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Irish-born
Ciaran McFeely (aka Simple Kid) was about 10 years old
when he strolled home with a copy of Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When
Wet” to the great shock of his brother. McFeely’s hipper, older
sibling immediately took him upstairs, tossed the disc out the
window and said, “Here's Led Zeppelin.” So began McFeely’s love
affair with the classics—Zeppelin, Neil Young, Bowie. As Jon
and the boys hit the pavement and Zeppelin skinsman John Bonham
pumped out his monstrous low-end march, the roots of Simple Kid
were planted. And those roots are an integral part of a sound
that has won Simple Kid the admiration of both his peers and
critics. But 13 years later, the music coming out of McFeely
shows as much affection for those rock giants as it does for the
big beats and trancey melodies shaking and floating through U.K.
dance clubs. On 1, he plays everything from a
sloppy folkie falling somewhere between Bowie and Beck to an
avant-pop singer who could front the Beta Band. “I record
straight onto this old 8-track, straight onto cassette tape,”
says McFeely, who was born in Cork, Ireland, but now lives in
London. “And then I feed that song into the computer and then
chop it up. I’ll write my own song, like an acoustic song and
then take it and cut it up and treat it like I'm sampling some
old record, sort of in the way Fatboy Slim would take an old
record and put beats behind it. I sort of like doing that,
chopping up choruses and putting them the wrong way around, sort
of having no regard for the song in a way and treating them
really badly, and sort of screwing around with it.” Strewn
across those tracks are lyrics largely inspired by the works of
such authors as Charles Bukowski. His literate songs have helped
him draw the praise of the British press, who’ve even called him
a modern-day Dylan.
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