Villagers to bring their Fever Dreams to The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea for Covid-delayed show | Big Interview

These are songs with the strange, melted shapes and the magical ambivalence of dreams. The intent of Conor O’Brien’s songs – O’Brien is essentially Villagers – is both mysterious and as clear as a bell.

His fifth studio album in this guise, the Irishman also has a string of accolades under his belt including two Ivor Novello Awards, two Mercury Music Prize nominations and is a previous winner of Ireland’s Choice Music Prize.

The Guide caught up with Conor on a Zoom call while the performer was in Berlin visiting friends.

So, given the album’s overarching theme, did you set out with a course in mind or did it develop as you worked on the album?

‘Probably more so the latter. As with all of the albums, I try to work as much as possible that the album directs me, more than me directing the album.

‘With this one it was very social, and I ended up recording lots of weird little jams with the band and I went through lots of ideas that I only half figured out, which I'd never really done before with a Villagers’ album, so everything that happened to it in terms of the tone, happened quite naturally.’

Much of the album was recorded in sessions back in 2019 and early 2020.

‘When the pandemic happened and it wasn't quite finished so there were lots of weird sessions in my little tiny attic studio, adding loads of tape warbles, making it a bit more delirious sounding. It's half by design and half something which happened itself.’

Did the Covid lockdowns have an impact on the album?

Do you think it would have turned out differently if you could have finished the album sessions with your band?

‘Well, we had booked what we called our final session, and that very final session was the first day of lockdown, so it seemed quite apt. But I think, knowing me, we probably would have had about five more “last” sessions,’ he laughs.

‘I think it worked out. There's a couple of tunes on it that have to change drastically when we play them live, like the title track because that was very much a studio project, and the drums were a looped sample, and the strings are quite central to it. It was a string player in Ireland called Gareth Quinn Redmond, who's a violin player and we were working remotely over lockdown.

‘So those songs will definitely sound quite different when we do them, but I kind of like that – it's sort of a document of the time for me.’

Did any of the songs change much from their pre-pandemic versions to what ended up on the album?

‘There were parts of some songs written during lockdown – particularly Full Faith in Providence, the really quiet song towards the end of the album. We did a full-band epic version of that and it was really not hitting the mark at all. It was trying to sound like Exit Music by Radiohead,’ he laughs at the memory, ‘and it didn't work at all. I reworked that a bit, and I definitely rerecorded all of it through the pandemic, because I remember the absolute silence around the apartment. It was right at the start of the first lockdown and it allowed me to play lots of piano and sing really quietly into a [portable recording device] Zoom Recorder, and that's the version that ended up on the album.’

In terms of finishing the album, Conor says lockdown actually hit at ‘the perfect time’ for him.

‘I'm kind of an obsessive person – when I'm halfway through making music, I can't really think about anything else until the album's finished, so when lockdown hit, I was about to enter my own little lockdown anyway.

‘It just emboldened me even more. And the themes of the album, like escapism, and trying to bust down these psychological boxes we might find ourselves getting into as we grow older, I think that just became even more pronounced when there was an actual box,’ he chuckles.

The influences on Fever Dreams

As always with Villagers projects, inspiration for the album came in from all angles, from night swimming on a Dutch island to satirist Flann O’Brien, radical feminist and civil right activist and writer Audre Lorde, director David Lynch, artist LS Lowry, via the library music of Piero Umiliani and Alessandro Alessandroni and jazz from Duke Ellington and Alice Coltrane.

‘That side of jazz is a bit newer to me – that spiritual side, and I got really into that during lockdown. There were new ashram recordings of Alice Contrane’s brought out which were amazing and I was really inspired by that. Her use of synthesisers in a really seamless way was unbelievable.’

It was wanting to know who played the trumpet solo on Elvis Costello’s version of the classic Shipbuilding – Chet Baker – which first switched a young O’Brien on to jazz.

‘I always thought big band jazz was kind of old-fashioned and boring, but then I realised recently, only in the last five years or so, how genius Duke Ellington was – he's pretty much become one of my favourite ever arrangers, and the recordings he did in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s and well into the ’60s, even, were just amazing.

‘I just really like the discipline in that kind of music. I'm not a jazz musician, so it sounds really magical to me – I never developed the licks to get there, so it's something that inspires me a lot.

‘I try not to go too far in one direction so I don't do a really bad version of [avant garde jazz saxophonist] Pharoah Sanders or something. I just like to take elements of that and fold it into my own weird little stew.’

Lorde, whose poetry and writing first came to the fore in the ’60s, might at first glance seem a less obvious influence.

‘I read a small book of hers, it's more like a collection of essays, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House – I was just really inspired by it. There was also an essay she wrote called The Uses of The Erotic which I found really interesting in the way she was reappraising something which is usually more male-centred – she was reowning that and that use of the world, and the power in femininity and womanhood that didn't necessarily come to the fore at the time when she was writing.

‘I did English literature at university, and I suddenly realised in my 30s that it was full of so many men, I never noticed that, and I never really read many female writers, so I have been sort of redressing that in the last few years, and she was part of that. It's been blowing my mind. That's what I love about literature –quite often you realise there's so many blind spots in how you filter reality every day, and she was one of those writers who helped me with that a little bit.’

Joy in playing live again

The album was released last summer, and Villagers were on the bill at Latitude Festival in 2021 – one of the government-backed trial events.

‘It was really magical being in front of an audience again. The tent was packed and I don't think I'm ever going to take that for granted after what's just happened. I realise how magical it is and you really need to live in the here and now, and to experience playing in front of people who are really listening to your music is really special.’

The joy in that communal side of music has even filtered into Conor’s writing process.

‘It's completely changed my writing. I'm writing a lot and that energy is in it – trying to write words that will really resonate in a crowd of people in the same physical area, and I have that in my mind quite often now when I'm writing, which is really fun.’

So should we expect new Villager material soon?

‘I'm working all the time. I think I'm probably going to make an album – I think there's a shape happening now and it's album-shaped, but I don't know, I keep changing my plans! I've been to this nice little studio in Dublin and I've been working away in there by myself.

‘Other than that, I've been trying to stay focussed and playing music with friends which isn't necessarily related, but it's about trying to get back in the real world again. All that stuff feeds back into itself, and into the Villagers stuff.’

Villagers play at The Wedgewood Rooms in Southsea on Tuesday, August 23. Tickets £22.50. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk. The date is rescheduled from March 14, all tickets for the original show remain valid.