ROBYN’S DREAD FEST

If you’re fixing for an unhappy new year, then Robyn G Shiels has the soundtrack and possibly even a bit of solace. His music is quiet, inward-looking and magnificently doomy. A banjo string gets plucked and the accordion wheezes like an asthma attack. The singer murmurs his words about love and woe and haunted nights. But hey, you’re no longer alone with a Robyn tune.

He is the laureate of loss, the bard of bleakness, the minstrel of misanthrope. But if you go to a Robyn show, there is laughter and hecklers and bottles of and old-time religion.

“I remember going to marquees that were set up outside Kilrea,” he says. “All these ministers and preachers would come to them. And there was fire and brimstone and they’d give out them wee tracts, wee booklets that said if you did wrong, you’re gonna be thrown into this pit of fire.”

Some of that is reflected in the recent video for ‘An

Offering As Such’. It threads the northern landscape around a series of

Bible quotes, painted on rocks and nailed onto wooden posts. Robyn’s mother, who taught him at

Sunday school, was concerned that he might be mocking The Word, but her son was not looking for such an easy score.

“Old Northern Ireland is still stuck in the past with that stuff, like ‘The End is Nigh’.

It’s the fear thing. You ever see that film Wiseblood? It was that. God was instilled in fear in you at a young age. As you grow older you go, that’s like brain-washing.” scenarios and they were going on around the same time. You have to wait until those stories to finish to then write about them.”

Later in 2019 there will be live studio recordings but next is a series of Robyn remixes by friends of the artist: Therapy?, Arvo Party, Documenta, Robocobra Quartet and exmagician. Importantly, the online Bandcamp sales will raise funds for Haemophilia Northern Ireland. Robyn, it transpires, has a variation on haemophilia, called Von Willebrand Disease.

“I’m a bleeder,” he says. “My mother had it. They tested my blood when I was born.

It wasn’t until was six years old and I had to get a tooth out when they found out. I was actually more haemophiliac when I was younger. We have a weird strain, the only family in Europe reportedly that carries it on. I always said to Doctor Benson – ’cause he’s always keen and supportive of what I do musically – I said look, some day we’ll do a charity gig or whatever.”

Sometimes Robyn works in a bar, and on memorable occasions he takes to the stage with a gang of supportive desperadoes. The music is remarkable and the recordings are infrequent but precious. There is great art when it arrives. “I don’t really have anyone to impress but myself,” he affirms.