Alan Maguire's debut album, The City and the Sky is due for release on the 20th of May. He's been playing in bands for over 20 years and has played nearly every venue and festival in Ireland.

 At one point towards the end of the '90s he went to see Muff Winwood of Sony A&R in London. He told Alan his music would never be played on radio, and to come back if he ever wrote a song that could be a hit single. He's yet to write that elusive hit single but he has diverged into atmospheric electro rock for his first solo album.

There's no sign of the heavy grunge guitars of Culture Vandals or the funky chops of his work with Miss Kate and the Higher State on The City and the Sky. The guitars are relegated to the passenger seat of these abstract urban landscapes and there's more emphasis on dreamy synths and hypnotic beats.

We spoke to Alan about it in a very reflective and analytical interview. 

Alan, you have your debut album coming out ‘The City and the Sky’.

Yes, it came about because I’ve been making music for 20 years and about two years ago I turned around and there was no one to make music with anymore. For various reasons, lifestyle reasons, people have kids, or go off and do other things. Emigration is a big one, a lot of the people I had been making music with live in different countries. They leave one by one and then you look round and there's nobody there. So I said “Fuck it, I’ll concentrate on doing stuff at home on my own.” I was messing around with soft synths and VST stuff, just being an all-round producer dude. And then a few months ago I started putting everything on Soundcloud and it turns out people do listen to things and people seemed to like some of the tracks.

How did I get from doing that to it being an album? is a good question. I realised that I’m middle aged and if I don’t make myself do it, it will never happen. But also the music I had been making up til then had been very scattershot. Do a funky tune one day, do an electro/ screamo tune the next day. It sort of coalesced around a particular style towards the end of last year. I looked back and realised I had five or six tracks that were kind of coherent sonically and tell a story in a certain mood. And I thought that’s almost like I have an album.

The other thing was I wanted to put stuff onto Spotify and YouTube because that’s where people go for these things. I figured if I’m doing that I might as well try to package it together as an album. So I retrospectively went from what the technology asks of you to it being in that format. Another thing is I’ve being listening to pop music and hip hop and all kinds of things where people who absolutely cannot sing are singing on their tunes because it’s just autotuned to fuck. I never considered myself a singer. It’s not on the list of thing I think I’m good at. But I thought if Kanye West can sing on those tracks then I can sing on my tracks. 

So I got autotune, I sang really badly, I turned autotune up to 10, and its still not good singing but it’s a more coherent sound. And once you do that you can feel like there is more of a presence of a human being on the song. It makes you listen to the music very differently.  And that’s the other reason why the music sounds the way it does because of that kind of autotuned, morose, breathy thing that I do when I’m singing. That works ok when you’re doing stuff that sounds like Depeche Mode. 

The other stuff that I do is more funky. I’d have to sing in a soul way and I can’t do that. If I figure out how to sing in a soul way, I’ll do another album that is all the funky tracks together. But this is a collection of all of my most morose material. Maybe I should find a different way to phrase that if it’s going into print? 

Maybe a little sticker on the cover?

"Only his most morose tracks". It’s an interesting thing. Its fine when you’re doing that from song to song, “There’s another mid tempo mope-rock song”, and then you go back and listen to it as an album and you think “I had no idea I was that depressed”. I didn’t think I was. It’s not naturally cheerful though. There’s one or two tracks that sound, maybe hopeful, and there’s one that sounds happy but ironically happy.

The next move is to see if there’s a way for me to channel happiness into music. I’m not against happiness as a concept. It’s just not what naturally comes out. It’s not my default setting. I don’t think I’m naturally a morose person in reality but it’s the sound I can really get behind when I’m performing.

You sell morose well?

I think so. People have resting-bitchy-face, I have resting-slightly-sad-face. That’s why it’s an album.

You’re putting this out yourself?

I did go to one or two small labels that do electronic music and pretty much none of them responded to my emails. Which I wasn’t surprised about. The thing with those small electronic labels is that they are really quite focused on a genre, or a particular BPM, or a particular preset on a synth. And while I do like some of that music I’m not monomaniacal enough to produce stuff that is like that. If only I had found someone who specialises in doing medium tempo mope-rock Depeche Mode knock offs. Which wasn’t on purpose that’s just what it was. I'd prefer to sound like Mahavishnu Orchestra or King Crimson or something but that’s not what came out. 

Your own true voice?

I suppose yeah. You are forced to realise that. George Orwell said that after the age of 40 every man has the face that he deserves. Now at the age of 40 I have the album that I deserve.

Why is this the right time for the album to come out?

I turned 40 just around the same time as I realised that gigs with other people weren’t exactly plentiful. There is a sense of encroaching middle age, would be one part of it. But also I simply have the ability to do it because I bought lots of guitars and I have lots of stuff. I have lots of microphones and guitar pedals. I have the man-cave, also known as the laundry room. I found that it was logistically feasible to record a lot of music on my own without having to spend money on anyone else doing it. It’s technically and logistically the right time. Which is a terrible answer really. Shouldn’t it be that I am burning with this desire to get my message across to people?

That is the standard response.

I guess I am but I’m less likely to admit that motive to myself because it’s scary. Because you set yourself up for failure. It’s much easier to pretend that you are doing it for other reasons. Probably the real reason is that I would like some people to hear the music and to like it, and all of the things that come with that. But I am not completely open to failing so publicly so I am fooling myself into doing it.

