Designed by the same excellent production squad who brought you The View, The Works will be presented by John Kelly and feature arts reporting from Sinead Gleeson, Kevin Gildea and myself. We’ll be popping into artists’ studios, reporting back from film sets, going to arts launches, interviewing actors, authors, musicians and other arts practitioners, and generally getting out and about in the name of the arts.

The below is a bit of a taster for what you can expect — hope you enjoy it!

Bressie laughs. He understands the pop game and he’s perfectly content with the deal he’s struck — at least if it helps make him successful. I’ve met Breslin several times over the past five years and he has always struck me as one of the most searingly ambitious Irish musicians we have. “It’s not a cocky thing,” he says. “It’s a self-belief thing.”
That ambition and passion is writ large on his debut album Colourblind Stereo. It’s a record that ricochets wildly in terms of its subject matter — Bressie talks about love, the Celtic tiger and the dancefloor.
But from a musical perspective, the album is rooted firmly in the land of vocoders, feel-good keyboards and sparkly, David Guetta-style production. If this album could, it would wag its tail frantically at you.
While Blizzards fans may sniff at Bressie’s new musical direction (even if they still find themselves dancing to the beautifully fizzy Breaking My Fall in nightclubs), a younger audience is lapping it up — his uber-catchy debut single Can’t Stay Young Forever reached the top spot in the Irish airplay chart — and Bressie happily mentions that students have emailed him to say they’re playing it as their official debs song.
This is music tailor-made for an international, as well as domestic, audience. Ireland is the test run. “They say the key is to nail it here in Ireland,” Bressie says. “If you create a big story here, they’ll creep it in there [in Britain]. But they might turn around and say: `We need three more big songs’.”
“They” are the record company, and if their attitude sounds a bit clinical, well, that’s because it is. Bressie eats, sleeps and breathes music but he’s very concerned to make sure he creates for himself a safe, high-up nook in the tree of pop.
“A lot of songs with the Blizzards I wrote when I had no worries in the world,” he says. “I was in college. I was just chilling out. With the solo album, obviously things have changed. I’ve been through a lot more. I’ve done two albums with the band. I moved from my home town. Stuff like that. I think that comes across in the songwriting.”
Growing up in Mullingar, Bressie was more or less raised by his sisters and his music teacher mother. His father was in the army, so he was almost always overseas, and his producer/musician brother relocated to Glasgow when Niall wasn’t yet five.
Being bigger than all of his classmates and his family always meant Bressie stuck out from the crowd. “My family are tiny,” he says. I raise an eyebrow. “My grandad is massive, so that’s where it came from. I put up with my fair share of milkman jokes. I was raised with three sisters, so I had to be pretty confident or I’d have been eaten alive.”
School wasn’t always easy. A Christian Brothers school, it was a tough climate, where corporeal punishment was still ongoing. Still Bressie made friends easily. He had hoped to study physiotherapy, but missed getting the 540 points he needed (he got 490). Instead, he went to UCD on a sports scholarship to study Commerce. Throughout his studies, even if certain subjects like French didn’t come easily to him, praise from his sports coaches always did.
Bressie became a professional lock-forward for Leinster Rugby from 2001 to 2004, before walking away. “I just had enough,” he says. “I walked off the training pitch and said to my coaches: `I’m retiring, I’m done’. Three weeks before, I’d nearly lost my eye. Someone had stood on my face.
“I love watching the sport, but when you become professional, it changes. My whole passion for it went. And it’s not a sport you play unless you’re passionate about it.”
If his parents were sceptical when he left rugby to play music full-time with The Blizzards, his father really couldn’t believe what he was hearing when Bressie told him, in January 2010, that he was walking away from the band to live in London and make a solo album. “My dad went: `Fuck’s sake, are you ever going to stick at something?’ ”
The criticism looks like it may have stung — but Bressie’s retort has been to work harder than ever. These days, he has so many plates spinning in the air it’s a wonder he can manage. His day job involves working at 19 Entertainment in London, whose stable includes Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, churning out hopeful hits for up-and-coming artists. The rest of the time is spent coping with the demands of his own career — for the new album, he worked with his production partner and fellow Irishman Jimbo Barry and Gomez singer Tom Gray.
“I haemorrhaged my savings,” he says. “I bought a load of studio equipment I couldn’t afford and got a big loan to do it. The deal with Sony — you get your money up front and it’s your choice whether you want to record in a good studio with good equipment or whether you want to do it in your bedroom. And I chose the good studio.”
If the first year in London proved difficult — Bressie couldn’t acclimatise to the pushiness of the city, the English sense of humour — gradually he has started to fit in.
Still, there remain problems. For all that Bressie regularly talks about what he wants to achieve with his music, he’s often faced with trying to reel in his natural instincts and accept what record company executives are telling him.
For my money, one of the strongest tracks on the new album is Animals, which has a surprisingly angry and political chorus (“Treat us like animals/That’s how we react/like animals”), and also talks about the pension plight of his father.
Bressie fought to get the song on the album. “There’s the line, ‘You robbed my father’s pension/like he ceased to exist’. Why can’t I sing about that? That’s my first political song. A friend of my manager’s said: `Ah, Bressie, singing about politics doesn’t suit you’. And I said: `What happened in Ireland in the last five years is the single biggest thing that’s happened in my life. Why can’t I sing about it?’ ”
Still, happy as he is that the song is on there (when four other “heavy” songs didn’t make the cut, thanks to his manager), Bressie has some reservations about what fans might think. “The fans who liked the first two singles might feel a bit isolated when they hear that one,” he concedes. “If you’re 17 or 18, you don’t want to know about that shit.”
There’s a fight going on within Bressie. He has a million different urges in terms of his musical vision, but his own massive ambition — to be the next big thing in pop — may mean that his creativity has to take a back seat in favour of privileging the needs and interests of the pop marketplace.
Still, Bressie is constantly thinking, drafting, reshaping and writing. For the past two weeks he’s only had an acoustic guitar to hand. “I’ve written four folk songs,” he laughs. Next stop, the folk album? Don’t bet against it.
“I firmly believe I’ll be successful if I’m passionate about it,” he says. He could be right.

