The Second Ireland Diary

Day one

Monday, October 11

Maja:

I’m up very early – 4:30am swedish time. Taxi 5am, airport 6am, flight 8:15. Mark meets me at Dublin airport, and I surprise him by appearing behind what appears to be a touring polish football team. We find a hostel near Heuston train station where we’re able to leave my bags, then get a bus back into town.

Once there we settle on a bar called The Norseman where we settle in for a couple of beers and also go for their whiskey taster tray. Then we head off to find another bar, this time for lunch and we end up at Fitzgerald’s. There we’re looked after by Katie, a wonderful waitress on her first day of work. A few more pints here accompanied by a fantastic meal of Steak and Guinness pie with mash. Then we’re on our way. The 5:30pm train gets us back to Clara by 6:30. I’m exhausted by the time we get back. Pretty much straight to bed.

Day two

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Maja:

I’m excited. It feels wonderful to be back home and I have had a very restful time at my parents house. I just feel so positive, but before me and Mark get real productive there’s a couple of things we need to do. Unpack, take a lovely walk for me to rediscover our little town, then we catch up with the rest of the world by binge watching Squid Game and drinking beer.

Wonderful.

I’m back home!

Ireland, Day three

Wednesday, October 13

Maja:

Yeah, I’m happy to be back here. In Ireland. The country of rain and beer. When I finally wake up, I feel like I want to take on the world. So of course, before doing anything, we need to finish up watching Squid Game. I can’t leave that hanging, so we make a cup of tea and watch the last two episodes. Amazing. And now, I just feel like I’m done with watching things for a while. I want to get started. So in the studio I get going while Mark starts to cook us some pasta bolognese. I get on rearranging the studio, setting up the workstation and so on. Right now my priority is that I want to get a little bit better at producing, so I need to put in some hours at the computer. 

Mark:

Out at The Trap and I head off for a toilet break. On the way I bump into Angela and Jimmy, the managers. They’re doing renovations out back. They take me there to show me what’s going on as they revamp what will be the function room. There, we get speaking about music. This starts to look like it could go on for some time so I excuse myself, go and get Maja, and bring her back and introduce her. Now we’re told that Clara is a very musical town and we’ve really chosen very well in coming here. Crazy. They have the Clara band and Clara musicals, loads of other acts. And we’re told we should come tomorrow and meet Alan who runs their sound and other bits and pieces. 

Maja:

Only Mark could go to the toilet and come back with something like this. Only Mark. 

Day four

Thursday October 14

Mark:

Ross, my London agent calls. He’s wondering if I can start up quizzes like we were talking about pre lockdown. I have to stop him and tell him I don’t actually live in London anymore. I fill him in on a little of our story and he absolutely loves it. And he confirms my theory about lockdown; which was that a lot of musicians would have left London and, had I still been there, I would have been able to clean up. Well, things like that are actually happening for some people all fair play to them. 

Maja:

We go to try to meet Alan at The Trap at 2 pm. We manage to say hello, shake hands and give our card but he’s deep in conversation with the bosses and we soon realise they’re not going to finish talking or checking things anytime soon. If anything we’re a bit in the way. So we back off a little bit and take a little walk to the back of the pub. We start to see it really is an enormous place as we head out beyond the function room and into the back garden. Just huge. Right at the end of it, possibly 60 to 70 metres from where this thing start, is a large raised area. We discover this is the stage area for summertime shows. We’ve seen the whole place now and the serious talk down there is still continuing so we take ourselves off for a walk around the countryside surrounding the town.

Day six

Saturday October 16

Maja:

‘Mark! I’m buying the car now!’ I inform him after I’ve managed to crawl out of bed and come to the computer in the studio downstairs. I’m not especially alert. I’ve been quite tired since yesterday. It’s like everything is just a tad bit too slow today. But we need to buy another car after recently selling the last one in London, and I don’t want to put that off any longer. I’ve been here now for almost a week, and we still haven’t got to it. Living here, we pretty much need a car for any travel and for any kind of decent shopping. Anything, pretty much. The car I want to buy is a Ford Galaxy 2010 model for 2450 euro. It’s in Roscommon. I call up the seller, Tony, and he tells me it’s available and that I can take the train there during the day. I look up train times, and find a train leaving in one and a half hours. Perfect. I can go there, buy the car, and we can drive home. Everything done during the day. I tell Mark who takes a shower and starts getting ready. Then to look up car insurance in Ireland. I start with the first site, and I get a quote. 3700 euro for a year. 3700! And that’s 25% off with an online signup offer. So it’s already reduced by 25 per cent. No way this is true, this is just too much! I pay like 50 euro a month for my Swedish car. This is an infuriatingly high price. How can it be this expensive just because I’m not irish? I’m still a European citizen, and I’ve had my licence for nine years by now. But no. Here, I’m treated like a new driver because I’m new to Ireland. I’ve driven all around the globe. It’s not like I’m a beginner at all, but apparently none of that matters here. I continue searching for other options, but most companies won’t even give me a quote. And I found another one for 4500 euro. That’s even worse than my first option.

