Darkness, My Old Friend

If you've ever seen Villagers play live in Australia, well, it turns out that you haven't actually really seen Villagers play live. You see, the Irish five-piece has only ever made it to our shores in duo form, meaning that fans living Down Under have only ever seen less than half of the Villagers experience. But all that will change at the North Byron Parklands this July.

“I'm really excited,” Villagers brains trust and dreamboat Conor O'Brien enthuses about bringing his full band with him to our shores for the first time. “I mean, we got to play Melbourne and Sydney before – myself and Cormac [Curran], my keyboard player – and that was cool, but I've always had this nagging feeling when we're doing those shows that we're not doing the albums full justice, so it's going to be exciting to finally get the band out to Australia. I'm looking forward to it.”

Of course, the fleshed-out Villagers line-up is not just a boon for live shows. As the group became a collaborative beast between debut LP Becoming A Jackal (2010) – for which the backing band really were just touring partners – and their sophomore effort {Awayland}, released in January of this year, O'Brien found himself less tied down to being all things for all instruments and thus freer to explore his lyrical talents. In fact, the album has even been described as O'Brien's “great leap forward”. But, in true paradoxical style, that hasn't necessarily made him any happier with that side of his music.

“I think my ideas about that kind of change daily,” he muses. “When we were on tour [in the UK and Ireland] recently, I was enjoying some of the older songs that we hadn't played for a while, so I feel like it's always kind of a changeable thing. But the new songs seem to have a bit more of an energy behind them, like, a bit more a humour to them, I think. They're not quite as morose, I guess.”

This is an interesting observation, given the response to relatively recent single Nothing Arrived and, moreover, its depressing-as-hell video clip, depicting a day in the life (or does it?) of a grey-faced, average soul called Terrence Bliss, who each day buys a lottery ticket, goes to work, goes home, goes to bed, and does it all again the next day. But O'Brien swears up and down that making people sad was never the intent: “No, I think, with that song, the idea to sort of personify the character with a video – that was the video director's idea. He's a French director called Alden Volney, and I thought it was a really, really good idea, because it sort of used the idea of the lottery as a sort of metaphor for life… I'm wary of belittling the song, but it was a very heavy, heavy thing to write those lyrics, and I felt I kind of needed to put them into a pop song to lighten the load. When we play it live, there's a kind of cathartic feeling, so I'm kind of proud of it.”

Indeed, the whole of {Awayland} is permeated by these kinds of emotional juxtapositions, which perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise – after all, O'Brien was eyeballs-deep in Kurt Vonnegut at the time of writing the record.

“That was Cormac again – he gave me A Man Without A Country for my birthday, which is [Vonnegut's] memoir, and I just kind of fell in love with his sardonic humour and his love of life and his sarcastic wit, so I read Slaughterhouse-Five and some of his essays and stuff, and it was just what I was reading at the time,” he says. “I think whatever I'm reading always makes its way into the songs, and it helps me to find that humour as well, which I think I did. Mainly I think Earthly Pleasure is probably the one song that's almost directly influenced by Slaughterhouse-Five; I was almost imagining Billy Pilgrim, the character, when I was writing that song. It kind of freed me up a little bit.

“Also I was reading poetry – I remember being into a lot of Patrick Kavanagh stuff at the time; he's a famous Irish poet. He kind of hits the nail on the head a lot; he has a beautiful way with words. I was reading lots of stuff – American poetry from the '50s, like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and all that weird kind of post-beatnik kind of stuff, when everyone was playing with words and… I don't know. I was getting a lot of influence from that kind of stuff.”

Far from being taken aback when his audiences joyfully shuck and jive to his songs' upbeat aesthetics instead of recoiling at the crushing weight of many lyrics, O'Brien – perhaps unsurprisingly – embraces the incongruity.

“I kind of revel in that,” he explains. “I think that's something that we do quite well as a group. I've always been depressed by shit music that doesn't draw attention to the darkness in life – that depresses me. I think music… like, the blues is something joyful. It's something to share with people, it's kind of a collective feeling, and that's what we aim for in our live shows.”

It's a noble aim, and one they'll hopefully achieve with ease when they arrive here later this month. With a couple of days of downtime in Byron Bay before the festival, the band will have time to work through the haze of jet lag and other associated discomforts of long-haul travel (which O'Brien is prepared to tackle with “sweatpants, a good book, maybe a bit of alcohol … and the sleeping pill thing”), but nonetheless the bar for the full five-piece's debut at Splendour has certainly been set high of late, with O'Brien positively buzzing about the standard at which Villagers presently do their thing.

“I think at the moment we're the best band we've ever been,” he asserts. “The last headline show we did a few days ago was probably my favourite maybe ever.

“I think we played the best we've played ever, in terms of, like, every song was a new reading of the song, and it felt like we were breathing new life into the music. The venue was one of the most beautiful venues we've played, and the audience was spectacular, so all in all it was a good a night.”

It's an experience that O'Brien is hoping to replicate when they finally grace the Splendour stage. “I want to just bring that and enjoy the festival,” he says. “We've never been to that part, Byron – we've only been to Sydney and Melbourne before, so it's going to be a trip.”