Keeley Moss is an artist whose work blurs the boundaries between music and storytelling. In this interview she describes the creative process behind her concept album Beautiful Mysterious, which was inspired by the life and legacy of Inga Maria Hauser. Keeley opens up about the challenges and triumphs of her unique artistic journey, finding light amidst darkness.
How did your fascination with Inga Maria Hauser’s story begin, and how has it shaped your songwriting?
Reading about Inga Maria’s story for the first time unlocked something in my heart and mind that emotionally engulfed me so suddenly and so completely that I soon embarked on a multi-faceted mission with an intense determination that almost 9 years on is a fire that continues to rage unabated. I’ve been asked about the whys and wherefores countless times in interviews over the years but as much as I have tried to get to the bottom of it, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to adequately explain it. Because I think it’s something beyond words, and therefore beyond an earthy, rational explanation. But the initial impact of this fire was so powerful and so profound that it set me on a path that has remained unwavering for almost a decade despite all sorts of obstacles and challenges along the way.
And the result of that has been many, many things. Many songs, several albums, short films, many artworks, many live shows performing said works, The Keeley Chronicles blog, all of it is art that has poured from the arteries of my heart, and every fragment and element of it has been inspired 100% by this person who will never know the incredibly potent and indelible inspiration their short but meaningful time on this Earth has created, that is I believe ultimately the legacy of their life.
What does the title Beautiful Mysterious signify for you in relation to the album’s themes?
On the last day of Inga’s life, April 6th 1988, while travelling by train across Scotland, Inga wrote in her diary, “Saw the sea…beautiful and mysterious”. I was, and I remain, fascinated by that sentence, to me it captured Inga’s essence better than anything. Most people wouldn’t even bother to write down having seen the sea, most people take it for granted, and fewer people still would go to the trouble of travelling 1,000 miles to see it. But her description of the sea as “Beautiful and mysterious” I found even more striking.
Here was someone so awestruck by the purity and the impenetrable nature of the sea that they described it in a way I’ve never heard or read anyone describe it before. Ironically, it struck me that the words “Beautiful and mysterious” were just as fitting to describe Inga herself, not that she would’ve realised it. There are only a few documented examples of Inga’s words that have survived the ravages of time, and preserving as much evidence of her presence on Earth has been one of my main objectives from the first day I was drawn to the flame.
So given this is a concept album about Inga’s time on Earth, I felt Beautiful and Mysterious would be the perfect title for the record. But I decided to remove the word “and” and instead call it Beautiful Mysterious as a statement on how I believe the mysterious itself to be the holder of the most alluring beauty of all – the mysterious is beautiful. To my mind, mystery is also the single most important and valuable element of art. Unfortunately the media are always trying to strip any sense of mystery away, they can’t tolerate something being beyond their incessant probing and prodding, they’re allergic to ambiguity, they’re at loggerheads with the otherworldly.
Could you describe the creative process behind “Trans-Europe 18”? How did you approach capturing Inga Maria’s journey?
Just like a classic prog album, Beautiful Mysterious is very much a concept album. Except it’s one firmly rooted in reality (although with a strong mystical aspect to it). I had sketched out the arc of the album’s storyline and there was a gap in the story between Inga reaching the point in March 1988 of wanting to leave Munich and embark on her backpacking adventure, and her exploring London. So I knew I needed to write a song that would chronicle Inga setting off from Haidhausen on that bright spring morning of March 29th 1988, and try to to take the listener on the journey, and try to show the world through her eyes, while mapping her movements as accurately as possible to honour the chronology, the truth of her trail.
Around this time, Alan (Maguire, KEELEY’s producer) had presented me with a piece of music he’d written that sounded very unusual and was over 10 minutes long. I wrote a set of lyrics for it that didn’t quite work, but the vocal melodies I came up with showed promise. Given its extreme length, and the fact it sounded like nothing on the album then in progress, I figured it would make an interim 12″ vinyl-only single, one of those sort of non-album curio releases that is released largely for artistic motives.
