At the tender age of 61, former Revelino guitarist and Vicar Street concert booker Bren Berry has released his debut solo album. He talks about love, laments, and his own sense of mortality
It all began for Bren Berry one Saturday night in 1988. He had recently left his job in insurance to study social science in UCD and he was sitting at home writing an essay on Karl Marx's theory of alienation when the phone rang.
It was his old mate and fellow Ballinteer boy Bren Tallon. He had a support gig that night, did the other Bren want to come along and play a few tunes . . . ?
"He had a bass player and a drummer and, out of the blue, I was in a band . . . I fell into it," recalls Berry, whose musical experience up to that point was strumming a battered Yamaha acoustic to a dog-eared Christy Moore songbook.
So, he bought a Rickenbacker and played and recorded with Tallon - first with Crocodile Tears, who were renamed The Coletranes, before relaunching as Revelino, one of Ireland’s finest nineties guitar acts.
They released three very fine albums, were championed by John Peel, and when they finally bowed out, it was with a support gig to Bob Dylan in Kilkenny. Not bad at all.
Since then, Berry has worked as a booker in popular Dublin venue Vicar Street and all these years later, music remains his guiding but he has just done something he never thought he’d do and released his solo debut album.
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It goes by the rather evocative title of In Hope Our Stars Align and it’s a chiming, melodic mix of love letters - to his wife, his family, and music itself - and protest songs about the ecology and the slow decline of his beloved Dublin.
You might say the wry and dry Berry has been around the block. He probably sold the t-shirt and helped the band with their rider too but this is moment he is savouring.
"I kinda have to pinch myself to be honest," he says. "It’s weird to be here with a debut solo album, I put so much into it, I worked really hard and we blew through four times the original budget me and my wife agreed we could afford."
In Hope Our Stars Align is the result of a confluence of existential events. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Vicar Street, along with every live venue in Ireland, was shuttered and Berry spent a "beautiful" year and a half at home with his family in Ballinteer.
He took a creative writing course and was heavily involved in the vinyl remaster of Revelino’s acclaimed debut album. "The amount of goodwill towards that was so heartwarming," Berry says. "There was so much love for the band I think that was the first seed for me to record my own album."
Tallon had released his own debut solo album, Love in These Times, and Berry was feeling the creative urge again. However, there were a couple of problems - he’d never written a song before and he "hated" his voice.
"I was never comfortable as a guitarist. I always felt like an imposter," he says. "I was without doubt the worse musician in Revelino by far. Bren Tallon was such a brilliant songwriter so songwriting was never going to be a thing for me but I always dabbled . . . I had pages and pages of ultimately meaningless notes everywhere."
During lockdown, the dabbling led to him penning his very first song, Black Satellite, as a celebration of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday. "I thought `if I hear another person murder a Bob Dylan song, I’ll throw myself out the window.’" Berry says.
"But I thought I’d celebrate his birthday by writing a song. I cracked the code and it was a magic moment. Something told me to drop the register of my voice and it was such an epiphany for me and the doors just burst open."
Produced by Gavin Glass and featuring musicians including Binzer Brennan, Ciaran Tallon, Gavin Fox, Yvonne Tiernan, Rachel Grace, and Martin McCann, In Hope Our Stars Align is a heady brew of euphoria and melancholia studded with twinkling keyboards and lush strings.
Berry sings in his careworn, slightly cracked voice about the greenwashing of the eco debate on righteous album standout Knives (Heavy Metal Rain), and he romances his wife all over again on the droll and very tongue in cheek Bullet Proof, which namechecks Paul Newman, Phil Lynott, Jimi Hendrix, Steve McQueen, and the Wrecking Crew.
Another subject close to his heart is Dublin itself. This City is Berry, who is originally from Ringsend, lamenting the new destruction of Dublin, something he has witnessed from his front row seat working in The Liberties, an historic area which is fast becoming Manhattan on the Poddle.
In Hope Our Stars Align also has its share of mortality. Album track Hairpin Bends dwells on the serious health crisis he endured during recording.
"Coming up to Covid, I was very burnt out and I welcomed the break," Berry says. "This industry can be exhausting; it takes a lot out of you. We jokingly say it beats working but I think we work harder than a lot of people, long, unsociable hours, a lot of booze . . .
"During the process of making the album I had a couple of panic attacks. When we came out of lockdown it was very topsy turvy for our industry, a real rollercoaster. We were 40% open, we were 50% open, we were closing at eight . . . it was a really challenging time to come back and my health began to suffer. I wasn’t taking care of myself and I ended up needing a couple of coronary stents."
Berry is well back in the saddle now. He has booked thousands of shows in Vicar Street including many by his old friend Tommy Tiernan, who is coming up his 400th gig at the venue, and, of course, he has a tale or ten to tell from the frontline of live rock `n’ roll and comedy.
One of his personal favourites is a show by the immortal Chuck Berry involving the late legend’s demand to drive his own limo (and then charging the limo company for the honour), "the amp clause" in his contract, and, of course, his demand to be paid up front in cash dollars before he’d played a chord."
The stars have aligned for Berry again but Revelino fans may want to know if the two Brens and the rest of the band, including Ciaran Tallon, who now plays in hardcore act Klubber Lang, would ever consider reuniting for a gig. Maybe, who knows, in Vicar Street . . .
Berry doubts if he’ll even play shows in support of his solo album but he has nothing but warm memories of his days of Rickenbacker glory in Revelino.
"The laughs that bands have together. Just that warm, fuzzy togetherness," he says. "We were on the dole fulltime for ten years from ’88 to ’98. We didn’t have a pot to piss in. We went hungry but we never went thirsty. They were just magic times. We gave it everything. We worked hard and made a lot of money for other people and anything we earned went back into the band."
Karl Marx would have approved.
In Hope Our Stars Align is out now and available on Bandcamp or here.
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