NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOE
Joe Chester releases live solo album and chats about his encounters with Sinead O’connor and Mike Scott
Joe Chester – hailed as “a legitimate giant of Irish music” by Hot Press magazine – is often reminded of a very surreal scene in Notting Hill whenever he’s asked about the first and only time he performed with Sinead O’connor.
It was a special gig to celebrate Amnesty International’s 50th anniversary, which took place only days after the music icon had married her fourth husband in a drive-thru wedding ceremony in Las Vegas on her 45th in 2011.
The critically acclaimed singersongwriter had been asked to “step in” at the last minute to perform the intimate set with Sinead at Amnesty’s Dublin office on Fleet St and was sent the set list.
“I didn’t know Sinead. And I still don’t know her. I met her one night,” he told me on Skype from his recording studio in Nice.
Joe lives over there with his French wife Julie Bienvenu, who just so happens to be the drummer alongside him in my personal favourite Irish band, A Lazarus Soul.
Continuing the story, Joe said: “I got a call to say, ‘Are you free on this night? Sinead is committed to doing this thing and she can’t get a guitar player’.
“I went down to the Amnesty International office to set up. And while I was there, she called me from the airport.
“She was in Vegas getting married and there was a lot of paparazzi following her around the place.
“She’d just landed from Vegas and had called me just to say, ‘Howya’ and, ‘Listen, I’m just jumping in a taxi now. And would you meet me outside?’
“And I was like, ‘Absolutely, of course’. And she called again when she was pulling up.
“And do you remember that scene in Notting Hill where he opens the door and it’s just like a sea of paparazzi outside when Julia Roberts is caught in the house?
“It was like that. There was flashbulbs going off.
“As soon as I open the door, it was just like flashbulbs and paparazzi. And I was like, ‘What the f**k is going on here?’”
He added: “And then I smuggled her into the cafe where we then sat down and we had a cup of coffee and talked about what we were going to play.
“And we were on stage ten minutes later and we played for about an hour: totally improvised.”
It speaks volumes about Joe’s superb musicianship that everybody lucky enough to be in the audience that night agrees it was one of Sinead’s most memorable performances.
“It was the most wonderful, wonderful experience. The music was incredible. She was electric, just off a long haul flight with a cappuccino and ‘on you go’. And she was incredible. She was absolutely amazing,” he recalled.
He added: “And the place was just enraptured with her. And I had the best seat in the house, sitting beside her, playing the guitar.
“And it’s just one of those things were I didn’t even know when to stop playing. She was just looking at me and I was looking at her and I was trying to read her face.
“It was an incredible night. And then we just said our goodbyes and parted ways, and that was end of that. As collaborations go it was brief, but it was intense.”
It was even more surreal when The Waterboys’ frontman Mike Scott first reached out to Joe via social media.
“Do you remember Myspace? Well, I got a message one day on my Myspace page from Mike Scott,” he recounted.
“He was saying he had been listening to (my albums) A Murder of Crows and The Tiny Pieces Left Behind and he really loved them.
“And he asked would I be into coming over to his house for a jam?”
It was an offer – to paraphrase Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather – that no musician worth his salt could refuse.
“I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I don’t know what to make of it. Is this a wind up?’” Joe said, laughing.
“Fisherman’s Blues when I was a kid was just like Born To Run, or something. It was the album that was in everybody’s house.
“I brought a few guitars and a amplifier in a taxi over to his house.
“And we sat there for an afternoon, just facing each other and he played a song, and I’d play a song.
“And when he’d play the song, I’d try to come up with guitar lines for something – songs that I had never heard before!”
Joe continued: “He had my songs on his computer and every now and then he’d lean over to his computer and he’d say, ‘Do You hear that chord there? That really reminds me of Ennio Morricone’, or something like that.
“He’d obviously been analysing the music. It was quite unnerving.
“And then that was that. I stuck my stuff back in a taxi and drove off. I thought nothing would ever come of that. It was just one of those just really nice experiences.”
But it turned out to be a great meeting of minds – one that resulted in The Waterboys’ tenth studio album in 2011.
“He was working on putting Yeats’ poetry to music for a show called An Appointment with Mr Yeats,” Joe said.
“And he was looking for a collaborator, or someone to help with the preproduction. Specifically, he wanted somebody to help them with their harmonium, and vocal harmonies.
“So we met up for a few times to chat about it. It was six months that we worked together on that and then the full band came along and we put the show together (with rehearsals) in Smock Alley.
“And we did a week in the Abbey Theatre as the world premiere of that show (in 2010). That was an incredible
As soon as I opened the door it was just like flashbulbs and Paparazzi. And I was like ‘What the f**k is going on here?
show: it was a 13-piece band in the Abbey for a week playing just Yeats’ music. Sold out every night.