But then a few days later on a Saturday morning I was at home in Sandycove, Dublin where I was living at the time and I put on the recording of the instrumental mix, all 10:17 of it. And suddenly it struck me what an amazing piece of music it was that Alan had composed, and how hopeful and vibrant and life-affirming and adventurous it sounded. I suddenly realised that in it’s instrumental state, it sounded like Inga’s pure mission, her zest for adventure, the spirit that led her to leave Munich and take a giant leap into the unknown.
On the bus the next time I was on my way to the studio, I wrote the lyrics and title of ‘Trans-Europe 18’ in the space of 10 minutes and I laid down my parts in the studio that day, recording my lead vocal in the usual 3 takes Alan always has me do. Then I recorded harmonies, and in the meantime Alan had trimmed more than 5 minutes off the length of the song. I later added a guitar line, and that was it. Alan had already devised the bass line, which Lukey has perfectly put his own stamp on live. Alan created the instrumental track as a visionary symphony. And then I Keeley fied it with my words, vocal melodies, harmonies and a spacey guitar part. It’s the one song we co-wrote on the record.
Every time we write something together, we get brilliant results. We co-wrote two songs on Floating Above Everything Else, ‘Arrive Alive’ and ‘Totally Entranced’ that are two of the best tracks we’ve ever done. And we’ve co-written a song for the next album that I think is going to be the biggest of the lot. If the radio plays it that is. Thats one of the things about this primitive modern-day world, you could write and record ‘Hey Jude’ and it might get a handful of plays at night on a few obscure radio shows that hardly anyone listens to, and that’s it. In 1968 ‘Hey Jude’ went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA and stayed there for 9 weeks straight. If that song was released now for the first time, only a handful of people would probably ever get to hear it, and it wouldn’t chart anywhere in the world. It has never been harder to reach cats. It was far easier in 1968. Hell, it was far easier in 1958!
What a shocking indictment on the so called modern world that things were more advanced 60 years ago. “What a life, what a mess”, as someone once sang…
What other tracks from Beautiful Mysterious would you highlight to new listeners and why?
All 11 tracks on the album are equally necessary and meaningful. Take one out and the story wouldn’t flow, it’s a sonic novel, a story from beginning to end.
How did you first connect with Alan Maguire as a producer, and what makes your collaboration so effective?
Our connection came about in the most old-school way possible – I put up an ad and he responded to it, we met and then began working together. And here we are 5 and a half years later with a rich river of work having flowed from our fountain. The more interesting part of the story is that I hadn’t advertised for a producer, even though that’s ultimately exactly what I needed. Instead however, I had advertised for band members. But Alan had had his fill of being in bands and schlepping around being treated like a paraplegic malfunctioning sex worker, which is the way bands get treated in general. Alan’s forte is production, so he proposed producing a record together, and we went on from there.
At the time I put that ad up it was an act of pure desperation to try to avoid my complete collapse. I was literally in the midst of one of the worst months of my life at the time and knew that music was my only possible salvation. However, I had been trying to make something happen in music for many, many years by that point but nothing I had ever tried had worked for longer than a year at best, and no one I had ever met it had ever worked out with, it had been one failure and crushing disappointment after another after another after another. It was crazy that I would even bother to try again given my limitless lucklessness up to that point. But at one of the lowest points of my life, I rolled the dice one last time, and I got a number of replies. And one of them, Alan, turned out to be the one, the missing link, my Martin Hannett, my Trevor Horn, my George Martin.