This is ridiculous. It now means that this car isn’t happening.

I have to call Tony back. “Hello, how’re you doing?” “Grand, how bout you?” and all of that. “I’m not able to come today. I can’t find any decent car insurance.” That’s that. End of story. We can’t buy an Irish car. It’s just too expensive. Balls.

Well, I’m still going to try to call insurance companies next week to see if I can get something affordable, because this is just over the top. Completely. Surely there has to be some option.

So here we are. Not having a car in the Irish countryside for the foreseeable future. What a fun life. We can’t do anything here, and if we go to any town by train, last trains back to Clara from anywhere tend to leave sometime early evening with only occasional later ones. This is really not an optimal situation. We can’t really live here without a car. 

How are we going to manage now?

Both me and Mark are frustrated beyond. This was not the turn we expected. What are we going to do now? Our little town is nice and so, but we can barely buy decent food here, not at a good price at least. Doing most of your shopping from the local shops is not a sustainable way of being for two musicians looking to play music live for a living. It’s not fitting. We need something else. But what?

Day seven

Sunday October 17 

I wake with what sounds like a crazy idea and I tell Mark so. ‘You know, I still haven’t sold my Swedish car,’ I tell him with a sly look on my face. ‘Which means we do actually have a car,’ ‘OK,’ he says cautiously. I’m thinking like this. First off we can use my Swedish car in Europe for six months. That will put off the problem for quite a while. We have a car that we can use for six months. It’s just that it is currently at my parents place in Sweden. But I have to go there soon anyway for hand surgery. So I can go there, have the surgery, heal, and drive the car to somewhere in Europe where Mark can meet me. We could meet in Copenhagen, or Gdansk, which is a place I can get a ferry to from Sweden. Or we could even meet in Stockholm. Or consider a few places even further south. Like Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam or even Prague. Then we could just go and find places to play. We’ll find our hunting grounds somewhere. It’s going to be an adventure.

I can’t believe it where it looks like these thoughts are taking us. To our first European tour. Yes. Not buying a car would well be the beginning of our first European tour.

Mark is getting all excited about this. He is great at talking to people, and I’m sure that if we’re prepared and just there, we’ll find some opportunities. We’ll just turn up, check in at the cheapest hostel or at a friend’s house if we have any friends around where we end up, and look around for places to play. That’s our game plan right now.

Mark:

Yep. That’s does indeed appear to be our game plan right now. We’ve literally, right here, as we’ve just woken up, begun preparing for our first European tour. Just so that you’re fully up to speed, we’re not yet even ready to play live. Considering what we’re considering, we should probably get on it.

We do this with a two hour rehearsal in which Maja really finds her power voice. We get through four songs and make real significant progress. 

Into the evening and we go out and discover Nigel’s Bar – this place is only open at the weekends so tonight is the first time we make it in there. We’re warmly welcomed to Clara by Michael, the bar manager, then we have a look around and the sheer size of the place takes us totally by surprise. It’s one of those places that just goes on and on. Out back is a nightclub and games area, with another bar upstairs overlooking the whole thing. This could be a cool place in any full size city. It’s not something I expected to find in our new five pub town. Now we’ve discovered the games room, Maja challenges me to darts. Bad idea. For me that is. Because it’s now that she finds out just how pathetic I am at this game. She’s hardly smashing in the 180s either, but what follows is quite possibly a level of humiliation the Romans would have used for public punishment.

