Martin Mackie releases single and video for ‘Magic Potion’
Martin Mackie
Releases ‘Magic Portion’
The First single to be taken from his forthcoming album Temperance Songs due in 2019.
Available now from iTunes
“Ireland’s answer to Nick Cave”, Dan Hegarty, RTE 2FM
MARTIN MACKIE release the single MAGIC POTION, the first offering from his album TEMPERANCE SONGS, due for release in spring 2019. MAGIC POTION features a stellar line-up of Irish musicians; KATE ELLIS, the musical director of the CRASH ENSEMBLE on cello, CONOR O’BRIEN from VILLAGERS on bass guitar, ELEANOR MYLER from the band PERCOLATOR on drums and MARTIN MACKIE on guitars and vocals. The accompanying video was made by Martin’s long-time friend and collaborator LAURA SHEERAN.
Temperance Songs is an album which deals with the theme of alcohol in its many forms and MAGIC POTION concerns the age-old struggle between the enjoyment of booze and alcohol abuse.
Martin said: “The songs are about my own experiences with alcohol. Not just me personally but my family and friends. Rollovers, lock-ins, early houses, hair of the dog, and the booze blues are just some of the subjects. But I’ve tried to add a bit of comedy to the misery. For example, one song is called THE BALLAD OF CHRISTY MOORE. It’s folk tune about me coming back after the Electric Picnic. I was hanging, as they say. I’d this weird dream or maybe even a hallucination that the ghost of Christy Moore was in my wardrobe, even though he’s very much alive. Christy’s a famous ex-boozer. So, in the song he jumps out and starts lecturing me on the evils of excess. I was a bit worried what Christy would think of the song because there’s a line in it that describes him as being all ‘sweaty and hairy’. So I sent it to him. To my utter delight he sent me back a lovely postcard that said: ‘Dear Martin, Sweaty and Hairy, Ride on! Christy.’ And he drew a little guitar beside it. I’ve framed that.
“At the risk of sounding like a pseud, I got the whole idea for Temperance Songs from a series of paintings by the artist William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress is eight paintings showing the rise and fall of young man who ends up in the Bedlam asylum because of his partying lifestyle. I was gonna write a song for each painting but I found out the composer Igor Stravinsky had beaten me to that idea. You can’t compete with him so I had to change things. Instead I drew from my own experience.
“There’s other songs such as A LOCK-IN FOR THE DAMNED about a famous Dublin venue where people end up leaving, completely twisted, when it’s daylight. That’s normal behaviour in the music world. The track DRUNK FOR FIFTEEN YEARS features vocals by Waterford singer KATIE KIM, who is another friend. That song is about a guy in hospital after a mammoth drinking session. Again, there’s ghosts and spirits in the lyrics, that seems to be a recurring theme. I think there’s a lot of mystery to booze, the psychological effect it has on you when you drink and the downer you can get if you overdo it. Nobody in Ireland really talks about this stuff, beyond platitudes and clichés, so I thought it would be nice explore it in an album.”