Jimi Cullen
Jimi Cullen has played the length and breadth of Ireland over the last few years, manages his own songwriter nights in Wexford and has just released his first full-length album.
That a lot of Jimi's material is politically oriented will come as no surprise to those who know his name from his role in supporting the protests at Shannon Airport years ago. The kernal of this social conscience is alive and well, packaged deliciously in the melodies of his latest CD offering.
Originally from: Gorey, County Wexford
What was the transition from cover tunes to writing your own stuff: Well, it was actually someone started up a singer-songwriter night in Gorey. I didn't really have too much interest in writing before that and I put my name down for one night and I gave myself two weeks to come up with four songs to play at that.
So, I got the four written actually in the last three days or so, I had to actually just, in the end,lock myself into my room for three days and said "Look it, . you may get these done by Friday." I had to spend three days just pretty much with whatever I could come up with. Well, actually . . . three songs out of the four, two of them have been gone on CD and one of them is in the live show every night, nearly. So they can't have been too bad, anyway . . .
Thoughts on the local music scene: It's very good at the moment - very healthy. There's an awful lot of music coming in - original stuff. Most of it is at a very high standard and it kind of pushes you. You have to write good songs, because there is that many good songs out there and if you're not able to catch people's attention, you'll just go unnoticed, really. I think it's very healthy - it's not a competetive edge, but it drives people to do better.
Rural vs Urban Irish music scene : I'm based in Gorey and Wexford and I'd say I do 90% of my gigs in different places outside of Dublin like Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Waterford and a whole host of little towns - Athlone, up in Ballymahon, even - and I think there's a great scene in those places . . . if you go places like Waterford and Kilkenny people really welcome you with open arms and they really genuinely like to see people doing something like that down there . . . and definately, there's plenty of bands in all these places as well.
You write a lot of politcal material - why is that: I think it wasn't really an intentional thing - to just be totally political and all - the first few songs I did write, just . . . that's what came out, and that's what I wanted to write about, I suppose. And then from there I kind of said well, there's other things then that I wouldn't mind tackling, other issues and stuff. People genuinely seem to like it becasue it's something a bit diffrerent and it's not the same thing they're listening to every day. Seems to have worked out well and I do enjoy writing about them now. A lot of the stuff I will write at the moment, I will have themes in my head that I want to write about and I will try to sit down and write about that kind of a subject.