What happens next is just out there, unbelievable ridiculous. I’ve been writing quite a lot of Diary catchup today, and tomorrow I’m going to reach the day of Maja’s ankle break when she stepped off a kerb on the way home from the Palmerston and it just went. Well, we get home from Nigel’s  Bar and Maja decides she wants fish and chips from town. So we head back out to the actual fish and chip place, which we’ve never been to before. When we enter, we’re surprised to discover it’s a cash only business. They might just have to rethink that with the only cash point in town having closed just last week. We have no cash, and can’t get any so we leave empty handed to head over to the only similar take out place in town. As we leave the door, there’s a step of around six to seven inches. Kind of like a big kerb. Yep. Something in me miscalculates the distance to the ground and I go down hard, feeling pain in my ankle, in exactly the same place where Maja broke hers – although she did it on both sides of the ankle whereas I have it on just the one, but even so. Come on people. Hours before I’m due to write about Maja’s drama, which meant we had to postpone the whole Irish adventure, I go and do exactly the same thing. But again, not quite the same thing. It’s OK, really. No breaks in sight, just a bit of a sprain. But it was a bit of a worry for more than a second or two there when it happened, and the horrified sound Maja made as she saw me go down just like she had. Oh it must have been scary. I was well aware of that because I immediately called out from the ground, ‘It’s OK. Nothing’s broken. Just hurts. Give me a minute.’ 

Day eight

Monday October 18

The day I write about Maja’s ankle break, I’m wearing the exact same moonboot she got from the hospital and which we brought with us to Ireland. Just in case. Well, here we are at that just in case. Talk about symmetry. Damn.

Now onto the next ridiculousness, as The Diaries, an act yet to even play a half hour gig, an act not yet even ready to play a gig, discusses – in full earnest I may add – their first European tour. We’re alternating between the idea of starting in Hamburg or Poland, but the more we think about it, the more Hamburg comes into focus. Northern Germany, working our way down through western Europe. 

But we can’t start until Maja gets back from Sweden which will be possibly be December 1. But the other thing is that she’s leaving for that Sweden visit on November 6 so we also don’t have much time to get ourselves sorted and ready to play a decent length of set of seven or eight songs. Then, with Maja gone for the whole rest of the month, we’ll somehow have to keep in touch with what we hope to have achieved by then so that we can hit the ground, if not running, at least not falling over, when we arrive for our first European shows, wherever they might happen to be.

Day ten

Wednesday October 20

Mark:

We’ve tried comping vocals for I Like You (Better When You’re Naked), which means recording multiple takes and then putting the best bits together to make one coherent vocal. For one reason or another it just didn’t work. Not helped by me making a silly mistake after an hour or so of comping and managing to essentially delete all the work I’d done and then having no idea where I was with the thing. 

So today we decide to try another way, which is to do the song section by section, singing each line until it’s right, saying yes, we have it, and then moving onto the next part. This means we won’t have to return to compare and edit. When we have a section, we have it and that’s that. This is the theory at least. This doesn’t work too well either. We eventually get through it all, but again are not satisfied with the results. What we’ve ended up with is a track with a total lack of spontaneity. It just isn’t a performance. After yesterday, I just can’t take any more of staring at the screen. My eyes have just gone. I take a complete break while Maja works alone, trying different takes and ways of singing it.

After a while she declares that she has something we can work with that just needs a few edits.

Day 11

Thursday October 21

After really thinking we’d made a breakthrough yesterday, and after all the efforts of the past few days, we delete everything and start again. But so much has gone into this that we feel really confident with it now. I guess we thought we were recording when what we were really doing was practicing recording. This is borne out when we get back to it today; within three hours of starting, we have a full track ready to go. This really is a breakthrough, both in terms of learning to work together in the studio, and in Maja’s vocals. I think this week has been her biggest leap forward in improvement since this whole thing began.

Day 12

Friday October 22

Maja:

With something real finally in the bag, there’s a new calmness about things now. Mark has another session of double tracking guitar, playing against my new vocals, and then has a go at some backing vocals. All that’s left are a few minor touch ups and then I go in for mixing. With this I work with Alex who’s been super kind enough to offer his help on all things technical. I send him what I have and he replies with thoughts on how things could be improved and I incorporate those thoughts and so on.

Mark:

With all of this, I think Maja is really going to get into this production thing. Our pool of skills is definitely building.

Day 13

Saturday October 23

Maybe for today, Sunday and Monday, look through the Alex Whatsapp thread and get into studio bits a little

Maja’s first live band experience at The Trap.

Day 14

Sunday October 24

Day 15

Monday October 25

Maja has the idea of renting an apartment in Hamburg or Berlin and going there for December to play around those areas. Then we’ll take a break for Christmas which might just see us go and visit my family in Devon. During that time we’ll leave the car in Germany. In this plan, New Year will be spent back in Berlin while we decide where to go next. Maybe something like Holland, Belgium, northern France, and then western Germany from there. It’s a plan. 

Once we’ve discussed all this we get stuck into a rehearsal which ends up going on for three hours. We start in the kitchen reworking an old song of mine called Can You Be. After hitting that for a while we head into the studio to have a really solid go at everything we have as we aim to get the set nailed. Tomorrow sees us continuing to just go through the set as we work on more and more details and transitions within songs. Not to mention just trying to make ourselves sound like a single unit that can play together.

