The Goo 1
Interview Words: John Brereton BREN BERRY I blame
Revelino. When the former Churchtown quintet released their remastered version of their great 1994 self titled debut on vinyl during the depths of the pandemic in October 2020, it triggered a lot of dreams and aspirations from a certain cache of musicians, including myself. It proved there was an appetite out there for some revisionism, and a chance for some of us who still fancy making some noise to, well, make some noise. Bren Berry was a guitarist in Revelino and now he, like former band mates Brendan Tallon, whose debut 2021 solo album Love In These Times was a polished pop gem, and his brother Ciaran Tallon, guitarist with the bulldozing noise act Klubber Lang, has come forth to showcase his own debut long player, the sumptuous In Hope Our Stars Align. Bringing out your first album at the age of 61 requires a certain amount of courage and confidence (as the main booker for Aiken Promotions and Vicar St these are qualities BB certainly doesn’t lack but this is kinda different) and while he appears nervous about the whole process of releasing the record into the ether, for him it was a mission to fulfill after a health scare that shook his inner core deeply. 14 “ COVID was probably tougher on me than I really understood. Coming back to live music was so tough, opening and closing and reopening. I was probably just a bit burnt out and wrecked, and I had a couple panic attacks. I saw a cardiologist and although he said my heart was perfect he referred me for some tests just in case. It turned out I had a very big blockage and a small one so I got some stents in. Those MRI machines are one of the loneliest places in the world, you are just alone there, staring and feeling aware of your own mortality. It wasn’t major heart surgery, but it was a wake up call. I was advised to take a couple of months off and I did spend those two months working really hard on pre production for the album, getting the songs together. That ended up being a fortunate kind of element” Berry’s musical path started with The Coletranes, which morphed into Revelino and as a guitarist in one of Ireland’s most recognisable guitar bands in the 90’s it comes as something of a surprise to hear that he never rated himself on the instrument. “ I didn’t set out to be a guitarist. I got a guitar when I was around 19 or 20 and I had a Christy Moore songbook and a few others; I was all about just singing songs for entertainment. I ended up being by far the worst musician in the band but I was always writing bits - I had hundreds, if not 1000s of snatches, little riffs that I never developed. Recently I got a small home recording set up and put ideas down but that was it really. One night myself and Ciaran Tallon were pissed in my house and he asked if he could hear some of the tracks I had recorded. Even though he’s my best mate, and we were in Revelino together, I had never played him any of my tunes. He persisted, loved what he heard and urged me to finish some of the tracks. The epiphany came on Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. I heard someone murdering a Dylan song and decided there and then that I’d write a song in his honour. I got into the Dylan ‘zone’, focussed wholly on his vibe and started to write ‘Black Satellite’. The only catch was, I hated my voice. Then something said to me “drop the register of your voice”, it was a big moment because I did and it worked. That was the pivotal point for me, I could proceed. For someone who up until this point