Q&A: Mick Flannery
On stage fright and Lisa Hannigan
Friday November 20 2009
You've been very open about your terrible stage fright in the past. Do you still sweat ice-water before a show?
It depends on the gig really. Strangely enough, if I've been somewhere before it's not too bad. Although if it's a big place like Vicar Street, I still get very nervous.
I'm reliably informed that you used to get so nervous you'd throw up in your dressing room.
It wasn't really on a regular basis. That was very early on. I haven't puked in a while now. You'd get the shakes, like. Sometimes you can have done something the evening before that hasn't helped the situation.
Such as staying up all night boozing?
We're the least rock and roll band in the world. We can hardly put two gigs together. We kind of take the piss out of ourselves the first night -- staying up until six o'clock in the morning and ruining the second gig. Then the third show is just a daze.
You spent some time knocking about the New York singer-songwriter circuit. Apparently, it didn't agree with you.
My sister was there for the first month. She's a lot more pro-active than me. She helped me out and got me some gigs and made up some demo CDs and fliers and everything. Then she left and I didn't continue with the same spark. No good came out of it really, except maybe for the performance experience.
And you lived in hipster central, aka Williamsburg, Brooklyn ...
Yeah, I fucking hated it. It was expensive. Me and another guy had gone over and we didn't have a lot of money. We were drinking through what cash we had. I suppose I was too normal for the place ...
Well, it's basically crawling with posers.
That's what I thought. I just wanted to punch a lot of people. One time, we were eating breakfast in a bar and this guy came in with a book and a hat and a walking stick. He was about 20 and he's limping -- and he's got this designer walking stick ...
I'm annoyed already ...
He sits down and tells the barmaid that the book is changing his life. He's into whatever... theatre and drama. And he wants to know what's she doing later and shit like that. He gets up after his fucking mocha-cinno or whatever he's drinking and forgets he has a limp and walks straight out of the bar. I just wanted to give him a limp.
And then you played a whole bunch of singer-songwriter nights in Greenwich Village ...
It get a bit cliquey. It's a bit fake, the whole thing. You pat everyone's back and everyone pats your back and you don't know who to believe. Basically, you are waiting for your turn to talk -- and nobody is listening. They're all waiting for their turn as well.
You played a few times in the Sidewalk Café, spiritual home of the so-called 'anti-folk' scene (Adam Green, Regina Spektor, etc).
That was one of the bigger ones. There'd be 80 people there. It would go from eight at night to three in the morning. To be honest, I found those people pretentious and up their own ass.
Okay, enough about slappable scenesters. Closer to home, you duetted with Lisa Hannigan last Christmas ...
Yeah that came about through the Tony Fenton show on Today FM. They were setting up Christmas duets. The two of us were paired together after basically being drawn randomly out of a hat.
Apparently, you're a bit of a poker enthusiast.
I'd go down to the casino and play. I enjoy it, definitely, but you'd want to be in the right frame of mind. When I go in, I don't like to lose. I don't want to go in if I've had a few pints or I'm in bad form. I've had a couple of good nights when I limited my losses. And if I lose a certain amount, I'll leave it. I won't bother chasing ...
A special edition of White Lies by Mick Flannery is out now
- Ed Power
Irish Independent