But as much as he’s the perfect studio foil for me, I think I’m the right artist for him. I think the Universe knew that we were right for one another, that together we would prove transformative for each other, and that temperamentally and musically, and in terms of workrate and Modus Operandi, we would be perfectly compatible. The other thing about our first meeting that is interesting is that it was on a coin toss that it happened at all. I’m a very conscientious person and since I was 15 years old I had been trying to form bands and find collaborators. And Ireland where I’m from and where I was based for the first half of my life, in my experience there’s a great deal of flakiness where Irish cats are involved. Something typical in Ireland is someone saying, “See you in half an hour!” and then two or three days later they might arrive. Or they’ll say, “See you tomorrow at 8pm” and then they stand you up and you never see them again.
Countless times over the years I had made arrangements to meet cats through ads who never turned up, and then I’d phone them up and they either wouldn’t come to the phone or they’d answer and claim they had no knowledge of the meeting. Ireland is full of cats like that, it’s a very cavalier place which is probably one of the main reasons I was such a fish out of water there and perceived as such an oddball.
My intense drive and do-or-die focus and all-out energy are pretty alien there, the only other Irish cat I’ve ever heard of like that is Bono and he’s the most hated person in the country which says it all really. If Bono had never achieved anything and he’d only written half a song and had had no success whatsoever, he’d be a lot more admired at home.
So imagine going through that year after year after year, and generally only meeting flakes? Eventually cynicism and disillusionment starts to set in, even for an eternal optimist like me. The night Alan and I had arranged to meet for the first time, I have never, ever seen heavier rainfall in all my life… It was torrential, biblical, you name it. I looked out the window and knew I was going to get absolutely drenched, even with an umbrella. I was living in Sandycove at the time and Alan was in Rathmines, which necessitated a train journey, and a bus journey, and two separate 15-minute walks for me to get there.
I remember looking out the window of this rented flat I was living at this utter downpour outside and having to really dig deep to summon the requisite will to leave my flat and head out into this torrential rainstorm, all the time having no idea if this meeting would be any more fruitful than the hundreds that hadn’t gone anywhere up to that point. But I had just enough of a shred of belief still inside me, allied to the fact that I was at rock bottom at that point and was so desperate I was willing to take a chance on anything, so off out I went.
And everything great would end up growing from that one fateful decision. Up to that point, my being positive had only ever led to a negative outcome.
As for what makes our collaboration so effective, I personally think it’s the particular combination of our similarities and our differences. Sonically we’re very well-matched, we have compatible sonic sensibilities, we love a lot of the same kinds of music, we both love atmospheric textures and dreamy soundscapes in music. But as people we’re very different. I’m very conceptual and communicative, which Alan is not. And Alan is very technical, which I’m not. He has a great formal knowledge and technical understanding of music that I don’t have, I’m very instinctive and spontaneous when it comes to music. He can produce which is not my forte. I can sing which is not his forte.
In five and a half years working together we’ve never had a row. We agree on most things and where we don’t, we’re both flexible enough to trade one idea for another, or he’ll give way on one thing and I’ll give way on another. Or I’ll live with his idea and come around to it, or vice versa. It just works, it flows. The five songs we’ve written together, three of which have been released so far, and the fourth of which will be on the next album, I think no other two people would have come up with those songs together.
How do Lukey Foxtrot and Andrew Paresi contribute to the dynamic of your live performances and recordings?
So much. They’re the perfect bandmates, Lukey is such a good live performer and a natural musician, he’s got a really energetic stage presence which adds so much to our
visual appearance, and he’s so adept and natural in speaking to an audience. I’ve been in many bands and have had a number of different line-ups of KEELEY and I’ve never had a bandmate be as capable or as comfortable in being able to converse with a crowd onstage. And he has a fantastic knack of writing basslines or adding touches and flourishes to bass lines, making them his own. He adds little riffs and runs that decorate a song without cluttering it, and you soon start to really miss them if they’re not there.
