Lesley Roy Darragh Mcmanus meets our Eurovision contender

The Eurovision final takes place on May 22 and hoping for a record eighth win for Ireland is Dubliner Lesley Roy. She spoke to Darragh Mcmanus about her second chance at glory

Make a note in your diaries: 8pm on Saturday, May 22 at the Rotterdam Ahoy Arena in the Netherlands. That’s when Lesley Roy will, we hope, be striving to win a record eighth Eurovision title for Ireland. She has to navigate a semi-final first on the preceding Tuesday, but she’s confident. A native of Balbriggan in north Co Dublin, Lesley was slated to perform her song Story of My Life in last year’s shindig, until a certain pandemic got in the way. Now, she gets a second bite at the cherry with Maps, a banging pop tune that’s equally catchy and uplifting.

“I’m very excited about it,” Lesley tells me. “It’s been a long journey to actually getting on the stage. It was disappointing when the contest got cancelled last year, but it is what it is; everyone had some kind of loss and the time for crying over it has gone. And I’m so focused on ‘Maps’ now that it seems like years ago.

Her first rehearsal is in Rotterdam on May 8. “The plan,” she laughs, “is to be there until the final! And I’m grateful to have this second go. As soon as 2020 was cancelled, I spoke with the Irish delegation. I definitely didn’t want a sympathy ticket or to be automatically picked again, like how other countries were doing it. This is a song competition and we all agreed we wouldn’t green-light it unless there was a brilliant song. It took me another six months to go and find that. This forced me to write what I think is an even bigger song, to top Story of My Life.”

Lesley writes solo and in collaboration, both giving her different inspirations. For Maps, she’d been writing every day and producing different tracks, but “nothing was feeling like the right song to pitch”. Then that song landed in her mind.

“It came in a burst, the entire song into my head. I laid it down really quickly. It’s a magical feeling when inspiration hits, especially since the song is about searching for that, and feeling quite lost within the work. When it finally comes to you, it’s such a relief. You always think after finishing a song, ‘How did I do that!?’ And the worry of will I be able to do another one?

“It’s a mystery. All my songwriter friends say the same thing. I’ve spent years studying song-writing, learning all the tricks, the little things you can do – but there’s a certain element that you can’t bring into that room, and

“It’s a magical feeling when inspiration hits, especially since the song is about searching for that, and feeling quite lost within the work

you might not always have it. On the days it does come, you have to capture it quickly. ere are days when something arrives and a erwards you don’t know where it came from. It can be very special.”

She went into the process with “a giant list of things I wanted to try”: everything from electronic dance music to the classic Eurovision big ballad, “things people said they liked in a Eurovision song, and wanted in the Irish entry. But it still had to be emotional, and real. at’s what Maps is. You can use all the tricks you want, but without that human element it’s nothing. Maps is a journey, a look inward at nding your true sense of self – what is home for you, both personally and on a macro scale. For me it’s connecting with my roots in Ireland.”

Lesley has been living in the US for the last 12 years, ever since her rst album took her Stateside. She was very young – Lesley is still only 34 – but this is a woman who’s been “working in the pop music industry, one way or another, since I was 14”.

From a musical background – her mother played in bands – Lesley has been writing songs since learning guitar at the age of 10. She busked to raise funds for demo recording sessions, and while still at school was signed by a small label. Soon a er that, she was snapped up by a subsidiary of record giant Sony: hence the move to America, where she worked with megasuccessful hit-maker Max Martin, among others.

She’s released her own records, written songs for many other artists, worked with Katy Perry and Adam Lambert. And Eurovision “is always there” in the background, with memories of “growing up in Ireland, watching the golden era of success, winning back-to-back”. Every year Lesley would arrange Eurovision parties for her European friends in New York.

“But I’d never really considered doing it myself,” she adds. “en in November 2019 I thought, you know what, I’ll see about sending in this song. I wanted to help push the narrative, as such, of Ireland in Eurovision, and maybe with my years of experience I could do that.

“It’d be great to see us winning again. We’ve a bit of work to do, even in just getting people excited about it. I haven’t thought about winning for the last year, more that I want Irish songwriters to want to enter the competition. at it becomes normal, and less of the stigma you get in Ireland and the UK – although not in all the other countries. is is a massive platform for songwriters – you’ll never get as much marketing as three minutes before a TV audience of 200 million – and the more good songwriters we have involved, the quicker we’ll get back to the top.” Speaking of those numbers: is she nervous about performing live before so many people? Lesley laughs, “It’s such a big number that it kind of feels like a non-number! I’ve never seen a few hundred million people in a stadium, so you can’t visualise it. e most pressurised part of this whole journey was trying to nd the song. Once I had that, all the pieces fell into place. I’m more excited than nervous. I can’t wait.”

“The more good songwriters we have involved, the quicker we’ll get back to the top