Colourblind Stereo will be released on September 16. The new single, Good Intentions, is out now

Track listing

‘Oliver’  Gemma Hayes
‘Solitary Man’  Ólöf Arnalds (cover of the Neil Diamond track)
‘Ti Ti’ Interference
‘Frailach’ The Frames
‘Ships In The Rain’ Lanterns On The Lake
‘Undertow’   Suzanne Vega
‘Whole Made Of Pieces’  Jónsi
‘Shelter ‘    Birdy (cover of The XX track)
‘Hold On’  Tom Waits
‘Heatwave ‘ The Blue Nile
‘The Wizard’ Bat For Lashes
‘Deeper’   Wild Beasts
‘Bats In The Attic (Unravelled)’ King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
‘Saturday’ Sparklehorse

‘Come Pick Me Up’    Ryan Adams
‘Heroes’ Peter Gabriel (cover of the David Bowie track)
‘Fade Into You’ Mazzy Star
‘The Acrobat’ Iain Archer
‘Matchbox’   Adam Cohen
‘Fuzzy’  Grant Lee Buffalo
‘State Trooper ‘   Bruce Springsteen
‘Off He Goes’   Pearl Jam
‘Michicant’     Bon Iver
‘Wandering Star’ Portishead

First published in The Sunday Business Post, Ireland, circa Sept 2010

Words: Nadine O’Regan

At a party in London last week, a pair of glasses was stolen. These were not just any glasses. These spectacles were ripped from the nose of one Jonathan Franzen, aka the author of The Corrections and Freedom, aka the most significant figure in the literary world right now. A ransom note was found for £100,000. The prankster/culprit and the glasses were apprehended with the help of a police helicopter.
The act was only the most recent indication of how big a star Franzen has become. There are others: Barack Obama is reading his new novel, Freedom; Time magazine put him on its cover — with the heading `Great American novelist’ — the first living writer to achieve the honour in ten years; and, after a spat that attracted global attention in 2001, Oprah Winfrey loves him again. Furthermore, the reviews of his new novel, Freedom, would make even his most garlanded contemporaries weep blood tears of envy. There’s a new term for it: Franzenfreude.
It’s not often that a novelist makes you feel like there’s a rockstar in the room. But as Franzen walks into the boardroom of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire for this interview, it’s impossible not to feel a little nerdy thrill, along with that sense of impossibility that he’s actually here — it’s like someone more seen on television than in real life has just stepped out of the box and into your living room.
I’ve interviewed Franzen once before, in 2001, and the author looks just the same as he did then: tall, good-looking in a geek-chic way, with hair that’s flecked a distinguished grey.
“How have the past nine years been?” Franzen says, chivalrously introducing himself by gamely claiming to recall our first interview. Is he ready for me to turn on my dictaphone? I wonder. “I’ve assumed the position,” Franzen says, with a weary smile.

It’s 9.45am on a Saturday morning. Franzen is tired, having failed to sleep well the night before. Last night, he made the mistake of watching the edition of Newsnight that he’d filmed with Kirsty Wark.
Franzen doesn’t usually read or watch anything connected to himself, but this was different. During the reading he did for Newsnight from the UK edition of Freedom, Franzen discovered that a word in the book — Cyprus — was spelt incorrectly. A horrified Franzen read on to realise that an old, mistake-laden edition of his book had been printed in the UK and Ireland.
“It was unfortunate timing,” Franzen says drily, of his almost reality show-like discovery of the mistake. If you’re a Franzen fan, you know the rest of the sorry story by now. In the past week or so, 80,000 editions of the novel have had to be withdrawn, with readers offered free swap-overs to the new edition, if they’ve already bought the book.
The PR people accompanying Franzen here today wince when you mention it — apart from the huge level of public embarrassment it has caused, the cost to the publisher, Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, has been estimated to be around £100,000.
“The Corrections, part two, eh?” as one friend quipped.
Franzen himself has been remarkably calm about events.
“It’s a sad situation,” he says. “But it’s not like I’ve been throwing chairs across the room or anything. It was a typesetting error more than a printing error. It was a matter of an old file being used instead of the final file. The differences are significant enough that it’s embarrassing. In the final version, there are 100 changes in the order of sentences that I think make it a better book.
“Regarding the characterisation, it’s minor stuff. When I went through the galleys, the Berglunds’ daughter, Jessica, came across to me as needlessly shrill, so there are perhaps half a dozen places where I took the edge off her shrillness. There’s an Indian American woman, Lalitha. She is described as being extremely attractive and that’s dialled back.”
In fairness to the poor typesetter now probably trying to hang onto his or her job, Franzen knows all about the damage the slip of a moment can wreak. The last time we met, Franzen was recovering from the Oprah debacle — after his third novel The Corrections was announced as an Oprah book club choice, Franzen said Oprah sometimes picked “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” books for her book club, and an infuriated Oprah promptly rescinded the nomination.
“Elitist!” and “Pompous prick” were just some of the comments hurled at him by the public, who felt slighted on Oprah’s behalf — and their own.
At his public reading in Dun Laoghaire later that day, Franzen will be gregarious, witty and engaging. But one-on-one, having experienced the long-term, negative effect that his own remarks can create, he’s more withdrawn than he used to be. He looks down at his hands a lot. He gets caught up in endless sub-clauses. He talks in safe, careful terms.
He has a conflicted attitude to fame. As his character, rocker Richard Katz, says of fame in Freedom: “I would hate the absence of the thing, but I don’t like the thing itself, either.”
However, despite all he may have learnt about humility and graciousness in recent years, it’s hardly a stretch to say that Franzen continues to have a deep sense of entitlement as a writer. After he published his first two novels, The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion, Franzen wrote his famous Harper’s magazine essay, in which he discussed the problems faced by contemporary novelists — and the novel as a shrinking form.
In the essay, he argued in favour of elitism. Elitism, he says, represents “the efforts of the individual to secure a small space of privacy within the prevailing din”.
“All people should be elitists — and keep it to themselves,” Franzen wrote. Of course, elitism is also the first refuge of the insecure — and it’s safe to say that Franzen knows a lot about what it’s like to be an insecure, unsuccessful novelist — his first two novels made barely made a ripple in the world on their release.
When I interviewed author Bret Easton Ellis in 2005, we talked about how success can make a person nicer.
“Oh, I know,” Ellis said. “Jonathan Franzen used to be such a prick; so red-faced and furious all the time. Now he’s really nice.”
I quote the lines back at Franzen. After a bit of throat-clearing and harrumphing, Franzen gives a rueful grin.
“He’s right,” Franzen says. “Up until about three weeks after The Corrections was published, I was a bizarrely angry person. One of the changes even between The Corrections and Freedom that I made was just to get the anger out of the book. When I would occasionally open The Corrections while struggling with Freedom, I was struck frequently by the level of anger in the book — it no longer made any sense to me.
“There’s a kind of anger that comes from a feeling of deprivation, a feeling of not being known. And once you have success at the level of The Corrections, it’s simply no longer appropriate to walk around with that level of anger.”
If The Corrections made Franzen as a novelist, Freedom has cemented his reputation as one of the most important novelists of our time. Freedom is an enormodome of a novel: vast (nearly 600 pages), sprawling and impressive. The first couple of hundred pages, in particular, are astonishing: Franzen has a knack of writing down things about family life that you might have thought or felt, but never seen articulated so well in print.
As with The Corrections, Franzen is at his most extraordinary when talking about ordinary people. His evocation of the middle-class, mildly traumatised Berglund family is superb: vivid, imaginative and wholly immersive. Other sections of the novel — which deal with environmental subplots — are less engrossing. Franzen reaches for high-art concepts while seeming more comfortable — and actually more innovative — on the ground.
Still, you can understand the plaudits — and not just because of the novel’s quality. Right now the literary novel is in the doldrums, with falling sales and many established novelists failing to secure new publishing deals.
For many, Franzen has come to represent an entire movement — the argument in favour of depth, in favour of taking more time to learn, to consider, to become a more reflective, thinking person.
There’s a generalised sense of anxiety coming from many of the characters in Freedom. At one point, Patty Berglund says: “Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.”
Our capacity for infinite distraction is something which worries Franzen.
“There’s an interesting coincidence,” he says, “between the rise of an electronic culture that allows you to be distracted by the instant messages, the tweets, the ringing phones, the episode of the Office that you can watch in the airport lounge on your iPad, all of these things — and a certain tipping point in terms of energy and the environment, certainly in the United States.