Andrew is such a rock behind the kit, a creative powerhouse of a drummer, he’s got the ability to play so thunderously where it’s required, or in a lighter and more subtle way if needed. Andrew is also skilled at programming, he deploys all the Pro-Tools samples onstage that are part of the studio recordings of the songs. And he’s worked with My Bloody Valentine, who are Lukey’s favourite band of all-time, and Morrissey, and The Smiths were the band who made me want to be in a band, so how fitting that all three of us have ended up in the same band. We play all over the UK, driving for many hours at a time and in tandem with our brilliant manager Nick Clift we’ve worked out the least financially ruinous way to tour, which is to cram Andrew·s kit and our amps and my guitar and Lukey’s bass and all our pedalboards, merch, clothes, etc into the car, but this means the three of us are packed as densely and as tightly as possible into this car with all the gear.
So the fact the three of us all get on so well and never argue is hugely beneficial. lt1s the perfect musical marriage really.
Also I must give a shout-out to our occasional keyboard player Marty ‘Mani’ Canavan who was in all the previous Irish line-ups of KEELEY, and who plays with us in the UK once or twice a year whenever he can get over from Ireland. He’s a really great cat and a natural musician who enhances any musical environment he’s involved in.
On your debut album Floating Above Everything Else, what inspired your cover of Spiritualized’s “Shine A Light,” and how did Jason Pierce’s feedback impact you?
During the pandemic, lockdown in Ireland really was lockdown – far more severe than the version of lockdown they had in the UK. You were only permitted to go out once a week to buy groceries, otherwise you had to stay indoors. And that remained the case for 2 years almost non-stop, unlike in the UK where they somehow seemed to only have a watered-down version of lockdown for a few weeks. And I lived on my own, with no family members on my side of the city, and no pets. And I was determined not to catch Covid. So I basically locked myself indoors for 2 years 24/7. But before long, the urge to perform music grew too uncontainable so I devised a series called Keeley’s Lockdown Rockdowns where I would teach myself to sing and play a cover of a song I liked, and then five minutes later I’d film myself playing it, and I’d post it online.
One of these songs was ‘Shine a Light’ by Spiritualized, which I’d seen them play the two times I saw them play live. Through doing my own version of it, I felt I’d brought something new to it, and I proposed to Alan that we record a studio version of it. This we did, and it turned out so well that I felt it had to go on the album as the closer, the epic at the end. Because when I performed ‘Shine a Light’, I sang it with Inga in mind even though Jason didn’t write it about her.
Then I found out that our manager Nick knew Jason from Spacemen 3 having supported Nick’s band Folk Devils in 1987! And Jason and Nick met up in London a few years ago. So Nick sent Jason an email with a link to our version of ‘Shine a Light’ and he sent back that lovely feedback about it, which meant a great deal as he’s such a hugely respected cat and is not easy to track down.
With The Keeley Chronicles and your involvement in documentaries, how do you navigate the balance between music and true crime advocacy?
It’s a strange and unusual position to be in, it’s unprecedented for an indie rock musician to be regarded as an authority on a true crime case. But I just do what I do, I don’t know any other way of being, I’ve been doing it for nearly 9 years now. All I have is Inga and music. I don’t own anything, there’s literally nothing else in my life. It’s normality for me because I’ve managed to navigate this balance for so long, so much so that the two paths overlap a lot, largely due to the fact that all the songs on all the albums are inspired by Inga.
That said, the press have persistently misunderstood and misreported the nature of what it is that I do, it’s alien to their mindset that they can’t get their head around it so they make assumptions that are almost always wrong. The truth is, I write about Inga’s LIFE more than I ever write about her death or about the details of the case. That’s always been the most fascinating and emotive subject for me, in particular the last week of Inga’s life which was ironically the happiest week of her life judging from her surviving diary entries and the postcards she sent to her friends and family.
How do you channel the weight of Inga Maria’s story into hope and resilience within your music?
That’s easy. Having spent literally years studying the timeline of Inga’s movements over the last week of her life to the most precise degree possible, there’s essentially a dividing line – the night of April 6th 1988. Everything before that point was light, joy, hope, dreams, adventure, simplicity, openness and relishing the thrill of the new. Everything after that point was darkness, terror, agony, death, murkiness, complexity, mystery and secrecy.
