After a tame couple of years, Wild Youth are back with a bangin’ new tune..
Singer Conor on why Dublin band are in a really good place and ready to rock
Conor O’donohoe was hitting the pavement on his daily morning 5km jogs in Sweden when suddenly hit with inspiration for Wild Youth’s new banger, Live Without You.
“I was about to go into studio and I went for a run – and I had this overwhelming (negative) feeling,” Conor began, speaking from his base in London, where he works as a musical gun for hire.
“I’ve got a girlfriend and I’m very happy with my girlfriend. She’s amazing. I’m very highly emotional and my mind is a very difficult place. I’ve got ADD. But she’s a very strong rock for me.
“It’s a very Irish thing, I think, sometimes when things are going really well for you, you just constantly feel like something bad is just only around the corner – as if something’s gonna knock you off your horse.
“And it’s that fear of self-sabotaging in your own head: what’s going on in your life, what’s working in your life, and what’s making you happy.
“And the worries of, ‘What if I didn’t have this? What if it all ended tomorrow?’ That’s what the song is about.”
Conor explained he suffers from attention deficit disorder.
According to Dr Google, this is an alternative name for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).
“My own mental health is a continuous battle. I’ve got really bad ADD,” he revealed. “And the more I’ve looked into ADD, I always wondered why certain things happen, or why my brain works in a certain way.
“Basically, it’s like your mind is like a spinning wheel for a hamster. But with ADD, that wheel never stops even if you get off. So, there’s never an ‘off switch’ in my head.
“It can work really well in my favour, like, if I’m in the studio. I can keep going all day and I can write and I can think of ideas, and different things. I’m energised.
“But then sometimes if you’re at home by yourself, or you can’t sleep – and it’s like your mind can take over.
“Or, if things aren’t going as well it can catastrophise all those things and multiply it by it 100.
“Which is tricky. I’ve really struggled. But, you know, I’m in a very good place right now, and I’m very happy, and all’s good. I’m very lucky.”
Conor takes meds for the condition, but added: “I run every single day. I do 5k every single morning. If I don’t run at the start of the day my head is a jungle.”
The jogging definitely seems to have helped on the music score, because the new single is an epic slice of pop perfection. You can consider this a five-star review.
The Dublin band’s first single of the summer is odds on to be a runaway hit, seeing as their last song was No1 in the charts.
Conor puts a “massive chunk” of their early success down to support from radio.
Wild Youth were the first Irish act to ever play soldout shows at The Olympia before releasing an album – doing three nights in 2019. “Irish radio (stations) were very good to us. I think there were lot of things involved,” he said. “We released a song called All Or Nothing, which I wrote in my shed. That got some radio play.”
It also helped when Wild Youth lassoed Danny O’donoghue and Co into helping them in the studio.
“I met The Script when we did a gig at a 3Arena, which was a Childline Show. We had a great chat then,” he said. “They’d seen our show and they’d heard All or Nothing in London. So, I started working with them. I built an amazing relationship with them. We really And we spent a long time writing and then it was [the single] Can’t Move On – the first time I ever wrote with them – and it was the most played song on Irish radio in 2019, I think. Radio was so good to us.
“So I think everything kinda came from that. Then Spotify started building, and numbers started growing, and then fans started coming.
“It stemmed from that quite organically, but I think a massive chunk of it is down to Irish radio.”
Wild Youth’s Conor and David Whelan first started jamming together in their early teens.
The other two band members (Ed Porter and Callum Mcadam) later jumped onboard to make up the final pieces of this very special jigsaw.
There had been much wild talk of the then two teenagers mitching off school to work on songs.
“We weren’t cool enough to mitch school. We mitched homework. We would just go and we would play music out the back,” Conor explained.
“My mum was incredible. She passed away a couple of years ago. She was very creative herself.
“She would let Dave come over and we wouldn’t do homework, and we’d go into the back shed and we’d write. We’d write up until my dad was home for dinner. And then he’d be like, ‘Right, what’s going on? Where’s the homeclicked. work?’” Conor’s late mother, who sadly passed away at only aged 56, believed in him from day one.
“I could have told her I was gonna be an astronaut and she would have believed in me,” he said. “She was an incredible person, very special.
