Groove Tube: Musical takes Mick on a whole new journey
Mick Flannery’s debut musical, The House Must Win, has been running in Dublin and Cork for the past month or so, starring Tommy Tiernan and breathing new life into the Cork singer-songwriter’s 2005 debut album, Evening Train.
This week, for those that didn’t get a chance to attend the production, The House Must Win arrives as an LP. It features a range of collaborators – Lisa Hannigan, Susan O’Neill, Anaïs Mitchell and Flannery’s own brothers among them. Amid the whirlwind of theatre preparations, he has had little opportunity to reflect on the release, but Flannery credits the show’s arranger, Liam Robinson, with piecing the record together.
“I felt very lucky to have met him,” Flannery says.
“He did all the arrangements for the old songs and the new songs that made it onto this album and feature in the musical. Sometimes you just get very lucky it seems with personality and someone’s talent. The marriage just works very well.
"The same way it worked with Susan [O’Neill], I seem to have gotten very lucky with Liam and I’m very grateful to him.”
The recording process for the album was unusual; Flannery played guitar on just one of its tracks, focusing almost exclusively on his vocal contributions, and the studio was a carousel of featured artists.
“It was like a Jenga operation of schedules,” he says. “A lot of the vocal tracks would’ve been flown in. People like Lisa Hannigan and Jenn Grant recorded theirs remotely and just sent them over to us, and we mixed them in afterwards. That helped move things along timewise.”
People seem to have enjoyed the musical, Flannery says. The hope is that it may get another run elsewhere in the future, but it has met his immediate criteria of being well received.
“There’s a bit more pressure [than with an album] I feel, because there are more people involved who have their work on the line,” he says.
“There’s a whole cast involved. You want it to go well for them. For the crew, the creative team, the director, the musical director.
"There’s more skin in the game, I suppose, and you just have this background hope that it’s not a pile of shite.”
Rehearsals for The House Must Win took place in Galway, a city to which Flannery has been no stranger over the years.
“We were looking around for places that had the timeframe available and Galway was good geographically as a central point for lots of the cast and band,” he says.
“It was very productive. We were in Nun’s Island Theatre for three weeks, which was very good for us.
"I live in Clare so I was up and down… Galway has been a great place for us. We’ve played the Róisín Dubh I don’t know how many times now and I always enjoy it.
"It has a great vibe, that place, and I always look forward to going back there.”
There can be a discomfort in examining your own, decades-old material, but Flannery says an extension of Evening Train has been lingering in his mind for a while. It helped that this was not an act of peeking inside his own thoughts and emotions from the time.
As a young person, you don’t know yourself very well and you don’t know exactly how you feel about any given thing with any great authority because of your lack of experience
A concept album that is “simple in its construction”, the songs were easy to reshape. Flannery admits he can’t listen to the old recordings however, as he hears a Tom Waits affect in his younger voice.
“That helped at the time as well for me to write those songs,” he says.
“That was partly the reason that I chose to write a story and write characters.
"As a young person, you don’t know yourself very well and you don’t know exactly how you feel about any given thing with any great authority because of your lack of experience.
“That helped when working on it recently; these characters weren’t painted into a corner so they could be malleable when writing the script.
"I changed a few things here and there about their backstories to help me flesh out the plotlines and stuff like that.”
Many people will have been delighted to see Flannery linking up with Susan O’Neill again.
The pair’s 2021 album In the Game was nominated for a Choice Prize and became the year’s biggest-selling release by a non-major label in Ireland.
Though they enjoyed working together, Flannery says you never know how the music will be received in advance of it being out in the world.
“I’ve given up on having expectations for things,” he explains.
“I always find that things don’t ever go the way you imagined, so there’s hardly any point imagining. I just really enjoyed that whole process of writing and recording, and then subsequently once lockdowns were lifted we got to tour that album. It was a great time.
“Susan and myself work very well together. I feel we have a similar approach to writing and recording, and live shows. She’s really attentive and listening.
"She’s always nailing the harmonies as best she can, and I’m listening to her and enjoying being part of the band while she does her solo songs.
"The whole thing had a lovely sense of variety.”
Though he is no real fan of musicals traditionally, The House Must Win has opened Flannery up to theatre. He credits Liam Robinson for showing him what the medium can achieve, and doesn’t rule out returning to it.
“With that Susan O’Neill album and mine, it feels like I should have a crack off that one as well in this format,” he says.
“Having worked on this and made all the mistakes I’ve made, that I hopefully won’t make again, it’d feel a little bit like a waste not to take what I’ve learned and apply it again.”