I write from every aspect of her story, largely from Inga’s perspective but also sometimes from the perspective of her family members and friends, and very occasionally from my own perspective. I have researched and delved deep depths for years to learn as much as possible about her to give Inga as accurate a posthumous voice as possible in order to counter the darkness that overpowered the beautiful lightness of being that had been the essence of her experience up to the point when everything went so disastrously wrong. More often than not, the hope and resilience of Inga in the days before April 6th 1988, and most importantly what she saw and experienced and how she felt about it during those magic seven last days, and her living so in the moment in a beautiful way in those early April days of 1988, is what makes me feel.
And it’s those feelings that are so overpowering that they give rise to songs, the heart gives birth to art. Writing through Inga’s eyes is like entering a doorway to another world for me. It allows me a portal to a pure space, a vista to see and be in 1988 in a sonically entranced state. When I’m singing and playing those songs, whether it’s at home practicing or giving birth to new songs, or rehearsing with my bandmates, or playing onstage, my mind goes somewhere else, it goes to this otherworldly space. It goes to 1988. I need to go there. I have very little interest in 2024, I see the current age merely as a blank canvas to splatter my sonic paint on, so I can escape into my visions of 1988 through these songs. That’s what these songs are – a doorway to another world, another time, another place. No one else in music seems to be trying to do that. Why, I don’t know. To me, it’s so clear and so worthwhile. But other cats have their own agendas, their own reason for being, for breathing, for believing. Each to their own.
What has been the most surprising or impactful reaction you’ve received from audiences regarding your dedication to this story?
That’s hard to say because the majority of members of an audience don’t tend to disclose what their impression of a live show is. It could mean something very profound to them but they might not feel able to share it, or they might need to absorb the set and the night and perhaps take a while to come to terms with it.
We’ve generally had the warmest of responses from live audiences, and this has increased the better we’ve become and the bigger the shows we’ve played. But I always want to accept every single person who comes to see us live, or who happens to see us live even if it’s by accident while they wait for the headliner to come on. Whatever their reaction is, to me it’s valid.
I think anyone who sees us live realises how hard we work, how genuine we are, how devoted we are to this artistic spiritual crusade and much we put into our every show we play, especially given how little money we make (we usually just about break even or lose money because the cost of touring involves so many expenses) and how far we’re willing to travel to play.
For instance, when we toured the UK supporting Terrorvision earlier this year, we played in Wolverhampton, Aberdeen and Glasgow. It took us about six hours to get to Wolverhampton, then we loaded-in and soundchecked, then played for 30 minutes, then we cleared the stage of our gear and ran to the merch table to try sell enough merch to be able to afford to survive on the road and cover the cost of food, transport and accommodation. Then we drove 7 hours from Wolverhampton to Aberdeen and did the whole thing all over again, getting to play for 30 minutes. Then we drove another 4 hours to Glasgow and did the whole thing all over again just to get to play for 30 minutes. Then we all caught ‘Flu and had a 8 hour drive to get to London, and then I had an additional 4 hour trek to get to Somerset. And that was all for basically no money, because the tiny fees support bands get paid are immediately devoured by the costs of being on the road.
But was it worth it? 100%. They were the best days of my life so far. Most musicians seem to hate touring but I absolutely love it, especially getting to do it in my beloved “Dear Old Blighty”. To me, being squashed in a van or a car with a tonne of music equipment and my bandmates, and being faced with hours of driving in the rain or whatever, for the purpose of playing our music to hundreds of cats every night in a different city or town is the greatest thing in the world. And in Wolverhampton supporting Terrorvision we got to play to an audience of 1100 people which is the biggest concert audience we’ve played to so far. And it was our best show, with the best sound we’ve ever had.