“And it’s such a ‘big ask’ to ask a sell-out crowd to sit through 20 new songs that they’ve never heard before. And it was really powerful.
“And then we went off on tour with the show. It was an amazing experience.”
There was also, of course, his collaboration with Tipperary singersongwriter Gemma Hayes.
Joe explained: “We got to know each other through the singer-songwriter scene in Dublin and then we lost touch for a few years, until I contacted her and asked her to sing on a track on A Murder of Crows.
“And so, then on my second album, The Tiny Pieces Left Behind, I didn’t want to do any gigs because I was just burnt out.
“So, Gemma came along and rescued me. She said, ‘I have to do a tour (in the US) and will you be my guitar player?’ I was like, ‘absolutely’.
“It meant that I could just slink into the shadows for a year or two.
“We ended up supporting My Bloody Valentine in America.
“We’ve always had a very strong musical connection. There’s a magic there, you know. It’s hard to explain.”
Laughing, Joe added: “But we definitely argued a lot, Gemma used to say that we were too alike and that’s why we argued. We used to have terrible fights.
“It is almost like a sibling thing. I suppose, as well, we were under a lot of stress all the time (with the tour).”
Joe stepped back out of the shadows with several critically acclaimed solo albums in the noughties.
His last long player, the double LP
Jupiter’s Wife – recorded in 2019 but released in early 2020 – is one of the best Irish albums I’ve heard in a long time. I voted it best Irish album of the year.
The only other Irish album to impress me even more in recent times was The D They Put Between the R&L by Joe’s band A Lazarus Soul (ALS).
It was picked by several newspaper music critics – myself included – as the best Irish album of 2019.
As collaborations go, it’s a match made in heaven for Joe seeing as his wife Julie is their drummer.
The two other guys in the band are singer/lyricist Brian Brannigan and Anton Hegarty of Future Kings of Spain fame on bass.
Joe confessed that he was taken aback by the tremendous response to the ALS album.
“I was shocked really because, the thing is, that Brian and I have been working together for 20 years and I think that was our fifth or sixth album,” he said.
It’s not even Joes’s favourite ALS album. He much prefers Graveyard of Burnt Out Cars from 2007.
Singing the praises of his band’s vocalist, he said: “To me, it’s all about Brian’s songs. And his songwriting on a Graveyard is just like novels, those songs. There’s a song called Me & Maradona Dunne on that album that is like a novel.”
There’s an Irish tour next year with dates in Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny, and Galway.
“I would imagine it will be emotional. We were rudely interrupted, because we were right in the middle of promoting that record when this all happened. We had just started doing festivals,” he said.
“I mean, this tour will be the first time A Lazarus Soul will have played outside of Dublin – apart from when we played Other Voices one year.”
There will hopefully be another ALS album not so far off in the distant future, but there won’t be another solo studio effort anytime soon.
Which is all the more reason for you to check out the live album of his 2020 concert film Under The Ragged Thorn, which has its official streaming release this weekend, following on from a limited edition CD version.
Recorded at a 17th century chapel in Nice last summer with Joe’s wife’s accompanying him on drumming duties, the film is now available to watch on the streaming platform
Onjam (www.onjam.tv).
“I haven’t said this to anybody yet, but this will be the last Joe Chester album for quite a few years. I’m concentrating on some other projects now, so I imagine there won’t be another Joe Chester album for maybe five years,” he revealed.
“I’m in the middle of another project that’s going to take me well into next year, possibly beyond. And then, if it takes me three years to make another Joe Chester album, then that’s five years. “
The release of the live album is a “watershed moment” for Joe, who recently discovered that he has produced well over 60 albums for other artists when he had to update his discography for his website.
“It’s feels to me like looking back now and taking stock,” he added. “I just knew when I was making this live record that this was going to be it for a while.”
The live concert is the perfect moment to press the pause button. “I was feeling like I needed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I was thinking of some sort of artistic statement that I could do – something other than singing into the abyss of the smartphone,” he said.
“It was really great to play the songs of Jupiter’s Wife live because I never had before – even if there was no audience.”
Joe – who also hopes to do some solo tour dates next year to finally perform tracks from his last superb solo album in front of a live audience – certainly won’t be resting on his laurels in 2022.
“I’m just always going. There’s always something. ‘What’s next?’ And it never stop. And even when the first lockdown happened, I remember thinking to myself, ‘It really seems like everybody’s taking time off here and I’m not’,” he concluded.
“I wondered, ‘Am I going to pay the price for this… am I going to burn out here? Because if you can’t even take the opportunity to just stop when the world stops, you know?
“It’s just the way I am, it’s my make up. I just have to keep working.”
■■Joe Chester’s new live album, Under The Ragged Thorn (Live In Nice) is released today across all streaming platforms. It’s also available to purchase as a limited edition CD via Bohemia Records from www.bohemiarecords.ie/ store