“Just at the point when to think about what’s really happening to the world is unbearable, we suddenly have the means to distract ourselves all the time. We don’t have to be bad or good people, as long as we keep ourselves busy. The novel is part of what remains of that quieter, more reflective place.
“People have been all too ready to declare the novel dead. But it may be — and I say this only on my more wildly optimistic days — that the novel has a [chance] of becoming more attractive, rather than less. It’s been gratifying to see how well the book has done in the States and, in my more wildly optimistic moments, it makes me wonder if there isn’t a hunger for precisely that experience. And whether this digitalised, atomised culture may be making the novel more appealing rather than less.”
If it sounds an unlikely hope, Franzen is perhaps our best prospect for keeping the dream alive. You might scoff at how he does his writing — he’s famous for using headphones, blindfolds and any form of sensory deprivation necessary to achieve the requisite concentration — but it all points towards the seriousness of the endeavour for him.
Freedom is his first novel in nine years, but he spent only a little of that time — just over a year — writing. The rest was spent finding the tone, battling the depression that came from “digging deep” and taking endless notes.
Franzen works from a little bedsit he rents near his apartment on the Upper East Side in New York — it doesn’t have a TV, radio, telephone, the internet or even pictures on the walls. He doesn’t have children, but he considered it at one point, he said, because he thought the experience of having them might help his fiction. That’s how seriously he takes his work.
His live-in partner of ten years, Kathryn Chetkovich, once wrote about the experience of being Franzen’s girlfriend. When they first met at an artists’ colony, she confided in him about her parents’ troubles and asked him what she should be doing to help them.
“You have to do your work,” Franzen, then a struggling writer, told her. “That’s your first responsibility.”
In her essay, Chetkovich noted, “he meant, of course, my writing, and he spoke with a confidence I had never managed to feel. He may have been struggling, but he knew what his work was. That was the first thing I envied about him.”
That’s the thing other writers still envy about him. In the face of increased indifference towards the novel, Franzen continues to maintain that impressive sense of purpose.

*****

Published in The Sunday Business Post, Ireland, on 30 January 2011

By Nadine O’Regan

‘I love Father Ted,” Kristin Hersh remarks, as she stands with her husband in a Dublin hotel lobby, chatting about her impressions of Ireland. “The kids love it too. It’s brilliant.”

It’s not often you find yourself trading Tedisms with a US alternative rock icon who paved the way for Courtney Love, Nirvana and the Pixies, but then you shouldn’t count on the expected from an encounter with Kristin Hersh.

Fine-boned and small of stature, with a fashionable fringe and round blue eyes that surprise you with their brightness, Hersh looks barely any older now than she did in the 1990s, when she sang with Michael Stipe on Your Ghost, the hauntingly odd first single from her brilliant debut solo album Hips and Makers.

Although Hersh is always likely to delve into the subjects of magic, bipolar disorder and suicide in her conversation, and has suffered more than most in her life, the 44-year-old Throwing Muses founder is also remarkably easy company: funny, unassuming and whip-smart; and amusingly delighted when I tell her that for many Irish admirers, she is an indie-rock pin-up.

Hersh has come to Dublin to promote her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing (published in the US as Rat Girl), which sees her return to the diaries she began in 1985 when she was 18.

Hersh has spent four years working them up to publication standard, and it shows: the book is brilliantly put together and beautifully, sharply written. An acid portrait of youth, it would frighten the horses and then some.

At heart, the book is a story of survival: Hersh was diagnosed first as schizophrenic and then as having bipolar disorder. Beneath the humour and insight, there’s a lurking, obliquely expressed fear of what she might do to herself.

Born in Atlanta and raised in Rhode Island, Hersh formed her band Throwing Muses when she was just 14, a scrappy thing who spent several of her teenage years homeless and refused to wear a coat, or even glasses to help herself see properly.

Songs were not compositions Hersh actively crafted. They were compulsions. They grabbed her by the throat and held on tight.

‘‘I hear the songs and copy them down,” Hersh says, settling down to a cup of tea in the bar of Buswell’s hotel. “My job is not to get in the way. That’s harder than you think, particularly if you turn music into a career. But it’s not hooks that bring a song home, and it’s not a moral that you already know. It’s surprises. It’s vitality.”

The songs began as ambient noise in Hersh’s head after an accident where she suffered a double concussion. ‘‘I was riding my bike to a teenage job, and an old lady careened into me. I flew way up into the air, and went limp, and the ground rose up. I believe it was the double concussion that made me start hearing music. The notes would continue until they were a cohesive piece. Eventually, I realised that no one else was hearing this sound. It was frightening but also beautiful.”

If that sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you, buy one of Hersh’s nine solo albums and consider the music. Strange chords and unusual time signatures dominate. Hersh has a refined, complicated sense of melody, but she rarely sings notes that go with the chord. She sings notes that seem not to belong, and yet also fit perfectly. There’s mathematical logic in them, but it doesn’t conform to the expected rules. When she was starting out, in the thrashier, more primal indie-rock band Throwing Muses, her sound would alarm even herself.

