{"id":212975,"date":"2025-12-03T10:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T10:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/212975\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T10:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T10:19:09","slug":"when-i-saw-paul-mescal-score-a-goal-i-was-nearly-moved-to-tears-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/212975\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018When I saw Paul Mescal score a goal I was nearly moved to tears\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Kean Kavanagh watched Paul Mescal<\/a> score a goal in Normal People he almost cried.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an example of why representation in a broad sense is important,\u201d the indie-rock singer and former GAA star says from London as he prepares to return home to Ireland for a much-anticipated December tour. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I saw the football scene, how beautifully they shot it … all the movement … Honestly, I was nearly moved to tears. I\u2019d never seen that represented. It was so beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the sequence early in the blockbusting television adaptation of Sally Rooney\u2019s novel, Mescal\u2019s champion footballer passes up the opportunity for a point and instead lofts the ball into the net. It left a deep impression on Kavanagh, who, like Mescal in Normal People, is both a keen athlete and a bit of a restless artistic soul.<\/p>\n

Like Mescal, he also rocks a killer mullet. More significantly, he has followed the example of the Normal People character in moving from a mid-sized Irish town \u2013 Portlaoise in his case \u2013 to study at Trinity College Dublin<\/a>, where he obtained a law degree.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first few years I was in college I played football for Trinity. My class was a majority of Dubliners, and then on the football team you had people from outside. That opened my eyes: there\u2019s an underworld of people in this place who are more like myself,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe great thing about law is it was nine or 12 classes a week. I\u2019d say I went to about three of them. From third year I bought a sampler and was making beats. That was the initial stage of learning how to record songs. With law I had all this spare time I\u2019d never have with another subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

His experiences as a GAA star who loves indie music and as a townie studying law in Dublin are poured into his astonishing recent debut album, The County Star. The name has a double meaning given that, in the Irish sense, it might signify a footballer or hurler who has made the intercounty team. (The closest Kavanagh came was sitting on the subs\u2019 bench for the Portlaoise senior side.)<\/p>\n

But Kavanagh was born in Houston, where the \u201ccounty star\u201d could be taken as a reference to Texas\u2019s self-image as the Lone Star State, a place apart from both the rest of the United States and the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

He talks about wanting to capture the \u201cduality\u201d of Ireland and the US in his songwriting \u2013 and his love of classic country music, that most American of genres, alongside punk, indie and hip-hop. <\/p>\n

You can hear it in tracks such as A Cowboy Song, which features doomy Joy Division-style guitars and eerie shoegaze melodies, but with lyrics that read like something from a vintage western paperback (\u201cBang! Bang!\/A bullet couldn\u2019t shoot any better\u201d).<\/p>\n

Kavanagh grew up in Co Laois after moving back to Ireland with his family as an infant. He is wary about the way townie Ireland and GAA identity are often depicted in the media.<\/p>\n

He cites one prominent example of the portrayal of the GAA that he\u2019d rather not name, which he sees as cartoonish stereotyping of the culture he grew up in \u2013 its reduction to craic, pints, breakfast rolls and so on.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s honestly degrading. There was something in me that very much wanted to be clear that there is culture within the midlands. There is a beauty there that hasn\u2019t been identified.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his time at Trinity, Kavanagh formed the record label Soft Boy<\/a> with his friend Kevin Smith, who\u2019s better known as the rapper Kojaque<\/a>. In a way, the two come from different worlds \u2013 Smith is from Cabra, in north Dublin. But their music shares a diaristic quality. <\/p>\n

Kojaque\u2019s first album, Deli Daydreams, which was one of Soft Boy\u2019s first releases, in 2018, chronicled a week in the life of a minimum-wage grafter at a corner shop, making it a sort of gritty urban companion to the dreamy midlands indie of The County Star.<\/p>\n

