O'Rourke on the wild side
With a voice like his, and some remarkable songs to match, Declan O'Rourke's ascension to the international frontline is no surprise.
Paul Nolan, 24 Sep 2007
Declan O’Rourke and I are sitting on the rocks overlooking the sea outside Dunguaire Castle in Kinvara, Galway. The laid-back singer – whose grandfather once lived in a cottage across the road from the castle – recently moved into a house near the town. These are very busy times indeed for O’Rourke, who has just released his second album Big, Bad Beautiful World, the follow-up to the acclaimed Since Kyabram, which went double platinum and catapulted him to the front rank of Irish singer-songwriters.
Born in Dublin, O’Rourke’s family moved to Australia when he was 10 and returned to Ireland four years later. However, Declan had strong ties with Australia and again moved to the country when he was 19. A big turning point in his life occurred when he came back to Dublin a week before the millennium, and attended a songwriter’s night in Molloy’s. The evening in question happened to be a send-off party for a singer who was moving to the US, and other artists in attendance included Paddy Casey and Gemma Hayes.
Suddenly surrounded by like-minded souls (“it was what I had been looking for”), O’Rourke dedicated himself to songwriting with renewed intensity and over the next four years built up a profile that led to the success of Since Kyabram. Interestingly, Big, Bad Beautiful World is a slightly rockier affair than the warm acoustica of his debut, with a full band now contributing to the more expansive arrangements. Part of the album was recorded in Grouse Lodge, the County Westmeath studio which has also hosted artists such as Muse, Bloc Party and Snow Patrol.
“I wanted to do the album with a full band, live,” he explains. “That was the kind of vibe I was going for. We needed a big room for that, and we wanted a residential studio outside Dublin, so that people wouldn’t be going off paying a bill during the day, or putting money in the parking meter or whatever. I wanted somewhere enclosed where people can’t really leave. We decided to go in there for 10 days and try and get the core of the album down. The plan was to do that and then for me to add bits later on, which was what happened.”
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