I believe in the romance of the road completely. I think it’s a truly romantic thing, however raw and rugged. You have to be very defiant, determined and battle hardened to do it as a life. But fortunately we are exactly that. I’d rather lose money, or make no money doing that than make money doing anything else. Obviously I’d rather make money doing it than just break even or lose money but so it goes. The sonic cause is a calling with meaning beyond the monetary.
Sharing laughs and warmth and camaraderie on the road with my bandmates and living in our beautiful band bubble between shows is a magical thing. Blissing-out on long drives across the UK and listening to brilliant songs, albums and playlists is my favourite thing in life other than getting lost in music through playing it. Sitting there together frothing at the mouth in joy and surprise every time I hear the intro of a song I love that Lukey or Andrew has put on the car stereo or is playing through their phone on a playlist is a special thing. And getting to really SEE the green fields of Foreverland all across the sands and England’s rolling hills while driving, or getting treated to the glorious sight of the sprawling metropolis of London, or the beautiful Brutalist architecture of Birmingham city centre, or the authentic urban art of the gritty streets of the wonderfully-named Wolverhampton, these are magic things for a cat like me, things with a value beyond mere money.
What lessons from the creation of Beautiful Mysterious will you carry into your future projects?
The central lesson I’ve taken from it is that good as this album is, and as significant a work as it might turn out to be, I don’t want to let it overshadow or hinder the creative quest that I and we are on. If you look at a classic case like The Stone Roses, where they created an extraordinary album in 1989 that helped launch them into a rarefied realm, that helped them so much until a point where it hindered them so much. And then they seemed to become paralysed by perfectionism, and self-doubt, and legal issues with Silvertone and their manager Gareth Evans, and then they also took their eye massively off the ball when the money came in and they all moved away from one another and bought big houses and lost touch with the gang mentality and the poverty that were essential elements in the creative chemistry that helped spawn that magical first album. And the indecision, and their loss of hunger and desire, and probably their understandable unease of being unable to live up to the vast expectations that would greet their next record… all that fed into the melting pot of factors that saw that infamous 5 year gap between The Stone Roses and Second Coming.
I’ve studied pitfalls like that, and other pitfalls that have befallen other bands I’ve loved, and I’m determined to steer clear of them so I can hopefully get the absolute maximum out of my talent and creative vision and get to build the largest and most consistent discography I can, for as long as possible. When I reach the end of my and our creative climb for whatever reason that might come about, I want to be able to look back at as vast a body of work as possible, whether that’s ten albums in ten years, or twenty albums in twenty years, or more, who knows?
So one thing for me that’s very important is being free to create this body of work and minimising the potential of obstacles to get in the way of me and us creating as extensive and true and pure a body of work as possible. This is why I think that as deeply primitive as this so-called “modern” world is, and as useless as most of the media has become, there’s something positive about that too. If we’d been around 30, 40 or 50 years ago and had released Beautiful Mysterious then, it probably would’ve been a UK Top 20 album, maybe even Top 10. At least one of the singles from it probably would have entered the UK Top 40 singles chart, and we would’ve been invited onto Top of the Pops and other UK TV shows, reaching millions of cats as a result. NME, Melody Maker, Select magazine, etc would’ve featured it and us. John Peel would’ve played tracks off it on his radio show. We would’ve been playing to a ready-made large audience every night on the UK college circuit. We might’ve gotten on MTV with some of the singles too, and made inroads into Europe and started touring internationaIly.
That was the advanced world that existed in the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s. Nowadays, none of that exists and we find ourselves living in a deeply primitive world where to go backwards would be to go forwards. But there is no backwards or forwards. There’s just… nothing. Virtually nothing. A handful of trillionaires having it large at the planet’s expense, and everyone else slurping dribble in the dirt.
