RESTORATION MAN
HIS MUSIC IS FEATURING ON TWO NEW AMERICAN TV SERIES FOR ABC AND NBC NETWORKS, IS THE THEME MUSIC FOR THE PLANNED MOVIE OF THE CURRENT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, THE HAUNTED, AND THE MAN HIMSELF IS SPENDING HIS SPARE TIME IN FORT CAMDEN RESTORING AN AGED BUILDING TO ITS FORMER GLORY.
RONAN HENNESSY TALKS TO SKULLY ABOUT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL YEAR OF HIS COLOURFUL CAREER TO DATE.
Skully looks quite at home in Fort Camden. The grizzly looking musician stands well over six feet tall with hair down to his shoulders and hands that are well-suited to the job of restoring stone and timber to their original state. He spends whatever free time he has with other volunteers trying to turn the historic structure into a site suitable for tourists; and if Fort Camden still needed a General, he'd certainly look the part. However as he picks a route from newly restored exhibition rooms to dilapidated army quarters and officers' billiard rooms, Skully reveals a life and an attitude which belies his imposing stature. He talks about heartbreaks in love and music, years of being taken for a ride by record companies and modestly talks about his new and fast-developing popularity as an artist whose music is popping up in major new American TV series and films shortly arriving on Irish shores.
The road to his recent musical success has been a long one though and as he works on restoring the Fort, his music seems to be restoring his career. Skully's musical heritage goes back to the showband era when his father played with The Bluebell Quartet ("massive in West Cork") and Skully himself started Dj'ing in Cork at the tender age of 12 and later started the band Real Mayonnaize ("mega-stars on the North side of Cork!"). With most of the county covered at some stage by father and son, it seemed likely Skully would progress to bigger things before he even left his teens. However tragedy struck the band when Dave Rudd, their talented, young drummer, died in a car accident and Skully was forced to look elsewhere to follow in his father's footsteps.
That elsewhere led to Irish band The Chapterhouse, formed by past members of Real Mayonnaize and all-female Cork band, Porcelyn Tears. The band scored chart success, appeared on Top of the Pops and was even named Hot Press Band of 1986! However along came a certain band called U2 and Skully and Cork woman Anne Redmond's punky, keyboard music suddenly became unfashionable. "In those days the only way a band could make it was to get a record deal," Skully says. "People would come over from London and America and we'd perform for them and they'd tell us how great we were but it just wasn't biting. They were looking for the next U2. Eventually we got sense and realised it wasn't going to work for us and we moved to France. Somebody was asking me the other day about how I came to know so much about renovating forts; I went to France and I renovated a farm! I gave up music."
Skully began teaching English in France alongside his farmhouse renovation, bought a language school and married and eventually divorced a French woman. It was only about 16 years ago, while' 'licking his wounds'' after his marriage breakdown, that the second stage of his career started in earnest. Having abandoned music for years, a friend suggested pulling out his keyboard might be therapeutic for him. Skully agreed and started playing again, "Of course as soon as I did that I got the bug back," he recalls.
"So I went looking for a vocalist. There was this girl called Aïda who was doing the cabaret scene in France and everybody was telling me that I had to go and see this girl. I went to listen to her and after about 4 minutes I thought, ‘Wow, she is a serious vocalist, I have to get her to sing with me.'"
Unfortunately it wasn't that easy; Aïda was playing hard to get. Phone calls, pleading conversations, cold calling... Skully says he couldn't get through until one evening when he learned that Aïda was originally from the Ivory Coast and was "deep-rooted in traditional music and dance". Skully did some homework, learned the basics of Ivorian music and managed to attract Aïda - siren-like – with an electronic version of traditional Ivorian music. "She phoned me up about an hour later and said, 'Jesus, when can we do this!?’"