“Even when she was passing away, she was like, ‘Forget what anyone says. Don’t let anyone put you down. You’re gonna to do it. You know you can do it. Whatever makes you happy – just do it’. So, she’d actually be delighted to see me still at it, playing music.” Conor describes himself as a “spiritual person”. He told me back in 2019: “I believe she is still with me spiritually, and she gets to see it all still. Look, I
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My mental health is a continuous battle. I have ADD. My mind never stops.
want to make her proud.” And speaking now, he said: “Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I believe that.”
There’s clearly a striking similarity between Conor’s own poignant backstory and that of Bono.
These two highly-talented Northsiders are both haunted by the untimely and tragic demise of their respective mothers.
The U2 frontman was just 14 when his mother collapsed at her own father’s funeral and died four days later from a brain aneurysm. While Conor was equally young, just 17, when his own beloved mother passed away.
“It’s so hard, man. I don’t think you ever get over it. I think you just learn to live with it,” he said. “I don’t think you ever get better. You just learn to survive... not ‘survive’ because I’m very lucky in what I have in my life now.
“I’m in a very happy place, but nothing will ever take away from your mum, or parents, or loved one coming and seeing a show.
“Or, on a Sunday, calling over to your mum for a chat, or dad, or whoever it is. Nothing ever gives that back, which is hard. But I’ve got an amazing dad, amazing brothers. I’ve an amazing girlfriend and amazing friends. So I’m very blessed.”
The Northsider, who is now based in London, enjoys getting back home as much as possible because “family means everything to me”. He added, “But then also, London has it charms and its beauties too. And that’s just mainly the place where I’m based for work. But Ireland’s always home.”
Conor also relishes writing for other acts. “I’ve been working on a lot of songs. I released one this year called Warm with Moncrieff, his latest single. He’s absolutely flying now,” he said.
“And I love riding with artists. I love that I’ve become a big part of their projects. It feels like the kind of journey where we do it together. I love that.
“I find, for me, it allows me to put different hats on sometimes. Your (own) sound is your sound with your band. People know you for your sound
and want to stay within ‘that’ sound. Then, when you write for a female artist, it lets me think from a female perspective. So I love that. I love having different hats on and getting to write different songs every day.”
Conor recently tweeted he would also love to write Ireland’s next Eurovision entry and have his band perform it. Was that tongue-in-cheek or did he mean it? “I’m very, very serious, yeah.
“It’s something we would absolutely love to do it,” he said with 100% conviction. We spoke to some people, and we’ll just wait and see.
“I would love to write the song. I’d love to represent Ireland. The Eurovision is an amazing thing. I think Irish fans are the best in the world. And I would love to get that buzz back where it’s like the travelling Irish, like we do when we go to the Euros, or any major event, and show people we’re the best country in the world.
“And there’s never been a band that has done it. If we did it, we’d be the first (Irish) band. I feel like I could write a great song for Eurovision. We’d be honoured. I’d absolutely love to do that.”
It would be a brilliant song too, judging by his latest effort, Live Without You, which could potentially be the band’s biggest hit yet.
It’s shaping up to be a great summer for Wild Youth. They’re doing support slots for Lewis Capaldi and West Life. Plus, it looks like they will be performing at a very big Irish festival later this year, but Conor’s not able to let to cat out of the bag just yet. And will there be an album soon? “I hope so, yeah. I don’t ever like to put pressure on, with what an album will be or when it will come,” he concluded. “I want to put out potentially three or four songs this summer and then we’ll see where we’re at.
“There are so many songs – about 120 songs written. So there’s no shortage of music.
“It’s just waiting for the right time and waiting for it musically to all make sense in my head. I think the pandemic definitely didn’t help. The momentum was very strong. We had so much planned for 2020 and it just all went silent – everything was cancelled.
“And then we’d, lucky enough, released an EP. So we released music through the pandemic.
“Now that we’re back playing shows, we’re playing the songs we released in 2020/21 for the first time.
“For the first time, it’s like hearing people’s reactions to those songs.
“We weren’t sure if it always worked, or if it didn’t work – and then you hear the crowd singing the songs back and you know.
“We’re back in a really good place as a band, and we feel happy. We love playing music and we’re so delighted to be back playing shows. We’re making music we love and we’re putting it out. The reaction to this new single has been incredible. So we feel momentum is really back again in a really good place.”
■■The new single Live Without You is out now via Universal Music. Wild Youth will support Westlife at their headline shows in Cork on August 12 to 13.
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I feel like we could write a great song for Eurovision.
I’d absolutely love to do that.