Day 17

Wednesday October 27

Ditto.

Day 18

Thursday October 28

Today it just isn’t happening. We try to rehearse. We really do. But it just sounds flat, uninspired, and it’s full of all kinds of mistakes that we just shouldn’t be making. It would be a waste of time to try to iron all this out. Most of it we already do have ironed out, we just aren’t proving it today. No. This is all coming from tiredness. We really have been hitting it hard lately, and rather than that manifesting itself in good, solid playing, exactly the opposite is happening. Frustrated and tired, we decide to start the weekend early and recharge.

Day 20

Saturday October 30

We’ve had a thought about maybe doing a gig before we set up so we can have at least on show under our belts before tackling Europe. If nothing else it would get that first one out of the way as we see just how much of our image of ourselves and our songs can survive contact with reality. And if things do go well, we could maybe justifiably go into Europe with something resembling confidence in what we have, beyond our own stubborn belief.

So we go into The Trap in the afternoon and see Angela. She’s happy to give us a gig this Friday, November 5, the day before Maja sets off. By definition, the very last day we have available before Europe. Brilliant. Job done.

Day 21

Sunday October 31

We really have no desire to see what happens on Hallowe’en here, especially as we live in a very conspicuous house right on a crossroads. With that, Maja’s had the idea of us going off on a day trip to Tullamore, probably taking in the night as well. Actually, that would kind of be the point. Before heading off, we have a run through of the set. For the first time we get through the whole thing in one go, complete with backing vocals. It all sounds very lively, and it’s encouraging that we’ve now got through the whole thing, which means the week ahead of us can be spent on consolidation. It’s also perfect that we hit this milestone before our first real day trip out to our nearby larger town of Tullamore. As a comparison, Clara has a population of around 3,500 while Tullamore is around 14,500.

We make the 2:30pm train.

Once in Tullamore we start to get a very different feel to the place than we ever have before. Up to now it’s been a functional town for us. Come and do the shopping, which mostly happens in the bigger stores slightly out of town anyway. But we have been to the shopping centre here, which hosts a Dunnes supermarket. And with that there’s been the occasional walk around the place, maybe popping into a cafe or two at times. But now we’re checking out bars and restaurants. We wander around and get our bearings for a while, also seeing if we can discover any live music. The most obvious place we see is a huge bar called Fergies, but they tell us their music starts at 10pm. Our last train out of here is 9:30, so no good.

Before hitting our first bar for a drink we need lunch, which is really breakfast. A little more of a walk and we find a wonderful Indian restaurant, just a tiny bit off the beaten track. We’ll be back here again, we decide. Now it’s time for the wonderfully guilty pleasure of daytime beers.

Our first bar is The Brewery Tap where we watch documentaries of old Offaly hurling glories. We get talking to John, the landlord and he knows Clara very well. He tells us there’ll be a party in The Mill later on, the bar behind our house. This will be a celebration for yet another victorious Clara sporting team. We’re really getting  a sense that this town is full of talented musicians and sports stars. I think this is the fourth victory we’ve heard of in the past month or so. 

Out of here and we head to the top of the town where we find Eugene Kellys, a wonderfully large bar where we have one drink in the main bar, then discover their spectacular lounge bar out back. What a contrast of atmospheres. The front bar is all bright and full of local joviality. The back bar is intriguingly dark and the cool music vibe is much more upfront, slightly louder than the other bar. It really has the feel of the cool chill place in town. We have to stay here for another. Afterall, this is like finding a whole new bar anyway.

Out of here and it’s approaching 7. We can maybe take in one more place before last train time. People have been telling us about Digans. That’s straight down the hill from here. On the way we walk past a musician unloading his car and call out good luck to him. He thanks us and we carry on our way to Digans. Oh dear. We don’t get this vibe at all. Very nightclubby and already a bit uncomfortably full and rowdy. No thanks. But we just saw that musician down the road a little way back there. Let’s check him out.

The bar is The Goalpost and we walk in and see our man setting up in front of a speaker someway down the middle of the place. Kind of at the back of the front part of the bar and just in front of a few steps leading down to the back area. We go and say hello and he introduces himself as Pat and invites us to sit down with him while he sets up. We chat a little and we give him our card. ‘Oh, fellow musicians. Very good,’ he says. He then introduces us to his friend, Colm. Cool. We’re suddenly a little crowd.

