Veteran musician Bren Berry teams up with Crash Ensemble in the salubrious environs of The National Concert Hall this Saturday June 14th for Dublin’s Musictown Festival. Ahead of what promises to be a brlliant gig, he talks to Aaron Kavanagh about the legendary Dublin band Revelino, his debut album In Hope Our Stars Align and fronting a band for the first time ever live on stage this weekend.
The Dublin musician Bren Berry co-founded the rock band Crocodile Tears in 1986. Two years later, the band changed their name to The Coletranes and signed with U2’s label, Son Records, and enjoyed success in the local music scene before splitting up in 1991.
In 1994, Bren joined a new band called Revelino, which signed to DiRT Records, an indie start-up from Shane O’Neill of Blue in Heaven fame. Revelino’s jangly and fuzzy guitar-driven alt-rock nicely positioned centre at the crossroads of the grunge, indie, and shoegaze movements of the time, and they became a fan favourite for two then arbiters of cool, DJs John Peel and Dave Fanning.
Revelino began winding down after the release of their second album, Broadcaster, in 1996. In 1998, Peter Aiken of Aiken Promotions asked Bren if he would take a job as the Booking Manager for his then-newly-opened Vicar Street venue; a position Bren accepted and maintains to this day.
In 2001, Revelino briefly regrouped to promote their third and final album, To The End. After those shows, that was, for a time, the punctuation mark on Bren’s music career. “For a long time, I didn’t miss making music at all,” Bren tells Totally Dublin. “I just put my guitars away and didn’t play.
“It was really only during COVID that I started strumming them again, and I did a creative writing course. I was just sitting at my laptop and picking guitar sounds and drumbeats on Logic, and playing bass, terribly, by myself.”
Every Friday night during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bren would meet for “drunken Zoom calls” with his former Revelino bandmates Brendan and Ciarán Tallon, their former manager, their former soundman, and Barry Woodley, who played bass for Crocodile Tears.
On one of these calls, Woodley expressed his frustration at Revelino’s songs being unavailable online, claiming that he had always raved to his friends about the band but had nothing to show them. He then offered to build an online archive of their music. This gave Bren the idea to rerelease their 1994 self-titled debut on vinyl.
“I knew the lads in Dublin Vinyl,” he says. “I said, ‘Look, what’s the story? None of the Revelino stuff is out on vinyl. I’d love to bring out the debut album.’ So they helped us get out the debut album, and it went to Number One in the Indie Charts here, and there was a massive amount of goodwill. Especially at such a terrible time in all our lives, it was a really amazing, positive thing for us all to experience. I guess it must have influenced me to start playing again. No doubt about it.”
Beyond the success of the album, several factors pulled Bren back to music. First, he was inspired by the litany of artists who performed at Vicar Street. Second, the creative writing course he was taking filled his head with ideas. Third, he never felt fulfilled as a songwriter during his tenure as a musician. And fourth was the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan. “I said, ‘If I hear one more person murder a Bob Dylan song, I’ll throw myself under a bus,’” he quips. “I said, ‘I’m going to honour the occasion by becoming a songwriter.’”
“In retrospect, when I look back, I think the reason I bought a guitar was to sing songs, not to be a guitarist, because I wasn’t a good guitarist, really,” reflects Bren. “I mean, Brendan Tallon and Ciarán Tallon are much better guitar players than me. In retrospect, I think singing songs is always what I wanted to do, but Brendan was such an incredible songwriter, there was no place for me to be writing them, you know?
“But ever since I first got a guitar I’ve always dabbled and never gotten far, and I’m one of those people who’s always writing and scribbling phrases, words, and bits. Every time I’m at a gig that I’m loving, I’m always writing notes, bits of doodles that never went very far. It was thanks to Ciarán’s encouragement, who was like, ‘Your musical ideas are great. Just focus on getting a song written.’”
Through both Ciarán’s and his wife’s encouragement, Bren worked with the producer Gavin Glass to flesh out the demos he had recorded in his shed. After a year-and-a-half, the two completed a final record, which featured contributions from Ciarán, The Frames’ Paul “Binzer” Brennan and Joe Doyle, Gavin Fox, The Raines’ Yvonne Tiernan, Sack’s Martin McCann, Danny Anderson, The Lost Brothers’ Mark McCausland, and Cormac Curran.
Released in January to rave reviews and devoid of the era-distinguishing sounds of Revelino, Bren describes his idiosyncratic debut solo record, In Hope Our Stars Align, by stating, “I wanted it to represent my record collection, whatever that meant, because, obviously, my record collection is quite eclectic.”
Lyrically, Bren took inspiration from writers of varying topics, including Thomas Kinsella, Thich Nhat Hanh, and David Attenborough, and also infused the album with humour, as he was motivated by the comedians he met at Vicar Street, which now make up the lion’s share of his bookings.
After the release of Hope, Bren played a single acoustic solo gig, supporting Adrien Crowley. But as we spoke, he was mere hours away from his first rehearsal with members of the long-running, world-class Irish music collective the Crash Ensemble and the vocal ensemble Tonnta. “I’m doing my first rehearsal with other musicians for the first time in twenty-four years!” he noted.
The rehearsal is for Bren’s largest performance as a solo artist to date, which takes place at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, this Saturday. Admitting to being both nervous and excited, he says, “This is a massive leap of faith for me, man. I’ve never fronted a band, and I’m doing it at 62 years of age, stepping out on the National Concert Hall with the Crash Ensemble! [Laughs] It’s preposterous in many ways!
“I’m a little bit nervous about my own ability, but I’ve worked really hard. I’ve been practising. I haven’t had a pint in six weeks, for a start! [Laughs] That shows commitment! I’ve been singing along with the MIDI versions of the arrangements. So, I’ve worked really hard to get myself into a good place, but it’s a totally new place for me to be.”
For the concert, the album’s tracks have been rearranged by composers Cormac Curran and Áine Delaney. “My whole thing, from the get-go, was, ‘Do whatever you want. You have my full permission to turn the songs inside out,’” Bren says of this collaboration. “Because I’ve had four songs remixed, and a fifth one being done at the moment, and I just love the process. It’s just amazing to see somebody’s different take on your songs, and you learn so much from it, too, really. It really helps you as a songwriter.”
Bren is currently working on new material and will debut a special song for Saturday’s event, called “The Crash and the Crow.” For Bren, not worrying about “making it” in the industry has freed up mental space for the organic flow of material and its documentation.
“I continue to write,” Bren says of the future of his music. “The making of the album, the producing, getting it out, and all that meant that my songwriting was kind of pulling old. So, I’m back writing, and I’m loving that. My main thing is just to keep writing songs. I am going to do the occasional gig, but look, I’m 62. I have no delusions about what could happen with this band. I’ll do any gig within a six-mile radius of me gaff, and the occasional one, further afield, if the conditions are good!”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Bren Berry’s debut album, In Hope Our Stars Align, is out now. You can find his work through his website.
Bren Berry x Crash Ensemble perform at The National Concert Hall this Saturday. Tickets are available here.
