Interview: Villagers

Villagers, whom we recently featured in our Ragged Recommends section, are unquestionably one of the most exciting bands that emerged on the Irish music scene last year. Despite having only played their first show in November, the band's handful of demos and live appearances have already attracted favourable attention from many of the music heads of Dublin - the audience at the show Ragged Words attended included a few bloggers and members of other bands including Jape (already a big fan) and Delorentos.

This might seem out of the ordinary were it not for the fact that the band's central figure is Conor O'Brien, previously of The Immediate, whose surprise break-up in mid-2007 disappointed and shocked the many who considered them to be one of the most distinctive and accomplished groups in an often-stagnant Irish scene. The story of Villagers starts with the earlier band, therefore: it was in The Immediate that O'Brien grew as a musician and songwriter, and in a sense, Villagers started on the day The Immediate broke up.

O'Brien, had been writing songs together with the band's co-founder Dave Hederman (and later Pete Toomey) since their school days; The Immediate evolved slowly throughout their years of school and college, and took a long time to develop the ambition and focus of a band aspiring to challenge for a wide audience. By the time they were ready to make that challenge, he suggests, they were feeling the pressure of unspoken internal struggle as life was pulling its members in different directions: "When you're in a band pretty much since childhood, you don't necessarily question whether it's what you want to do your whole life. The last few months were weird, things weren't right but nobody could really say anything about it…like a relationship ending really."

He'd known something was coming, but the sudden and total collapse of the band couldn't have been expected. "I started writing the next day, pretty much, out of a kind of shock, as a nervy response. Afterwards I realised that it happened at the best possible time for our sanity". A few weeks later, with news of the band's demise spreading, he got a call from Cathy Davey inviting him to be her guitarist. He liked her music but was hesitant at first, and the idea of getting up on stage so soon again with different people seemed strange, but it was a chance to keep playing music, and perhaps the only option that made sense at the time – "I partly did it for something to do, then kept doing it and started to write on my own in my own time".

His own songs started to come together, and with it the ambition to play them live. Having gained experience recording The Immediate's demos, he was well-placed to start realising his own ideas. The change necessitated a new approach, however, as he had to get used to writing alone ("the idea of starting a songwriting partnership with someone else seemed ridiculous") and his newfound solitude began to be reflected in the style of composition: "I let myself go a bit, in a good way: it became more personal, I put more of myself in there. With a band sometimes you're embarrassed to bring in certain things, but this way you just write it all and only present it to a band at the final stage."

The songs evolved slowly, and as he tells it, went through a lengthy gestation period: he claims that each song "takes about a year to make", explaining how one song, ‘Pieces‘ (a highlight of their recent shows, see video below) went from being a 4/4 folky, plucked acoustic number to the slowed-down, 3/4, almost doo-wop groove it has become, through countless revision. "You start off with the energy and the idea, but then to make the song really hit home you need to add all these layers and go through all these different processes…and maybe strip away those processes again, but by then it's changed". The songs certainly benefit from this, and come off as fully realised entities, fleshed-out pieces with a structural and melodic integrity born of constant attention.

Villagers, in fact, seems like more of pet project, a mutual collaboration, than a band: the EP was engineered by guitarist Tommy McLaughlin, and is being put out by drummer James Byrne on his own label Any Other City. The band will have a rotating cast, as its current members have other commitments (such as playing with their own bands Berkley and One Day International, as well as with Cathy Davey). The thought of future conflicts of interest doesn't seem to bother him, and it may even be a relief to be avoiding the intensity of a committed band, keeping the responsibility on his own shoulders: "I'd like to keep the line-up quite loose, to have more flexibility. That's liberating, but also kind of scary."

Villagers looks set, therefore, to be something at once complicated and simple - "a changeable creature", as he puts it, and yet fundamentally the same: a man, his guitar, his songs and friends. For the moment, O'Brien's ambitions are simply to stay independent, keep writing songs, and keep making music. We'll be listening with interest.

Villagers' debut EP, "Hollow Kind", will be released on Any Other City in February.