TD 1
in Maynooth University library. I put in my earph
ones and the first song I listened to was start/end. I still remember to this day how that made me feel. I can’t describe it in words, but something switched within my mind. I didn’t want to do medicine, I wanted to do this. So I changed my CAO and for months I didn’t tell my parents. I thought it’ll just come out, however it needs to come out.” There was another artist who had an effect on the young OLIVE, the classically trained electronic musician Stephan Bodzin. “I watched a video of him performing on this huge mountain and I was like, what is this? That same year he was coming to Belfast. Somehow I convinced my mom and I got to see him live. It changed everything. I started making electronic music. It was the most difficult switch I’ve ever made because electronic music is actually really, really hard to make”. If it is hard, he doesn’t show it. BOYS NEED LOVE (his second full length project, released in October) is a mix of euphoric dance music and personal emotion that was rightly given a warm response - as was last month’s expanded version BOYS NEED MORE LOVE. Recorded over two years, it went through a number of iterations before it finally arrived. What was missing from those earlier versions? “Myself,” he replies succinctly. How so? “I think it was only when I came back from (a trip to the Superbooth producer’s conference in) Berlin that I said, okay, stop. Let’s really write about what’s going on.” Which turned out to be some dark nights of the soul. “A lot of trauma that I’ve experienced, throughout my life and when I was younger. I feel like a lot of it healed. It’s not that I conquered my demons, but I spoke with them. In the beginning stages of the album, I wasn’t doing that.” There were further events that influenced the record, such as the end of a relationship and the passing of a close friend. “I was actually speaking to Daryl (stage and musical partner Daryl Bengo) about this this morning. It’s amazing to have another best friend who is also awake at five in the morning and we’ll just talk as if the day started. It was 6am. I was in the gym. He had just come back from a run. And I was saying, I feel like my trauma has healed. I had to go through BOYS NEED LOVE to do that. It was a therapy session that I just so happened to have released too”. The approach seems to have worked, not only for those who have connected with the record but for OLIVE himself. “I’m at a point in my life, in this very moment where I feel bliss. It’s that feeling when you’re on a plane above the clouds, you can see the clouds and you can see the sun. That’s exactly how I feel internally”. For a moment he returns to his seventeen year old self, listening to Eden for that first time. “I guess this is what I’m in. This is my purpose. This is what I’m meant to be doing.” BOYS NEED LOVE is out now on Hidden Hill. OLIVE HATAKE plays Whelan’s Ones To Watch Jan 9th - 11th. 18