Somebody’s Child

Words by Sophie Muir Photographs by Briony Graham-Rudd

The November sun hangs low in East London. I am practically blinded.

In a coffee shop drenched in millennial minimalism I sip on my oat chai latte and wait for Cian’s arrival. Ten or so minutes later I am greeted by a formal handshake, we immediately get to chatting. Cian touches a chair towards his left giving it a good pat like your dad might and tells me they [presumably him and his housemates] just ordered those exact chairs for their kitchen. They were nice chairs and I told him this.

We start by discussing the origins of his musical alias - Somebody’s Child. Previously I had read that the name was a way of separating Cian from his music in a way that allowed him to resist the confinement of any one genre. Cian tries elaborates on this, but he takes me in many different directions in doing so. From what I understand, at the start of his music making he had intended to write music for other people because he had been “disheartened playing around Dublin and playing covers and people not being interested in original music.” So, for Cian, it was a way of getting away from himself, from his own mind and what he thought had to be the case. Somebody’s Child in unspecific and somewhat objective.

We go on to talk about the artistic cycles in which you oscillate between writing for yourself and then gradually conforming to what you think other people might expect from you. In this sense, the name Somebody’s Child is wrapped up somewhat in the metacognition of the artistic process. In addition to this Cian expresses that he tries not to think too much about the placement of his music amongst other artists - if he does, his song writing is affected. Claiming to have an unusual relationship with music, he tells me has to take long periods of abstinence from listening to any music in order to press reset on his brain if he wants to get into a new creative project. When people ask him what he’s listening to recently he often replies with “nothing”.

I ask Cian more about the creative process and he tells me that this was something he had been thinking about recently. “I have a terrible memory, and I don’t keep any memoirs. And when I was listening to the album and reflecting on it, it felt like that these times for me were like a place in time, almost in my memory that I can refer back to and almost acts like a sense of, like a smell that you’re familiar.” I could tell that Cian was trying to express something he couldn’t quite find the words for, and I think he was alluding to some sense of nostalgia. The album for him seems to be a bookmark in a particular chapter of his story. He adds that when writing lyrics, they seem to come out of him in “a kind of transient sense where I don’t really know where some of the lyrics come from and they don’t really make sense.” He told me that often his lyrics will seem ambiguous to him but months later something will happen and it all seems to slip into place. Except, he didn’t tell me explicitly as such, in fact he forgot the question mid-way through his sentimental preamble. However, as a fellow writer I completely understood the experience he was referring too. We agreed on there being a therapeutic element in the act of writing. Continuing on, Cian told me about his time during lockdown, having worked in a restaurant beforehand he decided that he would just put in as much time into his music as his friends did into their endeavours such as “business or whatever”, however he soon realised that music cannot be forced. “The more forced it is, the more you put into it, the worse it sounds… I don’t think you can grind in music because the more you push the heart, the less feeling your songs have, they’re so diluted. You just need to cherish whatever comes in the moment. I don’t know, I just always think, like, I can’t imagine John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting down to write Imagine at 9’o’clock with a coffee.” This was my favourite thing Cian said. For some reason I just hadn’t expected him to say something like this but in retrospect, I guess it lends itself to his visual imagination which we go on to discuss.  In considering where his music comes from, where this drive to create stems from, he tells me he doesn’t know. “Is it somewhat ethereal? I’m not really sure.”

In thinking about the upcoming album, due for release in February, Cian explains that him and his band focused on the album from a narratological perspective rather than a perspective of production as they had faith in their producer, Michael Gordon. He expresses how exciting it was to work on a long form project in which they “ripped everything up and started from scratch.” Cian admits he is quite a visual artists and points to different movies he is inspired by. “Blade Runner [2049] was a huge element of this, this album in particular… in doing a long form album you can kind of look at things a bit differently… You can’t do too much in a three and a half minute song, [but with] a film you can book-end it with similar themes or something like that.” It was clear to me that Cian saw his work as a whole, as a story. I want to probe this more so I enquire about his visual inspirations for the album. Cian tells me his favourite film is Arrival by Dennis Villeneuve and we digress to discuss his plans for an Arrival tattoo on his inner upper arm. He then follows this aside with his love for cinematography particularly that of Roger Deakins. He concludes, “I guess I just visualise music quite cinematically.”