‘‘You can’t call what I do singing or entertainment,” she writes of her early offerings in Paradoxical Undressing. ‘‘I hiss and yell and wail. Sometimes I make seagull noises, unfortunately. Music is something I have almost no control over.”

It wasn’t long before a more sinister aspect started to appear alongside her songwriting gifts. The young Kristin became convinced that a house she sometimes stayed in had an evil aspect that was infiltrating her work.

‘‘In the Doghouse,” she writes, ‘‘sleep stopped coming, days stopped ending – now sleep doesn’t come and days don’t end. My songs are different, too, and when I play them, I become them: evil, charged.”

The diaries become clipped, terse in tone. In the song fragments Hersh includes, a momentum builds. ‘‘I’m losing my person,” she writes. ‘‘I don’t even look like a nice girl anymore. I look like the songs sound because I am like the songs sound.”

Hersh began to hallucinate a wolf in the night, a snake in her bag.

Realising that her songs were trapped inside her, she decided to set them free – by cutting her body open with a razor. It’s hard to talk about suicide attempts in a cosy bar in Dublin with two old biddies beside us, earnestly chattering about the price of tea, but I ask Hersh quietly nonetheless if it was only during the 1980s that she felt, as she writes, that ‘‘I don’t belong on this earth. I’m not good enough’’.

I’m foolishly expecting a happy answer because Hersh herself seems so wonderfully bright and sweet-natured. But she pauses and, when an answer comes, it sounds a little reluctant and awkward.

‘‘It’s been tough for the last 25 years,” she says. ‘‘Right now, I take supplemental lithium in very small doses and mega B vitamin doses.‘‘Even with children, depression can convince you that everyone is better off without you. I can be depressed and manic at the same time. It’s happened many times. I know lots of suicides, and I cannot judge them. I miss them, but I know that cloud, and I know it probably has something important to say at times.”

There are also physical repercussions for those suffering from certain forms of depression – you’re reminded of Kurt Cobain saying that he took heroin to stop his stomach pains. ‘‘I’m pretty sure Kurt was bipolar,” Hersh nods. ‘‘The physical pain that mania and depression cause is something people don’t talk about. There’s a huge desire to kill the pain.”

Like Hersh, Cobain was ambitious at the beginning of his career – sending notes and demos to record companies – and angry with himself later on, making it clear on his records that he felt he’d sold out: ‘‘Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old’’ (Serve The Servants).

For a while, Throwing Muses too played the record industry game, tweaking their songs to make them more radio-friendly, doing a million interviews and guest hosting MTV’s alt-rock show 120Minutes. Hersh’s stepsister and Throwing Muses member Tanya Donnelly also later formed her own band Belly, which notched up Grammy Award nominations and hit singles in the shape of Feed The Tree and Gepetto.

But Hersh ultimately wasn’t willing or able to follow the easy route. ‘‘When you are essentially sponsored by someone with a vested interest in the marketability of your product, your product is going to be dumbed-down,” she says. ‘‘Real music happens in basements and bedrooms and bars. Keeping a song at home is like keeping a kid in a closet – and yet, to squirrel my way through this bimbo of an industry to get real music to real people is an exercise in frustration.”

Hersh had a disastrous experience with Warner Music over what should have been her greatest commercial success, her first solo album Hips and Makers. ‘‘Hips and Makers was in the black the day it was released, as it only cost a few thousand dollars to make,” she says. ‘‘But the day I left, they declared it in the red, so I never made another penny off it.”

But in 2007, Hersh set up Cash Music (www.cashmusic.org), an organisation through which she and other artists could record and release music without any need for a record company.Her most recent album, Crooked, is every bit the equal of Hips And Makers – and if the world was a fairer place, it would occupy a spot in the home of anyone who loved indie music. These days, Hersh has a peripatetic existence.‘‘I never really stop running away, and now I take my whole family with me.”

She and her husband Billy O’Connell – who is clearly deeply protective of her – are currently house-sitting with their children and pet squirrel in New Orleans, in a mansion they’ve filled with their ‘‘crappy furniture’’ and strung with Christmas lights to make it homier.

This year, the couple will be married 20 years, and they still hold hands walking down the street.

When the time comes for them to leave, they will move city again, as they have been doing every year since 2005,when they lost their house in a flood in Ohio, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina. When Billy pops over to say hello, it transpires that they’ve been giving some thought to moving with two of their children for a while to Ireland – perhaps Wicklow – after New Orleans. ‘‘We’re always in cities,” says O’Connell. ‘‘We want to see the countryside.”

Professionally, the next step for Hersh is a second volume of memoirs. ‘‘I loved writing this book,” she says. ‘‘I didn’t at first because I wasn’t good at it. It took me four years to learn how to push out a scene.But I found I was good at falling back into memories, even without the diary.”

And, of course, there will be more albums, both from her newer band, 50 Foot Wave, and from Throwing Muses, who will go back into the studio in a matter of months.The music will be uncompromising and direct, recorded without the interference of a record company.

‘‘The listener doesn’t want it to suck, and neither do I,” Hersh says with a smile. Although she might not have the material success of some of her contemporaries, Hersh has something she knows is far more valuable: artistic satisfaction. ‘‘The music sounds the way it’s supposed to be,” she says.

With that in mind, I’m compiling an album of Prince material for Conor — comprising not just of songs Prince wrote and played on, but also songs he wrote for other people, and I’m throwing in a couple of covers musicians have done of his songs. I’m including some obvious stuff, but I’m adding some more obscure songs in there too — ones that aren’t so much about Prince crawling semi-naked across the bathroom floor (observe the videos) but more about simple quality tunes. (Mind you, ‘simple’ is not really a word in Prince’s vocabulary.)

Conor’s going to review the album, alongside Prince rookie, 17-year-old Robyn Maguire, on the show on Saturday. So far, with a large amount of help from my Prince fanatic buddy Adrian, this is the track listing I’ve come up with. Fingers crossed it does the trick!! Cannot wait til the Malahide Castle gig on Saturday.

