Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

Last Friday, Rodney Owl released Making Trouble, the second single off forthcoming album Loneliness is Contagious which is due around March of next year. The project is the brainchild of Armagh native, and long-time Galway resident, Mark McConville.

Rodney Owl has been McConville’s faithful moniker for upwards of a decade, in which time he has been a fixture of Galway’s circuit. His 2023 LP, Truth is Broken, was released via the Black Gate label.

On December 20 at 3pm, Rodney Owl plays a free gig in the Mick Lally Theatre as part of 3 Kinds of Music. Also playing will be the ConTempo Quartet and Java Blue. It is an initiative co-curated by Music Connects and the Black Gate, and it provides a welcome return to the stage for McConville after an extended period of writing and recording.

“I had my head in the computer a lot,” he says. “I think it’ll actually be a year exactly the last time I played a show which was upstairs in the King’s Head. I’d purposely taken the year out to concentrate on [the album].

“I’ve played there quite a few times over the last couple of years. Always a lovely crowd.”

Like Rodney Owl’s previous single Sea of Hypocrisy, Making Trouble wraps itself around a nylon string, Spanish guitar line. McConville’s music can sometimes start with a strong melody, and slowly chip away at it in pursuit of something more abstract.

“The song itself, the original version of it was very folky,” he says. “Very Dylan influenced in the guitar playing. But I would almost call it a mix between Dylan and Radiohead – my two ends of something coming together there.

“It’s a song about relationships, I suppose. Learning to bend and not break. Being a dad of a now-ten-year-old girl, and the ongoing curve of that. Especially being an older dad in the way I grew up – the society we’re living in now is very different.”

In previous work, McConville has tackled subjects like technology and modern life. There are shades of the same mindset on Loneliness is Contagious, but overall it has a more personal core.

Pictured: Christmas gig…Rodney Owl. Photo: John Margetts.