‘I call out oppression any time I see it’
Maria Doyle Kennedy tells Danny McElhinney how recording kept her sane over the last year.
From the confines of her kitchen to the glorious open spaces of the Highlands of Scotland, Maria Doyle Kennedy’s working year is a story of lockdown past and present and a vision of a Covid-free future. She took my call last weekend after a long day’s filming on hit historical TV drama Outlander, in which she plays the part of Jocasta Cameron. The location work came after a year spent working at home on her latest album Fire On The Roof Of Eden with her husband and musical partner Kieran Kennedy.
‘We’ve just come up a little bit north into the Highlands. It’s a beautiful place we’ve never been before called Nairn,’ she says.
‘It’s the first time we have travelled away [from Ireland] in well over a year and I realised it is probably the first time in 40 years that we hadn’t left Ireland.
‘We were supposed to go on tour several times during the year to America and Europe and we had lots of shows in Ireland as well.
‘It is good to be working but it was great to be recording; that’s what kept us sane. I have the album to thank for that. Working is good but sanity is also good as well.’
Maria has successfully combined acting and music for 30 years since she made her acting debut in 1991 playing Natalie
Murphy in The Commitments. She has also featured in the films The General alongside Brendan Gleeson. She appeared in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium and most recently in acclaimed Irish comedy drama Sing Street and in a myriad of TV dramas such as Downton Abbey and Black Orphan. She will next be seen in the fantasy drama series The Wheel Of Time.
At 56, her acting talent has never been more in demand but music has always been her first love. She met Kieran three years before The Commitments and they formed The Black Velvet Band and recorded two albums. Maria began releasing albums in her own right in
2001. Her tenth solo album is an ambitious 72-minute body of work that showcases that wonderful voice that is part Billie Holliday, part Dusty Springfield. If you’re looking for sonic reference points think the Nineties’ Bristol sound of Portishead and Massive Attack.
‘I loved Portishead and Massive Attack particularly the later stuff they did with Liz Frazier [of Cocteau Twins],’ she says.
‘It was pretty much all recorded in our kitchen. Kieran would get the headphones on and kind of go into a trance-like state and be in that for many hours a day. There was something almost hypnotic about the
‘YOU CAN BE REALLY HAPPY ONE DAY AND THEN BE BANGING YOUR HEAD OFF A WALL’
process for both of us. I think that comes from being in the same confined space for a long time. Going down to work there became like a ritual as much as eating would be. It became one of the things in our day that we had to do.’
She says songs such as Cyane which has the spirit
of Massive Attack’s Protection, the feelgood Need A Little Luck In This Life and the cautionary Revenge Is Sour reflect on the contrasts of life.
‘The difference between those songs is enormous but I think that is what people are made up of. Especially in the last year, things
are not just complicated, they’re contradictory,’ she says.
‘You can be really happy and grateful one day that you have somewhere safe to live with all the family and it’s great to be able to spend time with them and then at other times you can be banging your head off a wall and thinking,
“What is my purpose in the world? Why can I not travel, do a gig? What does it all mean?”. The way you feel or process things can be that dramatically opposed. The album reflects all of that.’
Maria can feel the optimism in the air. Normality, albeit a new kind, seems touchable.
‘I’m really grateful that none of us got sick but what I will take forward is that I won’t take anything for granted, that the world could change so quickly in a few weeks, in a few days,’ she says.
‘I’m a big hugger. I’m really missing the hugs and playing gigs and going to gigs and the theatre.
‘I’m missing the things we’re good at, gathering with people and talking about things and turning each other on with music and ideas.’
Being given a Billie Holliday album when she was 14, not only made her fall in love with the voice of the legendary African-American blues singer but also gave her the first glimpse of the inequalities and terrors visited upon people of colour that Holliday sang of on songs such as Strange Fruit. It’s a subject Maria cares passionately about and which she wrote about so effectively in Colour Code/These Streets Are Always Blue on her last album.
In the devastating song, she recites the names of over a dozen black people who have been killed in the U.S. by police officers or in the case of Sandra Bland, a black woman who died in suspicious circumstances while in custody and noting, prophetically in the light of George Floyd and others ‘and the list goes on’.
‘I wrote that song when we were living in Canada and I heard about Sandra Bland and her story broke my heart,’ she says
‘She was a young law student. To all intents and purposes, she was like me or any one of my friends. If we had been pulled over and treated so aggressively, we would have had the same reaction. Twenty-four hours later she was dead. When I heard the name of her campaign [Say Her Name] and did the smallest bit of research about the number of unarmed men and women of colour killed by the police it led me to an archive of material, the extent of which I couldn’t believe. The terrible thing about it is that since we recorded that song, we keep on having to add people to the list.’
She sighs and then says that we must face up to the failures in our system in Ireland.
‘I don’t know what to do except call out discrimination and oppression any time I see it.
‘I don’t think we can fully understand, as people who are not people of colour, the different things that happen and that they have to process on a daily basis. We are only just beginning to address the issue of Direct Provision and what a dreadfully oppressive system that has been. That has been going in our country for quite a while and it hasn’t been dismantled and replaced with something that is effective.’
Recently we have seen the efforts of Ruth Anne Cunningham and others with the Women In Harmony group to bring female artists together and Maria is supportive of campaigns such as those by Why Not Her to address the disparities in the amount of Irish radio airplay given to males and females. In any given year female artists can receive as little as 10 per cent compared to their male counterparts.
‘I think we are questioning all of our thinking, our structures, and our biases and I think we have to,’ she says.
‘I think there is a reason why the statistics are like that and they don’t reflect the amount of good music that is been made by women or indeed men. If you look at how the music is curated it will be mostly by males. I think that there is an inbuilt bias that needs to be looked at.’
Hopefully Maria’s new album will fare well regardless of the vagaries of Irish radio support or lack thereof. She and Kieran are hopeful of playing live shows before the end of the year.
She says of the period since the onset of the pandemic and the music they have created reflects the feeling of being ‘tired and emotional but still hopeful and connected to each other’. She ends our chat on the optimistic note that will surely chime with every reader.
‘I feel very hopeful now. My mum has had the vaccine. The days are becoming longer and we will begin to gather together and we really need to.’
‘I HEARD ABOUT [U.S. LAW STUDENT] SANDRA BLAND AND HER STORY BROKE MY HEART’