Girls & Boys    5:24                  Prince
When You Were Mine    3:48    Prince    Dirty Mind    Pop/Funk
Starfish & Coffee    2:48    Prince      Dream Factory
Love…Thy Will Be Done    4:25    Martika       (written by Prince)
Sign ‘O’ the Times    5:03    Prince    2 Sign ‘O’ the Times    Rock
When Doves Cry    5:56    Prince & The Revolution     Purple Rain    R&B
She’s Always In My Hair    3:26                Prince
Darling Nikki – Foo Fighters     (cover of the infamous track)
I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man    Prince
Private Joy    4:31        Prince
Alphabet St.    5:40    Prince       Ultimate: Prince    R&B/Soul
Purple Rain    8:42    Prince and The Revolution       Purple Rain    Rock
Manic Monday    3:05    The Bangles         (written by Prince)
Rockhard In A Funky Place    4:32    Prince      The Legendary Black Album

Crimson & Clover    3:50        Prince
Joy in Repetition    4:47       Prince
Bang Bang    3:21        Prince

Misterman by Enda Walsh, Black Box Theatre, Galway, until July 24.

The business of living isn’t always easy. No one knows that better than Thomas Magill, a lonely, thirty-something midlands dweller, who is battling demons from within and without.

Living in a warehouse cluttered with tape-recorders, scrambled eggs and teddy bears, Thomas fills his days with activities – visiting his father in the graveyard, buying his mother biscuits and promoting religious improvement around the town of Inishfree – in an effort to stave off his darker tendencies.

Based on that description, Misterman – by internationally acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh – should perhaps be the most miserable of plays, a torrent of self-loathing and woe. But Misterman is not what it seems.

While at one level Walsh’s reimagined play (first staged in 1999) represents ‘‘that very simple thing of what it is to be alive’’, as Walsh would have it, it’s rarely outwardly miserable. In fact, it’s one of the sharpest, laugh-out-loud funniest and most acutely well-observed plays I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.

Misterman is ostensibly a 120-minute monologue from Cillian Murphy in the role of Thomas. But a large number of voices (along with an excellent score from Donncha Dennehy) also inhabit the stage. Some come at you from the Beckettian tape-recorders placed around the cavernous space – such as the voices of Thomas’s Mammy and the ‘angel’ Edel, which Thomas has recorded in his travels around the town.

Others are revealed by Thomas himself, as Murphy, giving an extraordinary performance, morphs himself into other characters, by dint of note-perfect changes in his vocal register and body language. He’s Mr McAnerney (‘‘Your poor dad.Now he was a great man,” he tells Thomas), the bully Dwain Flynn (‘‘You fucking headcase!” he screams at Thomas), Simple Eamon Moran (a potential religious affiliate) and Timmy O’Leary (‘‘the boy who treats his mother like an old dog’’).

So total is the transformation in each case that you find yourself thinking Murphy (unrecognisable in a dirty, buttoned-up shirt, his beard unkempt, his striking eyes almost hidden by hair) could do a great job of being a stand-up comic.

The wit of Walsh’s script,meanwhile, is dust-dry, the ripostes blunt and pithy. ‘‘D’ya know what I’d do if I didn’t have my senses? I’d kidnap ya,’’ one old biddy (also played by Murphy) tellsThomas affectionately. ‘‘The guards would have to lock me up.”

Line by line,Walsh moves to inextricably link the everyday with the grotesque – and the darkness waiting beyond. If there’s a slight dip in quality in the later stages, as Thomas moves towards a more naked expression of pain, this is no more than a small gripe.

This is the kind of play that makes you feel incredibly lucky to have seen it. Misterman is a stunning achievement.

 
Brittle Bones    3:25    Richard Walters   from  The Animal
Tinseltown in the Rain    5:58    The Blue Nile   from    A Walk Across the Rooftops
Elliot Smith Ballad of Big Nothing    from        Either/Or
Josh T. Pearson    7:02        Woman, When I've Raised Hell

Age old Blue    3:36    Alela Diane   from    To Be Still
Iain archer    5:10       FrozenLake from To the Pine Roots
Plus a few I nearly played, but will leave 'til another time...
Sometimes Always    2:34    The Jesus and Mary Chain
Dark Road (Album)    2:41    Daniel Martin Moore    from In The Cool Of The Day
Come Running    3:28    Sol Seppy    from  The Bells Of 1 2
Morphine    3:27    Mark Geary    from  Ghosts
Way To Blue    3:10    Nick Drake   from   Way To Blue (An Introduction To Nick Drake)

Pop Goes the Rock

By Nadine O’Regan

Niall Breslin is leaving his newly-adopted hometown of London this afternoon.

He plans on being out of contact in Kent for awhile, as he’s got some songwriting to do and he wants a little peace of mind.

The songwriting won’t be for his band the Blizzards, though.

Just two years ago, the Mullingar pop-rockers had a top three hit in Ireland with their song Trust Me I’m a Doctor. In Breslin, they had a frontman that girls swooned over and even non-musos admired (Breslin is no skinny indie kid – he used to play rugby for Leinster).

And when they played live, they rocked good and hard. By Breslin’s own admission, they hadn’t yet made the album that would break them into the big time, but they had the potential – and, seemingly, the hunger and drive – to do it.

But the Blizzards disbanded over a year ago, unwilling to battle any further with an industry that refused to let them through the door, no matter how loudly they threatened to break it down.

Now two of the band run a pub together In Mullingar, another has gone back to college to study classical music, and Breslin is working as an all-genres songwriter and producer for 19 Entertainment, the London company founded by Simon Fuller, the brains behind the Spice Girls and American Idol.

When Breslin, 29, talks about the rock music industry, he can’t help it: his tone turns terse and a little angry. ‘‘What kills me about the rock thing is that the music fans who I call the purists love real music,” he says. ‘‘They love the underdog bands, the bands that are a little more left of centre. I can’t understand how these bands can’t sell albums if real fans love them.

“Why can we get Rage Against The Machine to number one to piss Simon Cowell off, but we can’t get bands we love into the charts? People are giving out about it, but they’re not actually buying these albums.”

Breslin’s experience is typical of a young rock act trying to make it in today’s music business.

These days, the only show in town is the one provided by chart-toppers such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Jay-Z. Rock, as made by young people, is not at the races. A recent report in the British music press revealed that only three rock songs made it into the top 100 singles of 2010 in Britain – and one was a re-release of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, which was first released 29 years ago.

‘‘It is the end of the rock era,” said veteran DJ Paul Gambaccini. ‘‘It’s over, in the same way the jazz era is over. That doesn’t mean there will be no more good rock musicians, but rock as a prevailing style is part of music history.”

In Ireland, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Cheryl Cole ruled the Irish singles charts last year. In 2010’s top 100, only four singles could be classified as rock, and that’s by a rather generous definition: folk-rockers Mumford & Sons featured twice, and the relatively poppy Heathers and Journey (again) made the list.