After about 20 minutes, Pat says he’s about to start, so we settle down at a table nearby and are soon bouncing along to his up tempo pop and rock cover set with a good amount of traditional Irish thrown in. A half hour or so of this and we wait for Pat to finish a song before standing, thanking him for the show and saying our goodbyes to him and Colm. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asks? Last train. It’s half past nine and it’s a 20-30 minute walk from here to the station. ‘Where are you heading?’ Clara. ‘We’ll have none of that,’ he declares. ‘I’m driving that way after. I’ll give you a lift. Stay and have a proper drink.’ Well, who can refuse? So we do, and get totally into the growing raucous atmosphere of the place, all the while hanging out with Colm a little more. And singing along when we know the songs. This day really has warmed up. Now we’re going deep into the evening as well. 

When his set finishes, all four of us pile into his car, me and Maja in the back and Colm up front. They ask what kind of stuff we plan to play if and when we’re out and about and we tell them we’re songwriters so will be planning on that, although we tell them now that we’ll be heading to Berlin and then wider Europe soon to see how we can get on. ‘You’ll be having to play a few covers if you want to play around here,’ Pat says, totally matter of factly, totally as a statement of obvious fact. No no, we say. We’re going to play all our own songs. ‘Oh, you can’t be doing that now,’ says Pat. No-one will be interested, If it’s not Wagon Wheel or something similar, they don’t want to know. Colm chimes in now. Originals, forget it he says. The general thought coming off both of them now is that it simply can’t be done. Colm turns round now to face us. All serious, he says, ‘You have to throw a few covers into your set. You just have to. I’m telling you now.’ If you didn’t know he was in fact offering friendly advice and from a totally well meaning place, you would think he was giving a warning. ‘What you guys are planning, you can’t do it,’ he continues. ‘You have to play covers.’ We hold our ground. No. We’re doing this. The atmosphere is in danger of descending a little in here.

‘It’s nursery rhymes for adults,’ Pat calls out. ‘That’s all they want. Songs they know and that’s the end of it. I’ve got my own stuff too as it happens, but it just doesn’t work with the kind of audiences you’re talking about.’ We really are being told here. Pleaded at almost. Like, ‘Guys, please don’t do this to yourselves.’ They are totally telling us for our own sakes. As I said, their thoughts are totally coming from a good, well meaning place and, for all the hard sounding words, no-one’s falling out here.

We decide to give Pat the last word on this subject. He then says that he and Colm are playing in The Trap on Wednesday with another friend or two of theirs. Oh wow. Our own local and we tell them we’re playing there on Friday. ‘Why don’t you guys come along on Wednesday,’ Colm suggests now, again nudging the atmosphere to more friendly territory. Maybe you could get up and do a song or two with us. Yep absolutely. Sounds absolutely brilliant and another continuation of our fantastic little daytrip to Tullamore.

Day 22

Monday November 1

We’re up relatively early and surprisingly very fresh. The main priority now, apart from rehearsal, is to think about what we want to do between now and arriving in Berlin.

I need to have a working studio set up here so that me and Maja can maybe send tracks to each other. One of those projects will be me recording backing guitar tracks for the songs so that she can have something rehearse with on her own.

And we have to decide what to take and maybe see what we might have to buy when we get there. This includes thinking about what Maja has in Sweden which she can bring in the car. But really, it looks like we’ll have to buy quite a few things when we get there, including a new guitar, at least one speaker, and a mixing desk. Of course we have a guitar here but it’s only acoustic meaning it has to be mic’d up. Not ideal, even for now, but there’s no point buying a guitar here just for one gig. For The trap on Friday we’ll mic up the guitar, then have a whole new semi acoustic one by the time we start in Berlin.

And of course, up front and personal on that to-do list is me researching venues and promoters and emailing and calling them. Generally trying to get us gigs to actually play when we get there.

Day 23

Tuesday November 2

After rehearsal we really get down to trying to settle touring plans. We decide to take in five or six cities. The plan will be to arrive in one, play in and around the place and get known around there as much as we can, then move onto the next one. That three to four week thing is also fluid and could shorten or lengthen depending on what was happening in any given place. For the first destination, we settle on Berlin. I’ll fly there at the beginning of December, and Maja will drive down from Stockholm, probably getting a ferry on the way, maybe to Poland. 

It’s looking something like this:

Berlin – with a Devon excursion

Amsterdam

Zurich

Paris

Madrid

Then possibly, possibly London. We’re not totally convinced about Madrid – too far out of the way for a start – and Hamburg could yet make it into the mix. 

But of course, who really knows? We’re open to anything else happening in between that could take us anywhere else. But with this, we now have a solid plan to talk about and aim at.