Why we are now Bray wanderers
Indie-folk trio are upping sticks and learning BerLingo
Wyvern Lingo began their career in Bray, Co. Wicklow, making atmospheric indie-folk music and released their first EP, The Widow Knows, in 2014. But by the time they’d released their eponymously titled debut album in 2018 they had embraced R&B and dance-inflected pop. Three years on, with the release of Awake You Lie, we find the musically adventurous trio leaning into the work of classic songwriters such as James Taylor, Paul Simon and The Beatles. There are also wig-out guitar solos and a nine-minute epic, In Colour On The Mend, that marches unashamedly into progressive rock territory. Elsewhere, it’s no accident that you can even hear an African influence on Rapture.
‘That’s crazy that you picked up on that. I wrote the melody for Rapture in Tanzania,’ Karen Cowley says casually in a Zoom call with bandmates Caoimhe Barry and Saoirse Duane.
‘My boyfriend was cycling from Cairo to Cape Town in 2019 and I went to meet him halfway in Tanzania. I would go back there tomorrow. It is such a cool place to visit; amazing culture, amazing people.’
Musically, they’re certainly not in Wicklow anymore and soon they won’t literally be there either. But for the limits of lockdown, the trio would have already said auf wiedersehen, Irland and hallo, Deutschland. They recorded most of their new album, Awake You Lie, in Berlin’s famous JRS Studios and will be moving permanently to Germany’s capital city when lockdown restrictions ease.
‘We’ve always loved playing in Germany and often talked about moving there,’ Karen says.
‘We got to the stage where we said, “why not?”. It is so much cheaper to live there. We love the place and a lot of our friends live there. We finished recording there in February 2020. Then we got places to live but we weren’t really set up and so we came back to Ireland. We moved back in August when things calmed down.
‘Caoimhe and I each have apartments there now. We all came back to Ireland at the start of December because we had bits and pieces of work to do and have been here since then, living at home; it has kind of been a jerky experience.’
Wyvern Lingo are not the first artists to cite the high cost of living in Ireland and around Dublin in particular as a reason to take their talents and energies elsewhere.
‘As a city, Berlin has a vibrant arts scene. There is great respect of all kinds of creativity,’ Caoimhe says.
Even their rehearsal space sounds idyllic compared to some stuffy old places in this country.
‘Through some good few friends over there, we ended up getting our hands on a rehearsal boat!’ Saoirse says. ‘That has been just great for the creative process. It’s a doubledecker barge on a river and we have a beautiful view when we are rehearsing. Some of the rehearsal rooms we’ve had before have been like airless dungeons.’
Touring might be as imponderable for Wyvern Lingo as any other artist right now. However, just last week they received news from the National Concert Hall and Sounding the Feminists that they are one of the winners of its Female Commissioning Scheme.
Wyvern Lingo will receive the €15,000 Music Project Award and produce a collaborative audio and visual livestream concert. The financial boost is particularly timely for them in a week when a Music & Entertainment Association of Ireland survey revealed that over a fifth of its members are struggling to repay their mortgages, while 58% have problems paying household bills.
These are very stressful times for so many people dependent on the arts for their income. Wyvern Lingo are in the fortunate position of being able to look forward to a brighter future but will have to forsake Ireland for Germany.
They’ve even picked up a bit of the local lingo. ‘You could get away with not learning German living in Berlin but it is a bit rude not to try,’ Karen says. ‘They don’t speak English in some of the smaller shops off the beaten track so you have to pull out whatever little bit of German you have. I’m very good at ordering a glass of wine.’ Abschied ist so süßes Leid. (Parting is such sweet sorrow).