In the albums list, only two rock albums (by Kings of Leon and Mumford & Sons) made the Top 20 in 2010- and, again, that’s a generous definition of rock.

Sales of all recorded music in Ireland over the past five years have fallen by 56 per cent, a stunning statistic that explains the redundancies, the downsizing and the general mood of despair that has gripped the industry in the past number of years.

Over the last three years,14 Zavvi stores have closed; Galway lost Redlight Records and Mulligan Records, while Zhivago Records has just closed; Road Records in Dublin is gone, and so is Abbey Discs. City Discs is also due to shut up shop.

While it would be massively inaccurate to say that it’s just young rock musicians who are feeling the pain – the entire industry is facing huge challenges due to illegal downloading – their suffering, at least in terms of album and single sales, and thus monetary success, appears disproportionately high.

Unlike pop artists with their pocket moneyed young followers, rock artists tend to have older fans who know how to use computers to their advantage and are reluctant to spend money from their own pay packets.

Rock music itself may be thriving – no one would dispute that the number of bedroom artists has increased exponentially and the passion to create rock music is still there.

Music equipment has become cheaper, and anyone can record an album on a laptop.

But if no one can make money from rock because not enough people are reaching into their pockets to pay for recorded music, then, at least by the traditional model of measuring success – good old hard cash – rock music is dead in the water.

Rock critics and fans may adore Irish acts such as Oliver Cole, Adebisi Shank and O Emperor, but there is an ever-wider disparity growing between the acts praised on the pages of music magazines and the acts that people are actually buying.

Although most bands don’t shout about it, they often can’t stump up money for petrol or their mobile phones. When they’re touring, they try to sleep wherever a friend might let them, and few bands can afford to tour with their full line-up; instead, they adopt a stripped-down approach and hope that their public won’t mind too much.

In the past, such constrictions were a rite of passage for a band, who believed that their creations would one day win them material comforts. But increasingly it has become obvious that the music itself will have to be their sole reward.

They have to be content with ‘‘success’’ in the form of YouTube hits and MySpace friends, and the number of times they would guess people downloaded their album for free.

The excellent Irish band the Cast of Cheers didn’t even bother to try to persuade people to pay for their Choice Music Prize nominated debut album- they simply made it available through their website, their decifromsion a nod of defeat in the face of an industry revolution.

It’s hard for bands to stay positive about themselves in this climate, even if they’re supposedly established.

‘‘Artists feel devalued,” says Stuart Clark, deputy editor of Hot Press magazine. ‘‘They say: ‘Why should my profession be deigned to be not worth anything?’ People like Tim Wheeler of Ash have said: ‘Why should I spend my whole life working on a catalogue of music when someone can go to a bit-torrent site and download it in four minutes?”‘

There are still rock acts who do make money, but it’s mainly from two non-album sources of revenue: live shows and merchandise. And the bands who are succeeding in these areas are almost uniformly older.

‘‘I’d wager a guess that Def Leppard are making a killing from their merchandise,” says Clark. ‘‘A lot of their fans would be in theirmid-40s now, doctors and lawyers who would think nothing of blowing €150 on a tour jacket.”

Bon Jovi were the highest-grossing live act of 2010 – the band generated $201.1 million in worldwide ticket sales. That might sound impressive, but, at 48, Jon Bon Jovi is more a symbol of a dying industry than a harbinger of lucrative times to come.

Forty per cent of the frontmen of the top 20 highest grossing live acts in the US will be 60 or more next year. Almost one in five of Them will be over 50.When these cash cows finally hang up their guitars, who will replace them? Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Katy Perry are the most likely contenders – but, of course, they all play pop music.

That stadium rock vacuum is largely down to the decision by radio stations not to play music by new rock acts.

Radio stations have been brutal in their refusal to make stars out of anyone other than pop artists.

‘‘Having hit records is very hard in this era,” says Willie Kavanagh, managing director of EMI in Ireland and chairman of the Irish Recorded Music Association. ‘‘Radio stations are at war against each other. They have to focus on the music that will get them the biggest audience.”

He cites the recent album by Dublin musician Oliver Cole, formerly of Turn, as an example of the unfairness of the industry.

‘‘Oliver Cole toured the album to a degree, but because radio didn’t pick up the singles from the album, it didn’t create hits, and therefore his live work wouldn’t be as beneficial,” says Kavanagh.

‘‘I would be very concerned for someone in that genre, where you can write beautiful songs that are really well presented on record, but instead of somebody going out to buy them they just download them for free. The artist gets paid no money.

“The record company gets paid no money. And then you have to question, do you make another album?” Even indie-rock artists that have hit the number one spot in the Irish album charts have trouble getting airplay.

‘‘What disappoints me is when you have an album from Cathy Davey or Villagers that is number one and has clearly crossed over, and yet, with few exceptions, radio in this country doesn’t deem it fit for daytime airplay,” Stuart Clark says. ‘‘If I’d been on Jools Holland, picked up Choice Music Prize nominations, and I wasn’t getting daytime airplay, I’d feel aggrieved.”

Some of the ambitious rock acts have decided on one solution for the career problem besetting them: take their rock songs and paper them over with pop stylings in the hope that radio stations may reluctantly embrace them.

For the most part, the only rock bands who are making a dent in the charts these days are those who have watered down their musical styles to the point where you’re not even sure whether you could accurately call them rock.

Are the Script, Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon playing pop or rock? In the video for their single Sex On Fire, the members of Kings of Leon were featured writhing sweatily on tables, licking their lips suggestively and having water sluicing down their naked chests.

At times, the video looked suspiciously like Take That’s Pray, which featured the members of that band rolling around on a sun-kissed beach. But at least Take That were honest about the hormonal crowd they were trying to attract.

‘‘Someone sat Kings of Leon down in a meeting and said: ’You could become the biggest band in the world and be millionaires, or you could keep doing what you’re doing,”‘ says Niall Breslin. ‘‘Kings of Leon made their choice.”

Their decision was easy to understand.

The public don’t want new rock from young acts – they want soft rap like Jay-Z, TV pop from the cast of Glee and the winner of The X Factor, and R&B-influenced-pop of the kind that Rihanna and Beyoncé can offer.

Music magazines worldwide have had to adapt their cover story agendas accordingly – these days, you’re as likely to see Justin Bieber or the stars of Glee on the cover of Rolling Stone as U2.

In Ireland, Hot Press magazine attracted negative feedback last year for putting Jedward on the cover, but they had a simple justification for their decision.

