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It’s become easier to distinguish and differentia
te and compartmentalise as time has gone on. I definitely think in the last few years that the electronics have worked their way back into the David Kitt stuff live and on the last album Idiot Check, but it’s still a very different hue and a different kind of head space and lyrically very different. I was listening to your brother r.kitt’s latest single. It sounds like an album that we should really be looking out for, but in terms of musical output, do you have a critical relationship with your brother? No, we’re quite independent when it comes to our musical output. I love seeing him grow and develop. I’ve seen a lot of the live shows over the last five years, every time I see it, it’s breathtaking the leaps that he keeps making production wise. But he’s very much his own man. I find I send my music to less and less people for a critical appraisal. You’re almost second guessing what they mean by certain stuff they say. It can slow you down, even when someone is saying something positive. I have the feeling that Robbie is very clear in what he wants to do and he doesn’t need a lot of help from me, to be totally honest. You’re based in Kerry now. You’re a Dub who lived in the city all your life. How has the transition been for you as an artist? Initially, really amazing and restorative and nourishing and life changing. My day-to-day quality of life has really shot up. You have to eat, you have to cook all your own meals and don’t have the option of takeaways or a walk around the corner for a sandwich. All the fresh air, just getting outside a lot and walking. I live really close to the sea and just being able to make noise 24 hours a day. While this kind of remote living really suited the COVID years, you have to go, “OK, life is actually back. What’s my next move?” And I still haven’t figured that out, even though life has been back for a while now. I considered moving permanently but I have to remember that I’m still relatively young and I probably should have another chapter of giving it a bit more of a go in an urban setting, where I’m more likely to get my music out there a bit more, I suppose. As David Kitt, you are re-releasing Not Fade Away after 18 years next month, but nothing about this record or indeed its re release has been straightforward. How about you tell the readers the storied background? Well, it’s just been a saga from the get-go. It’s an age-old story in the music industry, where some bright young thing signs a record deal with a major label. There are executive changes within the structure of the company. You lose your spot as part of a big cull. Then you get picked up by a more respected figure in Geoff Travis at Rough Trade. Then things went a bit pear shaped for them just as Not Fade Away was coming out. So, it never really got a proper push. It did okay in Ireland, but it never really got a proper release outside of Ireland. Around the time I was making it, my musical and general confidence was very low. I feel like I made some poor decisions during the record. It’s the only record of mine where I would have changed it if I had a chance. Then I got the rights back about five or six years ago and I was determined to figure out a way of making myself love the record. While being conscious of the fact that once you release a record, it’s not yours anymore and it belongs to the people. A lot of people have come up after gigs and particularly men; actually, a lot of men who’ve been through difficult breakups or difficult times in their lives, have said the record was really important to them and I didn’t want to fuck it up for those people. I didn’t want to change it too much but I was convinced that with a bit of resequencing and remastering... I re-recorded Say No More, which just was one of those songs that has been through so many studios and different mixing processes that it, kind of lost its essence, even though it was a kind of a radio hit in Ireland at the time. It just didn’t sound good in the flow of the record to me. Then I had this one song during COVID, Love Someone Else that kind of popped out. It was during one of the more challenging parts of the whole COVID phase and I just knew that it was the last piece of the jigsaw for the Not Fade Away thing that I was try“And the Wee Stores used to open on a Sunday. Because they were Prods. They’d open and sell the newspapers, while all the Catholic stores were closed.” ing to figure out and it’s done now. The actual process of getting the record out has had its own challenges in the last month. Just as we were ready to press go on a big campaign with Dublin Vinyl, they went into liquidation, which has been very sad for everyone who works there. Obviously, my story is relatively small when you put it into perspective of people losing their jobs. It’s been a challenge in the last four weeks trying to keep it on track in the midst of trying to promote this New Jackson record and it takes a lot of time, but we’ve found the solution and we’re more or less on track to release Not Fade Away on vinyl on the 24th of May, which was always the original plan. So, somehow, it’s actually still going to happen. New Jackson releases OOPS!... POP on the Permanent Vacation label on April 19th. Pre-order on Bandcamp: newjackson.bandcamp.com/album/ oops-pop 47