This is the first album you've done?

Yeah, I’ve played on records that other people have done. I did an album a couple of years ago with some friends that I do improv music with. I’m all over that, if you want to hear an album of somebody playing really wanky guitar then that’s a good album to pick up. I was a featured performer on albums in the past but this is certainly the first time that I have released something under my own name. And the first time I have released something with me singing on it. I could come to regret all of this. 

You know how much music is released everyday? So, on the bright side it will probably be forgotten in a week or two. There was an inflection point a couple of years ago where everyday more than 24 hours worth of music is released. It’s vastly more than that now. It’s like in the Middle Ages, Erasmus was the last person to know everything. The last person who could possibly have heard everything is already dead, probably. We live in a world that is vastly oversaturated with this stuff. You could be upset that you are so unlikely to find an audience or you could use it to your advantage by being more willing to take a risk in the almost certain knowledge that no one is going to listen to it. This is coming out a bit more nihilistic than I expected.

What for you will make this album a success? Or has that changed from when you first decided to do it?

It probably has. Before, my idea of success was simply that I would have the patience to go through what you have to go through to get it out there. Which isn’t all that much. But I wasn’t sure I would even do that. I thought I would just drop it after a couple of weeks. Just a flash in the pan idea. I decided to do this in the first week of January this year so it seems like a new year’s resolution, and it is the longest I’ve ever held a new years resolution. As time has gone on since January and it’s become more of a reality, I think my hope is that people review it, and listen to it, and it gets some kind of critical reception. 

I have no expectations of making money. If it broke even, I’d be delighted. How many streams would it have to get on Spotify to break even? Millions, so yeah, I don’t know. Maybe if a random person stopped me in the street and said “I like your album”. If I made some connection with people beyond my immediate friends, but I’d probably be really freaked out at the same time. So I think I will wait and see what happens and work backwards from there to decide what counts as success. 

There isn’t a great ratio of the success that’s available to the people who want it. It’s pretty intimidating. I’m not willing to go on the road for six months touring, or all the things that people have to do, people that we both know, who do this full time. The amount of energy that they have to put into it and anything that you get back out of it is a bonus. So I suppose I’m a bit of a dilettante in that regard.

You’ve been playing for 20 years in different bands and, almost literally, there is no record of that. Now there is a record of something.

I wrote down a list of the bands I’ve been in for a friend and there were about 20 bands. Some of those I was in for five minutes, some for five years and we still didn’t really do anything. And with other bands I did a fair bit of gigging. I did quite a bit with Miss Kate. I don’t know if it adds up to anything. Live stuff disappears off into the ether once it’s done. It’s really different. The work you put in to play a good gig. The amount of preparation and rehearsing. The ratio of effort to reward is two different sports entirely. There’s the visceral thrill of playing music to three people but I also feel I could turn into some sort of Pol Pot character sitting at home. Because you have 100% control over the stuff you do at home and I feel like I have ruined myself for being in bands now because I can spend an hour tweaking parameters on a soft synth. “Do I need to pan this thing a bit more to the left?” And when you’re in a band you have to take what you’re given. You can’t rally micromanage people that you’re not playing money to. When you’re playing in a band at amateur level in Dublin, it’s people who want to be there. So you can’t be a controlling megalomaniac. And I never wanted to be until now that I’ve had a taste of having 100% control over my music.

They are completely different things and it just happens that the skill set is transferable. Maybe the difference with doing it live is that you have to be ok at social interactions with people. People who may be difficult or crazy. Anyone who has been in a band has been in a band with somebody crazy. 

That’s something that you get better at over time and now when you’re doing it all on your own you can be slightly nauseated by seeing yourself everywhere. You know that ‘Malkovich, Malkovich’ scene? You feel a bit like that sometimes. Some of the music is dense. Fifteen layers of drums and bass and synth and guitars and vocals and they’re all you. 

It would be interesting to through something else into the mix. I do have demo recordings and cheap studio recordings of several of the bands that I have been in. And I have about 100 hours of recordings of me improvising in an improvising band that I played with. We used to do gigs a long time ago but after that we just holed up in a studio every weekend for five years. We had a ProTools rig and nice gear and recorded. It’s almost like keeping a diary. I don’t keep a diary but listening to this stuff is a good way to revisit the person that you used to be. Its extremely ephemeral music. First of all we were playing to no audience, just to each other.  Going back is like going back and finding pictures of you wearing clothes that you wouldn’t wear anymore. You think “Jesus, was that really me?”

When I started out doing this, you would rehearse a band for a year and then record three songs in the demo studio and listen to them over and over and over. They’d be mashed into your brain and now even recording is ephemeral because it can be done so easily. There are so many hours of the improv stuff that I’ve done that I can’t listen to all of it. Whereas songs that you’ve written twenty years ago that you’ve recorded, you’ve put so much time and work into them that it’s hard to listen to them with fresh ears. 

Did you ever catch your reflection without knowing it's you and think "who’s that guy?" That’s a really different way of seeing yourself from looking in the mirror and you find recordings of yourself and aren’t immediately aware that it's you. You get a sudden glimpse of how you appear to other people. How you sound to other people. It’s not always pretty.