They were conscious, too, about the choice of name. \u201cSoft Boy\u201d is a repudiation of the idea that male identity should be rooted in toughness and aggression. It\u2019s okay to have feelings, to be vulnerable, whether you\u2019re a GAA player, a musician or anyone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s something you would hear when you were younger,\u201d he says. \u201cSomeone\u2019s being a soft boy. It was a way of turning that around. That idea of men being vulnerable. At the time it felt like an important thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he has no memory of Texas, back in Ireland he grew up in a household obsessed with country music. That\u2019s partly because his Irish parents developed a love for the genre while working in the United States. But it is also because the Midlands are the heartland of country and Irish.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be the style of country music I would be into at all. There is still a huge interest [in the midlands] in modern country pop. It is so unbelievably popular. Another great midlands example: the Barack Obama Plaza,\u201d he says, referring to the motorway service station in Co Offaly that doubles as an Obama theme park. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous, but we do love the connection that we have with this bigger, more powerful, more successful thing. I think it bolsters our own insecurities as a small Ireland \u2013 our relative lack of power and influence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"KeanKean Kavanagh: the cover of The Country Star, photographed in O’Moore Park, Portlaoise <\/p>\n

The sense of having a foot in two worlds \u2013 the old and new, the drizzling and sun-kissed \u2013 is referenced on the album\u2019s cover, where Kavanagh appears to be sitting, under floodlights, in US-style bleacher seats. It looks evocatively American \u2013 yet the picture was in fact taken at O\u2019Moore Park in Portlaoise, a somewhat unglamorous county ground to which Kavanagh\u2019s album brings an air of faded romance.<\/p>\n

\u201cFriday Night Lights was a big influence,\u201d he says of the Texas high-school football drama. He agrees that there are parallels between GAA culture and the American obsession with sport, especially at school. \u201cI do think they are very similar.\u201d<\/p>\n

As both an artist and someone who has run a label, he has thoughts, too, on the state of the industry \u2013 and the influence of Spotify, which is soon to celebrate its 20th anniversary, for better or worse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t see anyone except for people who are really successful making money from it. It\u2019s more a marketing tool, where you\u2019re giving a free sample, basically, of your music.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do think people in the music industry generally are obsessed with stats and stuff like that. If your numbers are good, then they\u2019ll be interested in your music. You might get an advance because they see your numbers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMusic industry-type people are attracted to it \u2013 that\u2019s generally how I feel it actually functions. Is that a terrible waste of the infrastructure that it is? Of course it is. Of course people should be actively getting paid. There\u2019s no reason why they shouldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kavanagh moved to London in 2021, towards the end of the pandemic, feeling that Dublin had little to offer. As an Irish person in London, what does he think about the present vogue for Irishness, be it the fashion for Bohemian FC shirts or, to quote a recent Daily Telegraph advice column, the curious case of third-generation Irish Londoners who have taken to using the Irish spelling of their names and grumbling about \u201cthe British\u201d?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two different parts. There is an interest in Irishness in a superficial sense. If you walk down Broadway Market past London Fields, I\u2019m going to see people splitting the G for the first time. Everyone is drinking Guinness now. It\u2019s so different to when I moved here four years ago. There is that interest in a superficial sense,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there is definitely also a deeper interest over here in our culture and our music. That is clear to me when I see the amount of people going to shows. A lot of the music I see here are Irish artists. There\u2019s a deep interest in music from Ireland.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was amazing to see. I have English friends, and they\u2019re always raving to me, \u2018What is going on in Ireland?\u2019 All of their favourite artists now are Irish. It\u2019s scratching some sort of itch. There\u2019s a depth there they\u2019re not finding in their own artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kean Kavanagh plays Black Box, Belfast, on Monday, December 15th; Button Factory, Dublin, Wednesday, December 17th; R\u00f3is\u00edn Dubh, Galway, Thursday, December 18th; and Crane Lane, Cork, Saturday, December 20th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kean Kavanagh watched Paul Mescal score a goal in Normal People he almost cried. \u201cThis is an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,5286,19,17,116168,337,23432,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-212975","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gaa","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-kojaque","14":"tag-music","15":"tag-paul-mescal","16":"tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115655132319698504","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}