‘‘We felt that, in that fortnight, there was no one that Irish people were more interested in than Jedward,” says Clark.

While rock fans may not have liked it, it was probably the right decision. Jedward had the second biggest-selling single in Ireland in 2010 with their cover of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby, while their album came in at number 24 in the bestselling albums list of 2010.

Leaving aside the Rubberbandits and their comedy hit Horse Outside, the nearest Irish pop band to Jedward on the list was the Script, who came in at number 24 with For The First Time.

No rock band came within miles of them on either the singles or the album charts – the nearest were Villagers, at 44 in the albums chart.

From a commercial perspective, what else was Hot Press going to do?

Public appetite for pop is also dictating the direction of Oxegen, the country’s largest music festival.

For the last four years, its promoters have solicited fans’ opinions as to who should play the festival, and they’ve ended up with line-ups which included artists such as Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Lily Allen.

‘‘The promoters don’t pick the acts, the fans do,” says Justin Green of MCD. “‘We actively seek the fans’ wish list of who they would most like to see on the line-up.

There are 153,360 people on our Oxegen Facebook group, so you can instantly find out information.

‘‘We also hold Oxegen fan focus groups throughout the course of the year. Popular artists run parallel with what people expect to see – which is why we’ve had Lady Gaga, the Script, Jay-Z and Plan B over the years.”

Amid the gloom, is there any hope for young rock acts who would like to actually make a living from their craft? If there is any glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel, it resides in the campaign towards a digital rights bill in Ireland and the take-up of legal services like Eircom’s Music Hub, which allows customers to stream music inexpensively.

‘‘You hear all these idiots talking about the new business model, about free stuff on the internet,” says Willie Kavanagh. ‘‘They’ve never been in the music business, and they never will be. By definition, the music business has to be a business first. I think we’re very close to legislation which will make it an offence for an internet service provider to facilitate the theft of music across the internet.

“As soon as that legislation is in place, and we can get what is called injunctive relief against an internet service provider, then the internet service providers will have to work with us in the same way that Eircom already works with us.

‘‘It’s only when that happens, and when people are punished for stealing tracks off the internet for free by having their internet postponed or cut off, that the music industry and the artists, the creative forces behind great songs, will thrive.”

But nobody is expecting miracles. ‘‘If they could get back 10 to 15 per cent of lost sales, they’d be doing well,” Clark says. As for rock music itself, the hope expressed by many of the people interviewed for this piece is that rock music may stage a dramatic resurgence over the next few years.

‘‘Because there hasn’t really been a massively successful new British rock act since Coldplay, some journalists in Britain panic and try to write off the genre,” says Brian Adams, head of music at Today FM.

‘‘We were told that dance music had killed off guitar rock in the 1990s, but that was just before the Britpop explosion that brought us Blur, Oasis, the Manics and Radiohead.”

Jim Lockhart, veteran musician with Horslips and an RTE producer, agrees. ‘‘It’s dangerous to say that rock is dead,” he says. ‘‘You’re reminded of Dick Rowe the guy who turned down the Beatles for Decca, saying that guitar music was on the way out.

The fact that pop is in the ascendant isn’t a cause for despair.

‘‘Music is actually in a healthier state than it ever was. It’s a much more central part of people’s lives. Since people have become used to iPods, they’re never without their fix.”

Most importantly, from an artistic perspective, the passion for creating music is very much still around. Bands have become used to making music despite all the obstacles.

Many are prepared to continue in the face of indifference and penury, even when it seems all hope is lost.

In London, Niall Breslin is already working on a solo album – he says it sounds like Weezer with keyboards – that he aims to release next September.

‘‘I hope one day the Blizzards will make another album, and for the right reasons – just to make a good album,” Breslin says. ‘‘But at the moment I’m making an album that I’ve wanted to make all my life.

“Whether I’m in the industry as a producer or writer or performer, I don’t really care. But I’m never going to leave music.”

Cometh the Vann

By Nadine O’Regan

David Vann is in an excellent mood.

Despite the fact that this interview is cutting into his Christmas holiday time, he genuinely doesn’t appear to mind – and he fairly hoots with an embarrassed sort of pleasure when I ask him what it feels like to suddenly be a big-name author.

‘‘It’s really weird,” he says, sounding for a moment quite unlike the Stanford-educated, San Francisco University lecturing author he is – and more like a schoolboy full of wonder.

‘‘For 12 years, I couldn’t get my book even sent out to editors. No agent would send it out. I thought it would never get published. For five and a half years I didn’t write at all because I felt really discouraged. Now, to have two of my books coming out in 13 languages – it’s such a gift. It feels incredible.”

Polite, humble and inquisitive, Vann wears his intelligence lightly – in a chance encounter with him at a literary festival in Cork some months ago, I confess I initially mistook the Alaskan writer for an enthusiastic visiting Masters student (luckily I realised my error before asking him what his speciality was).

Golden-skinned with sea-blue eyes and an affable mien, Vann is that rare author who is as fond of hunting as reading – before he was ten, he knew how to shoot a deer from 50 feet away in his Alaskan home – and his fiction is filled with ‘‘the whine and squeak of mallards’ wings’’ and ‘‘silvery and gasping’’ salmon.

Growing up in Alaska and then rural northern California, Vann spent much of his childhood on solitary expeditions through the woods.

‘‘Even when I was on my own, my dad would send me off with a gun and a dog for 12 hours. I loved that and I still do. We had a hunting ranch that we went to each year, and as we went through the ranch, my father and grandfather would tell the stories of what had happened there – the time someone killed their first deer or times with bears. I learned that story was in place – that you couldn’t have story without the place.”

If Vann’s writing is notable for its capacity to render nature in the most lush, yet sharp of ways, it’s the emotional truth it contains that will leave you slightly stunned, such is its lucid power and grip. Vann’s new novel, Caribou Island, is one of the most anticipated works of the year – and, if anything, it exceeds expectations.

It’s the close-focus story of Gary and Irene, an Alaskan couple with grown children whose marriage is disintegrating. Gary is building a cabin on Caribou Island, a tiny, freezing back-to-basics shelter which he claims is for the two of them, but Irene knows otherwise. ‘‘Enough fights about this ridiculous cabin and he could justify leaving,” Irene sees. ‘‘Put her in an impossible situation and then say the marriage was impossible.”

The novel is lavishly stocked with searing lines like these. The book is not plotted – though started 14 years before, Vann wrote most of it in a five-and-a-half month compulsive dash, as surprised as any reader by the emerging storyline. As with John McGahern’s Amongst Women, the characters feel completely alive and engaging on the page.

