I was up at Oxegen last weekend and got a chance to interview Conor J. O’Brien of Villagers (myspace) and previously The Immediate (myspace, Wikipedia) for FlirtFM.

We had a quick chat about life on the road, the break-up of The Immediate, Inspiration for some of his songs, Piracy and the future of the music industry.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (BY-NC).

dd: I’m here with Conor of Villagers
cob: Hello
dd: And previously of The Immediate. How have you been getting on in the last while? How have things been on the road?
cob: Good yeah, I’ve just literally… I was in Amsterdam this morning.
dd: Business or pleasure?
cob: Business, doing a solo support tour of Tracy Chapman around Europe, which was bizarre but enlightening also. Kinda tired, learning a lot, I still feel like we’re at the beginning of things.

dd: What gigs do you have coming up next after tonight?
cob: I have to play at a wedding on Friday, but I’m not playing my songs, I’m just playing.
dd: So you’re going to be a wedding singer?
cob: No, I’m going to be a wedding guitarist, not even a wedding singer. That’s my next gig, then after that… oh yeah, Latitude! We’re going to play this festive in Suffolk in the UK called Latitude which is sort of like a weird of a weird festival in the forest, apparently its kind of hard to find and it looks really interesting. It’s the day after the wedding, I’m one of the best men, I have to leave the wedding at like half seven, then get a ferry over and then drive for 7 hours because we’re on at 2:45 the next day. Hopefully we’ll get there in time.

dd: What kind of reception have Villagers been getting?
cob: Mainly on the FM, *bdum-tsch*. I don’t know, we’ve been getting good reception, yeah. It’s been good, positive.

dd: Rolling back a bit, to your work with The Immediate, I suppose the biggest shock to all of us was the suddenness in which you guys went your own ways. We saw great things are were expecting an awful lot more. Can you chat at minute about that, would you consider working working with the guys again in the future?
cob: Well, I would consider it, if it made sense, but I cant envision a time it would ever make sense. The spark kinda died for us so we ended it before we killed each other. And now it’s all good, we’ve split and I can’t really envision a time where it would make sense for us to get back together.

dd: Not even to get back together and create stuff, but just get back together and play.
cob: To play a show?
dd: Yeah, to play a show.
cob: No, I can’t envision that, no not at all.

dd: Moving to some of your other stuff, the subject matter of some of your songs, and specifically about inspiration that you’ve had for your songs. Where does your inspiration for Becoming a Jackel and Cecelia [& Her Selfhood] [come from]?
cob: Only with hindsight have I realised that the songs I’ve written in the last couple of months, even in the last two years, are all based on the idea of change, something you cant really control, or a physical change, or an emotional change, anything that makes you realise that you’re not as in control as you let yourself think you are. I didn’t set out to write about that, it just turned out that way. The ones that I threw away, the ones I didn’t want anyone to ever hear were the ones didn’t seem to align with this particular genre.

dd: One last question before we wrap up. What do you see the future of the music industry panning out to? In terms of Piracy, New Media, people downloading your stuff? For example, are you pro people downloading your music?
cob: Yeah, I don’t care, it’s cool. Like, I do it. It’s a really natural progression in the music industry, it’s just a tip in the balance of power. It was always going to happen and now they just have to deal with it. There’s just a lot of grumbles about it, because people are loosing money and stuff, it’s always going to happen. Life’s to short to be worried about that kind of stuff, it’s awesome if people hear your music, I don’t care.

dd: Thank you very much and hopefully we’ll chat to you again.
cob: Thanks dude, thanks Flirt.