The 9th life of Damien Rice
It's been over four intriguing years since Damien Rice's extraordinary debut album O was launched. That record went on to become a huge underground international hit, selling in excess of 2 million copies. Now his long-awaited follow-up – the similarly simply titled 9 – is finally ready to hit the shops. So how did Rice so successfully capture the collective imagination? And will the latest instalment in the Rice musical biography propel him to even greater heights? Hot Press talks exclusively to some of the key players in his remarkable rise and rise.
Peter Murphy, 27 Oct 2006
All together now: Number 9…Number 9…Number 9. All things to all people, that number. White Album fans will recognise it as the weirdo Ono-nian track on The Beatles sprawling double set. Dante elected it the lowermost rung in his cross-section of the Inferno, to which he consigned perpetrators of compound fraud and the treacherous to kinsmen, country, guests, hosts and masters. Nick Tosches wrote floridly and at length of the illimitable nine skies and mystical power of tripled threes in his novel In The Hand Of Dante. Bible scholars, Kabbalists, numerologists, mathematicians and mystics have long eulogised the divine number’s aesthetic and mathematical perfection.
For Damien Rice, it represented the most obvious choice of title for his second record proper, the long awaited follow up to his two-million plus selling O, the Shortlist-winning debut that came in at an impressive No. 2 People’s Choice in last year’s hotpress all-time Irish album poll.
“At the point where you’re finishing an album there’s a title that’s the strongest, that’s sitting there and feels like it’s right,” Rice says, by way of an official communiqué. “Other options were A Hen Will Sit On An Unfertilized Egg, and You Love Her, You Even Love The **** You Hate About Her. So we went with 9.”
The sound you hear is a sigh of relief from label MDs, marketing departments and publicists – to be swiftly sucked back up when they learn that their charge has decided to forego all interviews, touring and promotional duties in order to maintain creative impetus right into the recording of a third album. But then, Rice has never played the supper seal. At the height of O’s success, he was telling the press, “I’m not promoting my record, I’m protecting it.” Nor has he fought shy of rows with his management, label and even his own band.
“We weren’t really a band when we recorded O,” Rice reflects, “whereas on this record everybody was pretty much involved from the beginning. From the touring that we’ve done together, everyone has a more intuitive feel as to what we like and what suits the songs. I’ve really got some momentum at the moment. I’ve moved straight on to the next record and I’m anxious to press on with that, so I’m putting aside any notions of tours or interviews for the time being.”
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