Not Playing The Fame Game

By Joe Kavanagh

Several interesting, if somewhat predictable facts, emerged from a recent survey of 18- to 25-year-olds in America, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Asked to decide from an array of five goals in life, two choices emerged head and shoulders above all others: fame and money.

A full 81% chose "to get rich", with "to be famous" coming second with 51%, while the remaining three choices (helping people, becoming leaders in the community, becoming more spiritual) only attracted 30%, 22% and 10% respectively.

Nor is this tendency toward greediness and megalomania a purely American phenomena, as evidenced in a recent analysis of British children under 10-years-old.

When asked to name "the very best thing in the world", the top three choices were, rather depressingly, "being a celebrity", "good looks" and "being rich", easily beating out other options such as "family", "friends" and "being healthy".

Whereas polls in the 1950s and 1960s consistently saw children name professions like fireman, teacher, cop, nurse and doctor as what they would like to be when they grow up, the vast majority now name fame as their sole aspiration, without even describing how they would attain that fame, i.e. as a singer, actor, writer etc.

Fame is currently the hottest commodity in this world to the wrinkle-free masses (those with Botox don't count, much as they might like to), which is utterly remarkable considering it barely existed a hundred years ago, and was scantly considered a career in and of itself even two decades ago.

Facts such as these make the subject of this week's column all the more remarkable.

Only 25-years-old, he has already created a huge stir on the Irish music scene, as evidenced by his recent Meteor Music Award for Best Irish Male, but rather than embrace his increasingly adoring public, he is virtually repulsed by the very notion of fame.

While most young artists crave the spotlight, one might require a searchlight to find this hesitant budding star, a man whose relationship with the public eye could probably be best described as tempestuous.

Ironically, for one who has trouble exchanging convivial banalities to strangers, Mick Flannery was raised on a farm in Blarney, County Cork, growing up the son of a mathematician father and a music loving mother.

To say their family is talented is to master the understatement, given that his sister, Sarah, won both the Irish and European, Young Scientist of the Year Award, for creating the Cavley-Purser algorithm, which, although subsequently discovered to be somewhat flawed, remains an important mathematical breakthrough.

Sarah Flannery also co-wrote a mathematical book with her father, In Code, a set of achievements that were enough to see a set of lights on the city's famed St Patrick's Street, in Cork City, named in her honor - all before she was 20-years-old!

Mick, however, followed in the footsteps of his singer/guitarist mother, and often joined her at pub "lock-ins" with her family in Killarney, where aunts and uncles would indulge in all manner of musical revelry.

Taking up piano and guitar (the latter which he plays upside down in true Jimi Hendrix, left-handed fashion), he was inspired to write his own music after catching Nirvana's moving unplugged version of David Bowie's Man Who Sold The World.

In fact, his very first original composition, Mad Man's Road, a third person story about war veterans walking to and from an asylum near his home, remains in his set to this day.

Captivated by his muse, he left school and took a class studying music in a local college in Cork, where he truly learned the craft of songwriting, and toiled on what would eventually become his self-produced, self-released debut: Mick Flannery EP.

Inspired by the likes of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell, he also began work on what he initially intended to be a musical, though he soon shelved the idea after discovering that he was unable to write believable lyrics and parts for all of the characters.

Fearing that the project was becoming too contrived, he instead transformed it into a concept album which tells the story of a week in the lives of a woman and a pair of gambling, boozing brothers.

Working in a studio provided by a family friend, he once again produced all the tracks and called on singer Karen O'Doherty to provide contrast and accompaniment to his own raspy vocals.

The resultant self-released album, Evening Train, was nothing short of a revelation upon its release in 2005, offering evidence of a superb songwriter with wisdom and nous far beyond his years.

Flannery's world-weary, absorbing lyrics, and guttural vocals inspired immediate comparisons to the likes of the aforementioned Waits and Ray Lamontagne, with one reviewer notably describing his voice as sounding "like a razzled old soak from some junk New Orleans neighborhood who has been terminally affected by the blues and just can't get himself a break in this lousy, two-bit life."

Encouraged by such endorsements, he entered two of his compositions in an international songwriting competition based in Nashville, Tennessee, and went on to win two awards, with track In The Gutter winning Best Song, while The Tender won Best Lyrics.

The success moved him to relocate to New York, where, armed with idealistic notions of the city's swinging 60s heyday, he attempted to make an impression on the local folk circuit.

The reality proved comprehensively different to the dream, as the cut-throat fakery and notoriously pretentiousness that can often typify today's New York folk circuit, grated on Flannery's utterly unaffected manner, as he once explained: "I found it a bit weird on the old music scene because I was just going to open mic nights and it's quite competitive like, but it's not really an audience, it's more like a room full of f***ing songwriters, hoping that you're not really good, waiting for their turn. It's like amateur X-Factor, without anyone paying attention to it."

Returning to Ireland after three months, he continued gigging around the country, building a reputation as Cork's best kept secret, until the secret eventually got out after he opened for fellow Corkonian, John Spillane, in 2007.

So taken was the latter that he talked his management company into signing Flannery and only months later, he was signed to a three-album deal with Sony Records.

Major label involvement saw him enter the studio with a producer for the first time in his career, a circumstance that inspired tremendous tension, as Flannery stuck steadfastly to his ideals, in the face of pressure to adopt a more pop edge.

Some compromise can be heard in the resultant album, White Lies, which appeared in September of last year and exhibited a certain amount of polish that was perhaps absent from his previous effort.

It nonetheless retained the rugged soul of Evening Train, and offers evidence of an artist that promises to be something special, genuinely capable of making waves that wash up on overseas shores.

Entering the Irish charts at #6, the album has since gone on to receive a nomination for Ireland's Choice Music Prize and while it was beaten out by Jape (a.k.a. Richie Egan), Flannery got a notable mention in the victory speech when Egan claimed: "Sure my mother even told me that Mick Flannery was going to win, she said you're good, Ritchie, but he's gorgeous."

Only weeks later he would make up for the loss by winning the abovementioned Meteor Award for Best Irish Male.

Through it all, Flannery has remained entirely nonplussed by his escalating profile, at once providing some of the most honest interviews ever conducted in the Irish music press, even as he loathes every minute of them.

It speaks to the man that throughout all of this success, he has maintained his job as a stone mason, a career which one gets the sense that he is distinctly more comfortable with, given his enormously down-to-earth nature.

His frankness, candor and utter lack of pretension is a breath of pure fresh air in a business where hot air is usually the order of the day; a state of affairs that will hopefully never change.

Ironically, however, like his sister before him, Mick Flannery is now the owner of a flawed equation: the more accomplished he becomes at pursuing what he loves the closer it brings him to residing a world he will almost certainly abhor.