The strengths of Caribou Island – which was inspired by a real-life murder-suicide in the family – mirror those of Vann’s previous book, Legend of A Suicide. ‘‘Nothing like this book has been written before,” said the Observer of the story collection – and for once, that statement doesn’t register as pure hyperbole.

Vann used the short story form to examine the real-life suicide of his father from different fictionalised angles. ‘‘The thing is, something about me is not right,” says the father in Sukkwan Island, the novella that forms the blood-splattered centre piece of the book. ‘‘I can’t just do the right thing and be who I’m supposed to be. Something about me won’t let me do that.”

More than most writers, reality and fiction are difficult to separate in Vann’s work.

As sunny as he is on the outside, his life has been underpinned by a determination to understand the causes of familial depression and marital tension; the darkness that has driven several of his family members to the most violent and extreme of acts.

‘‘We have [had] five suicides in the family,” Vann says. ‘‘My stepmother lost her parents to a murder-suicide. Her father told her mother that the last 15 years of their marriage had been a lie and he was moving on to someone else. That came as a shock to her. She thought their marriage had been fine.

“She planned to kill just herself but at the last minute she decided to take him out with her. This was something my stepmother went through 11 months before my father killed himself. She went through an incredible string of tragedies. And I had trouble understanding how she got through all of it.”

The loss of his own father to suicide shook Vann to the core. ‘‘I was 13,’’Vann says, ‘‘and I didn’t see it coming. I knew he was sad leading up to it, but I didn’t really know what that was about. He was up in Alaska. My parents were divorced and he asked me to come spend a year with him. I said no. Two weeks later, he killed himself.

‘‘He did it talking on the phone to my stepmother. He said, ‘I love you but I’m not going to live without you’. He was in Alaska, she was in California.

“They were separated. He had broken up two marriages through infidelity. She was finally moving on; had met another man. He had to repeat the words twice because she was at work and couldn’t hear too well. Then he pulled the trigger.

‘‘At the time it seemed like such a cruel and shameful thing that, for three years, I told everyone that he had died of cancer. I was so ashamed. It felt like what he did extended to me.”

Vann became an unusual little boy, living two lives. By day, he was a straight-A student, the kind who ‘‘got A-pluses in a lot of classes, where I got over 100 per cent’’.

By night, he took the guns that had bizarrely been allowed to pass down to him from his father and he slipped out of the house and shot out streetlights – an event documented powerfully in Legend of a Suicide.

‘‘I didn’t have the fancy cape, but it did feel like I had two different lives, and that the secret other life was the true life,” he says. ‘‘That was the legacy of my father’s suicide.”

Although Vann won a place at Stanford University, his development as an adult was more tentative and uncertain than his academic achievements would suggest – he didn’t have a drink until he was 22 and ‘‘even sex, I didn’t want to have for awhile’’.

He has battled insomnia for decades.

Haunting him was the fear that he would turn into his father. ‘‘I felt doomed for 20 years after my father’s suicide,” he says. ‘‘I imagined I would get married and have kids and hit some depression, and suicide would become a possibility.”

If there were two Vanns in operation back then, you have to wonder if they’re still present now.

Though Vann becomes a little strained talking about his past, for almost all of this interview he’s straightforwardly upbeat, prone to cracking a joke and generous with his time – he’s the kind ofman who puts other people in a good mood. It’s hard to reconcile the person I meet with the pristinely distilled anger of his prose – and the bleakness of his past.

‘‘I think the key is change over time,” he says. ‘‘Before, I suffered. I feel fine now. Writing helped protect me. The most important thing tome was to realise that I wasn’t my father and that I didn’t have to repeat his life. I had a much better, easier life. He became a dentist because his father became a dentist.

‘‘He grew up in a time when it didn’t seem to be a choice but an inevitability, and his marriage seemed that way, too. If he had grown up a little bit later, he might not have committed suicide. He might have led a more self-determined life and made choices that reflected who he was.”

There was also a vital turning point for Vann after his college days. In the mid-1990s, having decided that writing wasn’t Working out for him as a career, he became a sea captain, building his own boats from scratch, including a 90-foot catamaran.

His five-year adventure came to an end on his honeymoon ,when the boat Vann and his wife, Nancy, were sailing through the Caribbean sank.

At a time that couldn’t have seemed worse, Vann found a silver lining greater than the cloud itself.

‘‘After I hit that low point, I realised that I had no interest in killing myself,” he says.

Having been freed from what he thought was his legacy, Vann succeeded in publishing a very successful memoir of his life on the sea, A Mile Down (2005),which acted as an important calling card for the fiction that was to come.

In ways, it seems remarkable that Vann would have chosen the fiction form to write about his family, when he could so easily have written another memoir.

It wasn’t done to protect family members – with such a thin veil cast over the truth, he has already horrified his grandmother with his work (‘‘she said I should turn to Jesus’’), and his uncle – with whom he has a good relationship – has sensibly decided against reading any of it.

Vann picked fiction for its powers of metamorphosis.

‘‘For me, non-fiction doesn’t transform and take its own shape the way fiction does. For me, writing is unconscious and out of control, and the best moments are when the writing takes over and my plans are destroyed. That process of discovery only works in fiction.”

While Vann is reluctant to criticise any author directly, he gets annoyed by the way our perspective of literature has been altered by the media focus on fashionable authors such as Jonathan Franzen.

‘‘There’s this idea – as in the Jonathan Franzen profile in Time magazine – that our great literature is urban. I think that’s just wrong. I think our greatest literature has been rural.

Faulkner, Hemingway and writers like Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Marilynne Robinson.”

Vann is doing a lot to indirectly correct this impression himself, both in the US and abroad.

In France, where writers like McGahern and Julian Barnes have been feted, Vann has sold about 150,000 copies of Legend of a Suicide and won one of the country’s most prestigious awards. Sales in Ireland and Britain are also strong. ‘‘Ireland is incredible,” Vann says. ‘‘I went to two festivals last summer – in Kilkenny and Cork.

For a country with such a small population to have such a focus on literature is just incredible. ‘‘I’m begging the Kilkenny festival to bring me back this year.”

With early reviews of Caribou Island already glowing, it seems likely that it’ll soon be them doing the begging.

For now, Vann is quietly happy about his success.

‘‘I know my career might go right back down the toilet soon, so I’m just enjoying this. It’s wonderful that my books have a chance to be out there and to be read.

“That’s what every writer wants.”

Caribou Island will be published by Vintage on January 21