Unique Wallis Bird for Monroe’s

Earlier this year she released her fourth album, Architect, to much acclaim. It saw Wallis and her band experiment with a more electro sound. The clubbier aspect of this album was influenced by Bird's move to Berlin from London, where she had lived for six years.

"The six years had been great,” she says. “I think it’s always good to leave on a high, that’s why I was looking for different pastures. Not greener or anything, just different. London treated me really well; I learned a lot.”

Bird has a distinctive, left-handed and percussive way of playing guitar, something that came from necessity, she says.

“I just really wanted to hammer what I’m playing, because for some reason I express most passionately through beating the shit out of instruments. I learned to play guitar by taking a right-handed guitar, turning it upside down and playing it left-handed.”

Wallis Bird puts everything into her performances.

“I laugh and say to myself that’s the only kind of exercise I really get,” she says. “It’s emotionally quite a rollercoaster and daunting but the only time I ever get tired is at the end of a tour. I’m left pretty bereft after that, so I try not to stay quiet too long after. But playing? I have infinite energy for playing.”

Doors for Wallis Bird’s Monroe’s show on November 21 are at 8.30pm, tickets €20/€18 online.