The model was finished. That is the part that gets you. David Connolly had built a lighthouse for his construction project, had thirty five or forty pages of portfolio done on it, and needed one thing to complete the submission: a photograph of the finished piece. The school closed two days before Saint Patrick’s Day in 2020 for what everyone understood to be a fortnight. He never got back into the room.

The whole thing was written off. So was the exam. David was in the year that did not sit the Leaving Cert, the year of predicted grades. He passed, did not get the points he had been expecting, meant to appeal and forgot about it until the window had closed. There was no debs and no graduation and no last day out with the class, and afterwards he lost contact with most of them.

He is four years out of school now and he is a working musician, and the route from one to the other runs through a single evening at home and one video.

Singing my heart out

He cannot tell you when music started because there was no point at which it was not there. Primary school, the songs for the masses. The radio at home and the radio in the car, seventies and eighties the whole time, his mother and father’s music. And a drum kit set up in one of the rooms, left over from the band his father had been in years before, which a small curious child was never going to leave alone.

“I loved every single bit of it. I loved singing my heart out.”

He calls it a generational thing, and on the evidence he is right.

The background for three or four songs

The school musicals came first. Oliver Twist in first year, standing in the background for three or four numbers, and David describes a very specific kind of dread beforehand: the certainty that everybody in the hall was in the process of deciding whether he was any good. He says he was paranoid about it. Then the first song finished and the applause came and the nerves went, and he says they did not come back.

By fifth year he had a speaking part, Sheriff Earl in All Shook Up. Somewhere in second or third year, the guitar lessons had started, with a local teacher, on Tuesdays, once a week. He kept them up for three or four years and finished in fifth or sixth year with the instrument well under him.

If I’m not gonna try

Then school ended in the way it ended, and there was a stretch where it was not obvious what happened next. What happened next was that he sat at home one evening and made an entirely unsentimental decision.

“If I’m not gonna try and get somewhere decent where I want in life with music, I’m not gonna get anywhere.”

So he recorded one video and put it up. No campaign behind it, no plan past seeing what would happen. It got a reaction across Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, enough that he thought he might as well do another, and then enough that he decided to make it weekly.

That was around March or April of last year, as near as he can place it. He records on a Thursday and posts on a Friday morning, and he has not missed a week since. If he is going away on holiday he records two songs the week before so the Friday still happens. Paolo Nutini, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Elvis, Paul Brady, the Irish songs. The gigs came out of the videos, and so did being recognised around the town.

Seven instruments, and counting

Guitar, piano, tin whistle, drums, bodhran, cajon, banjo. The drums came from his father. Nearly all the rest he taught himself.

“My one goal in life is to learn as many instruments as I possibly can.”

That is not a line he reached for. It is what he says when asked whether he plays anything besides the guitar, and he says it the way somebody states an obvious fact about their own life.

Sweating buckets

His first proper gig was in Dodd’s, before COVID, and he is honest about it in a way that will be recognisable to anyone who has ever stood up in front of a room.

“I was sweating buckets. I was very nervous.”

What he was afraid of was specific. Not forgetting the words. He was worried that somebody in a pub, with a drink in them, would lash out or say something designed to knock him. Nobody did. They loved it, and he describes the feeling afterwards as a weight coming off his shoulders.

He had a couple of places going before COVID and lost them when everything shut, and had to start again from nothing on the other side of it. These days he plays Lovage every second weekend and calls it his favourite place in town, for the room, the staff and, he adds, the food. He thought playing to people who are eating would mean playing over noise. It turned out to be the quietest and most peaceful gig he does.

Every walk of life in the room

He goes to the trad nights and to the first Thursday folk club, and when he talks about the folk club it is not really about the music.

“There’s such a walk of life in that folk club. You meet so many different people in there, and there’s so many different stories.”

He gives credit away easily. Paul Byrne, locally, told him what to do in plain terms: pick up the guitar, sing a song, record it, get your name out there, and people will start appreciating you. David says that was the push that made him start properly, and if he could collaborate with anyone locally it would be Paul, or Donie O’Connor. Thomas Pratt of DAS Academy kept asking him into the showcases even though David was never enrolled there, only his sister was. Music Generation gets its due, and so does the Boyle Arts Festival, which had Stockton’s Wing and Paul Brady inside the one month.

He went to the Brady gig and came out of it slightly stunned, having discovered that a long list of songs he knew were Brady’s own. He only recognised two going in: “The Lakes of Pontchartrain” and “Arthur McBride”.

Further out, it is Ed Sheeran, whose records he has been listening to since he was nine or ten, and whose story of leaving home young and busking his way up David tells with real admiration. The first concert he ever went to was Ryan Sheridan at the Fleadh in Sligo, and he traces wanting to get up on a stage himself to that night.

A song written, not finished

Asked what the plan is, David says he has plans to do original music and does not yet know when he will be able to get it out there. There is one written. It needs work. When it is ready he intends to record it and see where it goes, and in the meantime the Friday songs keep going up and the gigs keep coming, and he would like to get to bigger places if he can.

Crazy

He finishes the episode with a song, and it is not the light note you might expect at the end of a conversation about school musicals and weekly covers.

Since late February David has been playing “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley at every gig he does. A friend of his, Alexei, died, and it was one of his favourites.

“It’s a song that I love to play just to remember him by and it was one of his favourites.”

In May he was asked to play Darkness Into Light, and he said yes, and played it for the same reason. He plays it here at the end, with the guitar, in the room, and there is nothing to add to it.

David Performing in Loveage for one of their Summer Tapas Nights

Loveage is one of David’s Favourite Venues to Perform In

David Performing On Stage in St. Joseph’s Hall