Fiction. There was also synth-pop R&B, 1980s throwback R&B, so it was an intermediate kind of sound. I think that’s possibly part of the reason I hadn’t crossed over or broken out. I hadn’t figured myself out, either.”
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The “digging”, as he puts it, began in earnest a few years ago. Living in west Cork, he spent most of 2013 releasing home-recorded doo-wop versions of popular songs, including a cover of Future Islands’ Seasons (Waiting on You) that proved to be a hit online.
“During that time, I really learnt about arrangements because I was taking all the songs apart and putting them back together with vocals,” he says. “I got to develop my vocal sound a lot more. When I finished that, I thought, ‘Jesus, I’ve got a lot to write about.’ It was like there was a switch, and I changed what I could talk about. Maybe it was [that] I allowed myself to talk about other things.”
Non-Fiction’s title is telling. Alongside the foot-stomping soul-pop of Clap Both My Hands are songs such as Betty and September, spellbinding tales of love and loss. Others, like the album standout Dad, are raw, emotional portrayals of a difficult relationship with his estranged father, sparked by unexpectedly seeing him at a bus stop.
His family are “delighted” with his recent success, “because they’ve also seen how hard I’ve worked and how dedicated I’ve been to it”, he says. “I haven’t spoken to my dad. I don’t see him or have a relationship with him, really. But I’m sure he’s supportive of it on some level.”
It’s Deady’s honesty and unwillingness to shy away from the personal that lend Non-Fiction the authenticity that is so rarely heard in modern music. Coupled with that powerhouse voice and the no-fuss arrangements, you can see why even Chic’s Nile Rodgers said that he was “becoming our No 1 favourite act in Ireland”. Deady responds by laughing: “We’ve supported him three times. We’d want to be more than ‘becoming’ at this point.” With crowds positively piling on the bandwagon, 2016 is beginning to look like a big year for Deady.
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The queueing for post-gig selfies (“Surreal — I thought it only happened to One Direction,” he laughs) has begun. Interview picked up some radio support in America from the influential KCRW station and he’s hoping to capitalise by going to the States with Non-Fiction. At the moment, he is doing everything — PR, management, distribution, driving — and he’s “sick of it now”, he says, rolling his eyes and laughing. “I’ve been driving around CDs to Golden Discs for the last two weeks. They can’t keep them in the stores, but I’m just like, ‘Oh, I don’t care any more. Just do whatever you want.’”
The songs do, as he puts it, have the “ability to travel”, so there is no reason still to focus on the Irish aspect of Deady’s music, although the west Cork twang to his speaking voice surprises. Nor does he want to be seen as just a “soul throwback” — the contemporary and experimental edge of several album tracks put paid to that notion.
“If it was all ‘baby baby’ and I was singing love songs, it could be perceived as that kind of act. But when people saw the lyrics were real and there was a real story there, I think that kind of fits with the sound,” he says.
“It’s not just one emotion that’s in the album; there’s joy, sadness. The songs have power and authenticity and people are really gripped by them. You can see it at the gigs; it’s powerful. People want to support it and they’ve lived part of it themselves; they recognise it because it’s part of them, too,” he says, smiling. “It’s Non-Fiction doing exactly what you want it to do. It’s quite mad, like.”
Brian Deady tours Mar 11-27; briandeady.com