Things Are Just Swell

Success hasn't spoiled Irish Oscar winning singer/songwriter Glen Hansard. Fresh from his walk up the red carpet in LA, he returned to Dublin to give the coveted golden statue to his mother to show off in the bingo hall. This week the star of the hit indie film Once joins his co-stars on stage for a one night only concert in New York. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to his band mate and singer in his own right Colm Mac Con Iomaire.

SINGER-songwriter Glen Hansard, 38, has been a livewire all his life. Ask friends and band mates like Colm Mac Con Iomaire.

As long as anyone's known him, Hansard's been the kind of man who fears a familiar routine the way most people fear death. For his entire career Hansard's been looking at the road ahead, eager to be on his way.

That inner restlessness has marked his life too, always propelling him on to the next gig, the next album, and the next project. Just like Mac Con Iomaire, Hansard started out as a talented busker on Dublin's famous Grafton Street. It would be romantic to write that's how they first got noticed, but the truth is it took them both years.

Busking in Dublin in the late eighties, they just made enough to keep them in tobacco and not much else, because as anyone who spent time in Dublin during that period knows, times were tough, with emigration at its height, and only their passion for the music carrying them forward.

It wasn't until Hansard and Mac Con Iomaire formed the Frames in 1990 that the public finally started to take notice. Like any great band, there's a story behind the name.

Hansard's habit of fixing his friends' bicycles at the time had filled his back garden with bicycle frames. When the locals started calling his house "the one with the frames," the newly emergent band was christened.

Although over the years the band has become of one of Dublin's best-loved, Hansard's mother - the one who took the Oscar to the bingo hall to show the girls - always hated the band's name and her son's growing reputation as a bicycle mechanic.

Her back garden had become known far and wide. If anybody found a bike up on the nearby hill on the way home, for example, they would just throw it into her garden, a graveyard for old bikes. It drove her nuts.

From the band's earliest days its style was set. The Frames wrote harmonic and deeply felt songs about what really mattered in life - love, sex, sorrow, hope and fear.

But in the early nineties their unadulterated Irish sincerity was out of fashion, even a bit embarrassing. Irony was all the rage. Bands like Nirvana and Radiohead sang about alienation and social discomfort, stuff that music critics could get their heads around much faster. They crowds kept coming, but the Frames couldn't get a paragraph in the local music papers.

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Nster.com