Looking back on his four decades with Irish folk music legends Kila, Colm Ó Snodaigh admits he’s still living a teenage dream.
He cracks a joke about a musician’s career.
“‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘I want to be a musician.’ ‘You can’t be both.’”
But Ó Snodaigh also gives a nod to the financial downside of life in a band with another cracker.
“What did the musician do when he won the Lotto? He kept touring till the money ran out.”
However, Ó Snodaigh counts his blessings to be still performing as Kila, a much-loved seven-piece group that also includes his siblings Rónán, Rossa and Cormac, plus Seanan Brennan, Brian Hogan, James Mahon and Dave Hingerty.
“It’s mostly weekends, which has allowed us to do other things if needs be, and it has allowed us to stay together,” Colm says.
“And we are restless enough to want to write new music and try to bring new music into the set as much as we can,” he reveals as Kila release a new single, Cé a Chum, from their next album due out shortly.
“Everybody in the group loves the music, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. And with a big band you make a different noise… somebody called it a beautiful noise, it’s a very different thing to a two-piece or a four-piece band.
“We’re in great shape, we’re playing really, really well, getting good crowds, and we’re finishing off an album at the moment.”
Ó Snodaigh says the group is still coming to terms with the shock death of their friend Glen Hansard in a motorcycle accident.
“Rónán and Ross were closer to Glen and Rónán was in the original Frames, they were great mates,” he says.
He recalls Kila’s early days busking on Dublin’s Grafton Street where The Frames and The Mary Janes were also vying for attention on the street with their music.
“They were gigging and we were gigging, so it’s almost like they’re your compadres. You’d always meet one or two of them through the years because it’s a small little ecosystem the music world,” Colm reflects.
“And when somebody like Glen dies who is going to pick up the mantle? There’s nobody like Glen around.
“I think Glen just wanted to be singing and busking all the time. He’d take out the guitar and just play a song.
“The last time Kila played with him, he was talking about the busking and he was saying how himself and Mic [Christopher] were up one half [on Grafton Street] and the Kila boys were down the other half and then they joined up.
“Eoin [Dillon, Kila] memorably said to him, ‘Yeah, you only came down because we were earning more money.’ Glen paused a second and says, ‘Yeah, yeah, not any more you’re not!’ It was the perfect slap down, he was so funny.”
Ó Snodaigh is full of admiration for the global impact that Hansard made through his music and the force of his personality.
“As Rónán said, ‘Glen climbed to the top of the mountain, all the rest of us didn’t.’ He went and took over the States, nobody else did. He got the Oscar, he toured the big halls, he did all of that stuff.”
That’s no mean feat, I say. “For a start, how do you not feel intimidated by meeting Bruce Springsteen or Eddie Vedder and have all of those people saying you’re brilliant. How do you deal with that?
“How do you deal with people that you only know through watching them on TV? I remember being in RTE one time and Kris Kristofferson was on the same show and it was a moment meeting him. But how do you accept that as a normality?”
What was his impression of Kristofferson? “He was a very tall, impossibly handsome and striking man,” Colm recalls.
“He had heard the uilleann pipes and poked his head in. Then he pointed to the uilleann pipes and said, ‘Oh my god, what do you call those?’
And Eoin replied, ‘Michael.’ He instantly got the joke, laughed and said, ‘I kinda asked for that, didn’t I!’
As the conversation returns to Hansard’s passing, Ó Snodaigh says the Irish singer took his fame and success in his stride. “Somebody asked Glen one time, ‘What did you do with the Oscar? And he said, ‘I gave it to me Ma.’
“After he won the Oscar I think it was Bruce Springsteen who rang Glen and said, ‘Everything is changed now, get used to it, you are now public.’ And that’s why there was such an outpouring of celebration for him in Dublin when he died.
“I went to Vicar Street where everybody met afterwards and it was really lovely to meet everybody, some I hadn’t seen for 20 years.”
Was Glen the ‘king’ of your music community? “I think so,” Colm says. “The busking thing was him Mic and Mark Dignam, those three were playing together… and then there was Kila.
“Glen wasn’t such a leader then, there were a lot of other personalities at the time. But over time Glen, when he took on The Frames, he took the lead, it was his band.”
He became the man? “Ah yeah, very much so. From then on he was in the driving seat, it was very much him.”
Ó Snodaigh says the main man in his own life these days is his teenage son who has introduced him to rap music.
Colm and his wife, Elizabeth, became parents in their mid-40s to their son who is now 16. “We’d been trying for a while and I didn’t think there was any chance,” he says.
“Suddenly he was there… he must have been just thinking ‘yeah yeah take your time, I’ll get to yez.’”
Let him have his day first and then I’ll come in and I’ll create mayhem in his life? “You know exactly what you’re talking about,” he laughs.
“Oh my god, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world [being a parent] but also the most frustrating thing in the world time-wise.
“But I think humans’ way of rewarding ourselves is to watch our own children grow. You could watch another child grow, but it’s not the same.
“Watching your own child and watching them make reasonable decisions and not get into trouble and generally do OK, that’s great, that’s pretty cool. I am so grateful for all of that.”
Your children do keep you in touch with their world and the modern world? “Absolutely, I’ve listened to so much rap in the last two years,” he laughs.
“I had never enjoyed rap, but I’ve grown to like it. He knows all the words off by heart and the words are fantastic, they are really, really intricate.
“He’s going into fifth year and I was saying to him that Shakespeare is the rap of the 15th/16th century. If you can approach Shakespeare with the same attitude that you have towards rap, you’ll love Shakespeare.
“He’ll say to me, ‘what do you think of those words? I said, ‘well, you’ll have to explain them to me, I can’t catch them.’ So I’ve begun to enjoy rap artists.”
KÍLA’S brand-new single, Cé a Chum, is now available on all streaming links.