The two combined to form Métisse and immediately hit the right note with record companies. "I honestly believe, and I've worked with hundreds of vocalists now, I think she's the best vocalist I have ever worked with. We recorded three tracks over a long weekend. I sent them to London that week and the following week we were on a flight to London to see a major record company. It was the first time in my career that a record company had responded positively to my work."
As we reach the highest point in the Fort and look out over Crosshaven Harbour, Spike Island and the distant spires of Cobh, Skully talks about the first and probably biggest mistake of his career. Having been wined and dined in London by various record companies, Métisse signed an ill-fated record deal with Telstar Records. "We were advised that if you were going to sign a record deal, sign with the people giving you the most money as they would then have the most to lose. But actually Telstar had so much money they didn't care what they did.
"It was the weirdest period in our lives. We were living off our savings and we were running out fast. We were being flown first class to London and being collected by chauffeurs in limousines with security men. We were whisked through London and staying in five-star hotels and the rest of it. And then we'd get back to Cork and we wouldn't have enough money to get the car out of the car park!"
Having recorded most of the album in a London townhouse, Skully and Aïda were called to a meeting with Telstar executives and told there wasn't a single they wanted to promote on the album, "We hadn't even recorded the full album but they had already decided they were going to drop us," Skully says. However Madonna contacted the band and said she wanted to use one of their singles, "Boom Boom Ba" for her new movie, The Next Best Thing. Despite the interest and the use of the song in her movie, Telstar still refused to let them release an album.
After much wrangling and in-house politics, Skully eventually took the courageous decision of buying out his contract. "We went into the Bank of Ireland and Brian Fitzgerald in there lent us the money to buy our own album back from Telstar. I'll never forget the man; he took some risk with us."
However the drama wasn't over as Telstar still retained rights over Skully's music and every time the band made money, Telstar was there to plunder their spoils. It was only when Telstar went bust in 2004 that the band was freed from the label's stranglehold. Since then their music has featured heavily in cult series such as Dead Like Me, the movie Life After Death and even the Olympics. Their latest success is in getting their music into ABC's The Gates and NBC's Undercovers (by director J.J Abrams) which both premiered in the States in the second half of this year. Skully's music will also be used for The Haunted by Jessica Verday - currently on the New York Times best-sellers list and which will shortly be translated to film. "So now we're being played non-stop on KCRW in LA which is the most influential radio station in world because it's the radio station that all the music supervisors in the movie industry listen to."
Skully has also released a number of solo and collaboration albums which are proving popular with fans and selling well on the internet. In September he also signed a record deal with Sony and is currently working on his third album with Aïda. Despite signing record deals and having his music feature across the world, its village life that still attracts as we begin our descent back to Crosshaven. "They might say down the village, 'Oh here's yer man Skully now; what's he up to at all!' But I like that. It's a lot of nonsense really the razzmatazz that goes with the music industry.”
"I remember when we were recording in the townhouse back with Telstar there were producers and assistants and tape-ops and all this stuff was sort of laid on by the record company. And then at the end of the evening somebody from the record company would come in and say 'OK, who wants a ride home?' and all these people in the room would put up their hands; but Aïda and I thought we wouldn't chance that in case somebody asked us to pay! So we would walk home from the townhouse back to where we were staying in Hamstead and they'd all pass us in these limousines waving at us. And we'd be waving back at them. Two years later I got the bill for all that. We were paying. It just shows you how you can get absorbed into it."
As we leave the vastly transformed Fort behind and Skully comments on his vastly transformed career, he emphasises the point that what he does is nothing special. He just works at music like other people might work at their jobs. "Do you know I'm inside there and I'm working away with guys who are brilliant at what they do. There was an electrician there, Peter Madden, and he wired that whole place and gave up hundreds of hours of his life to save the Fort and I watched him working and he's just an artist. But nobody comes running to him looking for an autograph saying, "you're just the best conduit-running person I've ever seen!" Its just play that I play the piano so apparently that makes me different."
THE CORKONIAN \ OCTOBER 2010
