"WHEN people hear of a woman with a guitar they conjure up la la
la, nice candles and some kind of 'lite music'. I wanted to get away from the
folk singer thing because of all that shite, " says Frock singer BeRn.
"Frock is folk, punk, angst, rock 'n' roll, feminism, ire, laughter
and Celtic spirit, " she explains succinctly, for those of us not familiar
with the term. BeRn coined the term when she found herself increasingly asked
to describe her sound. "I was doing a lot of radio interviews and they'd
ask me what kind of music I play and I was like, 'sort of folky, kind of edgy'
and I thought that sounds so bad. You can't be humming and hawing like that on
the radio." A native of Drogheda, BeRn is now based in Cork after 16 years
living and playing in San Francisco, and several other exotic locations in
between. "I moved back to Ireland in September last year. I was getting fed
up in the states, you just get burned out." BeRn's music career started at
the tender age of nine. "My mother put my sister and I in a talent
competition and we won it.
So that was the start of it for us.
I got a guitar when I was ten, learned a few chords and I remember
singing that song 'Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning' for the class and I
was shaking my hips and the nun told me to stop." But she didn't stop. She
joined a folk group when she was 15 and by the time she was 21 she was living
and busking in Amsterdam.
From there she went to India and
continued playing and singing but she was yet to write her own material. "I
was writing poetry and then I'd be singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' or something.
I went to Taiwan in '91 because people busking there were making good money and
I found I was getting bored of singing covers so I just started to make songs
up there and then. I didn't even write them down." After her trip to Taiwan,
followed by a brief visit to Thailand, she returned to America, which had become
her home.
While there, she enrolled in a songwriters school.
"I came back from that and was sitting on the bed one day and just started
writing 'Cowgirl', " which speaks of her wanderlust and her reluctance to
'settle down'.
"It just came out of me and right through
me. And I thought I'll call my mother and she said to me, 'why are you calling me
now?' She had just found out that she had breast cancer so I came back to Ireland
for eight months and while I was here I thought I'd make my album. I ended up
recording the album in Lake Studios in Boyle." The owners of the studios
gathered a few musicians to play on the album, She Is Me, amongst whom was Steve
Wickham from The Waterboys, who contributes fiddle and mandolin.
BeRn already has a second album recorded, which is just awaiting the
finishing touches.
"Recording is so expensive. When you
have money constraints you don't make the album that you want." She says
the styles of the albums are similar but the lyrical content is different.
"Some of the songs are more mellow, " she says, "because I was
dabbling with a bit of Zen Buddhism for a while. The working title of the
album is called Sweeping The Floor and I have a song about that which is kind
of irreverent to the whole Buddhist thing even though I was embracing it at
the time. I usually have a social commentary, something political ? I have a
song called 'Fuck The War' ? something spiritual and an oul' love song as
well. It'll probably end up sounding like the last one no matter how hard I
try, " she says, exasperated. But that wouldn't necessarily be a bad
thing.