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Frames man bound for Melbourne

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Melbourne is in for a treat that is unfortunately being denied to the rest of Australia.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire, long time member of Dublin bands The Frames and The Swell Season, is bringing his solo show to the Melbourne festival for two nights.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire

Colm Mac Con Iomaire is Melbourne bound

For Mac Con Iomaire, the sounds of the past are vital. A devotee of Irish culture and language, his music delves into rich traditions while also being very much of the 21st century.

On his second solo album – And Now The Weather (Agus Anois An Aimsir) – Mac Con Iomaire and the 22 musicians who worked on it with him, have made a record of rare beauty. So it seems incongruous that iTunes Australia describes the album as country and folk. He laughs when told about this. “It could be worse. If there is a divide between country and folk I probably lean more towards the acoustic than the heavily electric,” he says.

Unusually for an album these days, the sleeve design for And Now The Weather is quite beautiful. “It’s a bit of a cottage industry,” he says. “My wife, Síle, is an artist and she did the sleeves for my CDs. Everything is so disposable these days, the idea was to make something unusual that was attractive and tactile.”

With so many musicians on the album, did he write parts with particular people in mind? “I did have people in mind for different instruments so they would provide different colour,” he says. “I got Liam Ó Maonlaí for one tune, for instance, because I knew he would definitely be able to do what was required.”

Mac Con Iomaire has asked himself, in the days of declining record sales, how to finance a grand, sweeping album such as And Now The Weather. “It’s definitely counter to what the prevailing wind is, with streaming and downloading for nothing. But the music needs to be what it is. It needs to wear the sleeves that it’s wearing,” he says.

“The music business model is a tabula rasa (blank slate) really. All models are being smashed in a vacuum of what’s going to happen next. The artist won the argument over the business man in this case.”

There is a very touching quote from writer Brian Andreas on the album sleeve – “There comes a moment in the middle of the song when he suddenly felt every heartbeat in the room and after that he never forgot he was part of something bigger” – which Mac Con Iomaire came across by chance.

“I was unaware of him until after a Frames show somewhere in America, when one of our supporters presented us with one of Brian Andreas’ works. Because of that quote, all of the rest of the band decided this was obviously mine. I got to keep it. Usually the singer keeps all the trophies, but I got this book.

“What keeps me doing this after so many years is the magic that can happen on a night in a roomful of strangers; the power that music potentially can have to move people,” he says.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire Melbourne festival dates

Friday October 16 7pm

Saturday October 17 9pm

Both shows are at the festival hub, Alexandra Parklands


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