Groove Tube: New single has its roots in nocturnal demons

In celebration, Si Noble plays Monroe’s Backstage Bar this Friday, April 10, with support from Dónal Tuipéar & the Ursidae Project, and The Glare.

“I was pretty sure I wanted that to be the title of the album when I wrote the tune,” he says of the Witching Hour.

“The song is all about insomnia. It’s that time when your head hits the pillow. All you want to do is shut your eyes and drift off, but it’s the time when all thoughts, insecurities and demons come into your head and revolve around in it, and it becomes sort of deafening.”

Though this single is largely introspective, the album as a whole tackles a range of external, contemporary themes. One track, contemplating social media, is sung by Noble’s daughter. “If I sang it, I’d sound like an old fossil,” he says.

“The theme going through the entire record is me, I suppose,” he explains.

“I don’t mean for that to sound egotistical. I’m the prism of the things I sing and comment about. That’s relationships and loss and pain, and the realities of being a certain age.

“We’ve all had crossroads in our life we try to circumnavigate. Do I turn left or do I turn right? Looking back at occasions when you have turned left and perhaps you should’ve turned right. All those things – it’s a bit of a melting pot of all of that stuff.”

Noble moved to Ireland 20 years ago, following an Irishwoman back home from Australia.

He spent many of those years living in Galway city, gigging and attending gigs with great regularity, before eventually retreating to a quieter life in Indreabhán.

“Galway city becomes a bit dangerous because people know where you live, and you get knocks on the door at two o’clock in the morning from people wanting to continue partying and all the rest of it,” Noble says.

Though he has never quite mastered the language, Noble’s children were brought up speaking Irish.

It plays a dominant role in his professional life too. Outside of his art, he works as a producer with Connemara-based TV and film production company Fíbín.

“You’re sort of let off the leash a bit when you’re writing music for television, because you’re not writing for yourself,” he says.

“You’re not composing a song which is your opinion on something or your memories or whatever it may be.

“With music for television, you don’t have to try and be cool or individual or anything like that.

"You can write a 90-second or two-minute song about ‘it’s your birthday and we’re baking a cake’ or ‘let’s go swimming in the sea’ or ‘we really should be picking up that rubbish’ – whatever the theme of the episode is. It’s quite freeing in a way.”

Though he has amassed a vast catalogue of music in a variety of guises, the Witching Hour is a new step for Noble, abandoning any sort of moniker and pushing his own identity to the fore.

“The [majority of the] songs on this record were written in the last 18 months to two years,” he says.

“This one is going to be for me, because it’s going to have my name on it for the first time. I think it’s probably the most honest selection of songs I’ve written as a consequence.

“It is quite a sad record in places. I suppose that’s the realities of life and the world we’re living in right now, which is crazy. All of those ingredients feed into the songs.”

Noble adds that the album is a “definite separation” from anything he has done musically before.

He wanted it to be a more adult-sounding record by way of orchestration and instrumentation.

To that end, recording with Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt made perfect sense.

The Witching Hour was pieced together at Harcourt's Wolf Cabin Studio in Oxfordshire, and mastered at Abbey Road Studios in London.

“It was going to be finished earlier but Paul McCartney had a new album coming out and apparently he takes priority when it comes to mastering,” Noble says.

Gita Harcourt-Smith, who plays violin with the likes of Elbow, The Streets and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, sauntered intermittently into her husband’s studio to contribute to a handful of the tracks.

Harcourt himself played drums and Noble’s long-time friend Alan Cassidy completed the band.

He has lined up a group of six to replicate the songs in a live setting. Over the years, Noble has done his time on aching return buses, playing to five people in rooms many miles from home. With this project, he has allowed himself to be more selective with gigs, picking and choosing nights like Monroe’s this week.

There was a long period, brought on by the birth of his children, in which nights attending gigs in Galway largely disappeared. Noble is just out the other side of that now, a little more available with his kids a little older.

He recently flew to Marrakesh for a few days to shoot the music video for the Witching Hour, as if to emphasise the newfound freedom.

Still, there is a novelty to nights like Friday.

“We’re all really looking forward to it,” Noble says. “We’ve been rehearsing up and getting match fit. Hopefully it’s going to be a great night. I’m sure it will be.”