We turn to musical inspirations for the album. As a backdrop for creative process Cian notes “we try to kind of pay respect to the cyclical nature of how music seems to evolve…” He speaks of influences from the eighties such as Joy Division who operate as a simpler sound for them. “Then we have the kind of 2000s, you know the Arctic Monkeys who are kind of the forefathers of my initial musical introduction. So we tried to play on that kind of 80s and then the 2000s and now we’re in 2022 and I guess we just pay homage to the influences that have been with me along the way in the process of the album whilst also retaining a kind of unity of sound.” For Cian this is where the Blade Runner inspiration came in: “…it gave us our own sense of kind of unique, um, uniqueness so that we weren’t, you know, copying other people.” As a self-proclaimed Arctic Monkeys fan, I am very interested to know his position on their new album, The Car. “I’d like to get into it more, I haven’t given it the time but I feel like there is a reason why I haven’t given it the time… I love Mirror Ball and Body Paint but I feel like there could be stronger songs around them.”

We then return to genre; in reading past interviews with Cian I had noticed a use of the contemporary term indie as a genre distinct from pop, which, in my mind are not so distinct anymore with the homogenisation of independent/alternative, and mainstream culture. I ask Cian where he might find the divide between indie and pop, if there even is one nowadays. He tells me that he believes there is a division in their sense of authenticity. Pop, to Cian, is a little more polished and structured, whereas indie is more tasteful because it comes from a history, whereas pop music comes from what is current. Cian interests me here because it seems as though he is getting at this idea that what is contemporary is ahistorical. There is this current sense of homogeneity where cultural pop phenomena become amorphous in their relevancy. His description of indie as “authentic” led me to consider his suggestion that his need to create could be ethereal. I guess I’m deducing that Cian feels as though indie music has an element of honesty, of truth, and is in turn more artful. Or in his words, tasteful. Despite his ability or willingness to tell me explicitly, I got the sense that Cian is, maybe unconsciously, concerned with creation in its most self-expressive form and honest. This was something I could tell he was hinting at with words like ‘therapeutic’ and ‘ethereal’, but maybe wasn’t ready to talk about yet.

I ask Cian how he got into music in the first place, where did this journey begin? Who inspired him? When did this passion click? I am surprised to hear in response: “I was in school and I didn’t really know what else to do. My dad, I remember him telling me that I had to go into engineering because that’s what’s good. I remember getting the points through engineering and then saying, no. I’m going to do music because I feel like that’s what I should do. And I kind of just gravitated towards it, it was kind of like ‘fuck you’ to everyone else and I just want to do what I want to do. But I didn’t really have any career ambitions with this. So I guess I just fell into it a little bit. But then it just happened really naturally. It was very... serendipitous, I guess. So yeah, it’s all kind of cool the way life usually works out.”

I am curious to know how Cian felt about Ireland as his home and whether it has any impact on his musical expression. He tells me his songs, despite recording often in London, “are very much stems for Ireland.” He speaks of a music video that he is about to shoot for We Could Start a War that will be shot in Ireland as an homage to the place and the city it was written in. He touches on the juxtaposition between old and new and the gentrification of Dublin. Cian says the housing crisis over there “is just insane,” and it’s cheaper to live in London at the moment. Following on the talk of Ireland I asked if there were any Irish acts that he felt more people should know about to which he replied ‘yeah so many bands.’ Cian explained to me how “it’s like a known thing. Like don’t go to a label in Ireland because then you’re limited to what Ireland can you bring you”, which from what he tells me isn’t a lot at all.

Feeling like Cian and I had spoken a lot but I wasn’t getting a clear picture of him so I ask what the first album he bought on CD was, if any? “My family weren’t big on buying CDs… I remember the first album I got was a free Britney Spears CD, it was Toxic. And the first concert I went to was a Pink concert… so really weird introduction into music… my parents weren’t really into music, my dad liked it but he loves the storytelling rather than the music side of things. And my mum just listens to classical in the car.” I then had to ask what the first vinyl Cian ever bought was. “It was Tom Coll, the drummer of Fontaines DC, from an Irish label that just put out Irish tracks.”

We continue to chat for a while and I find out that Cian’s favourite breakfast is overnight oats, he tells me of a time he spilt his drink all over the floor at a screening of Dune, I am informed about a show that Cian is loving called ZeroZeroZero. And that is about where we leave things. As soon as I tell Cian we are done, he shook my hand once again and dashed off with the remaining half of his iced latte still in his hand.