It is what it is. As bad as things are now, I suspect things will be far worse 10, 20, 30 years from now in terms of being unbelievably primitive. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the fact there’s now really no way for an emerging band and their artworks to properly emerge has one positive aspect. And that’s the fact that what remains of the media is so oblivious and asleep-at-the-wheels, and audiences face such an uphill task to find new bands and albums they might like or love, that artists are now in a position where they can get on with creating a body of work largely without pressure or expectation or commercial demands being foisted on them.
There’s no longer a major label demanding a band change their sound and manufacture an image to fit some hot new fly-by-night fashion shtick, because major labels don’t sign bands anymore due to there not being enough money in it for them to even be willing to take a punt. And bands no longer have the press breathing down their necks about whether their new album will live up to their previous album, because the press doesn’t know the band or the album even exists. They have no clue what’s going on unless they’re told by a publicist, and publicists have even less of a clue.
However that one positive is countered by a perilous negative, that nowadays there’s virtually nowhere to live, no one can afford to rent or buy a place to live, and if they can find somewhere they generally have to spend all their leasure time, their “dream time”, working extra shifts or a second job in order to afford the rent for whatever shoebox they’re renting. Which plays perfectly into the hands of the rich bald white men in suits who run the world.
Because they don’t want cats having time to write, or paint, or dream, or think. They want everyone to be a slave to their corporate ogre agenda, so they can make more and more and more money to stockpile and enrich their shareholders and allow them to compete in their dick waving competitions.
These human robots are worse and more scary than any mechanical robots. They’re the ultimate enemies of art. There’s no poetry in their soul. They have robot minds, they live robot lives with robot wives, they see the world through empty eyes. And they won’t stop until they enslave our brains, and imprison us for every day of our lives. And even then they won’t stop, because the goal is to always minimise and monetise, always delete and destroy, guzzling greed, squeezing our brains until they bleed, carving up our arteries until we no longer breathe.
You’ve supported tribute group, The Smyths. Can you tell me about how the music of The Smiths has influenced you, as well as your broader influences?
I first fell in love with pop music as a child, Top 40 radio was awash with glittering gems in those days and being given a Walkman for Christmas by my mam in the guise of Santa was to this day the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. Pet Shop Boys were the first band/duo I ever loved, their very original and literate take on pop and the thrillingly exciting portal their songs offered to the bustling world of London electrified my childhood mind.
Having a Walkman was an extraordinary means of escape, a much-savoured refuge from my parents’ daily rows and our constantly having to leave my abusive, heartless father who gave my mother a torrid time which resulted in my having to move 15 times by the time I was 15 years old. Then the next seismic eruption was discovering The Smiths when I was 14.
That was utterly life-changing and mind bending, like a rocket going off in my heart and head simultaneously. The Smiths made sense of the world for me, and yet simultaneously they opened a new world to me.
Those precious songs were pearls, and always will be no matter how much certain members try to take an axe to what made them so special. Hearing a band sing of places as wonderfully mundane as Newport Pagnell, a place no other songwriter on Earth would’ve thought to reference, or unlikely and unglamorous places such as Dublin, Dundee, Humberside, Leeds and Birkenhead was, and still is, a huge part of their appeal for me. The magic of minutiae is something mainstream pop stars and rock bands steer clear of, they’re instead always trying to pander to the lowest common denominator by making their lyrical references as bland, as blank and as tediously universal as possible.
The Smiths did the polar opposite, very much daring to go out on a limb to do so, and I’ll love them forever for it. And that focus on the minutiae of life is something that is at the heart of my own art. I never, ever write or sing about New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Hollywood.
Such glamorous locations as that are alien to me, they don’t speak to my soul. Stranraer does. Bristol does. Preston does. Glasgow does. Belfast does. Larne does. London does. Inverness does. The fact that each of those places has a connection to Inga means they carry a lot more emotional weight and interest for me anyway, but even if I wasn’t writing to, and through, and about Inga, they’re exactly the sort of places where my songs would spring from. My mindscape, as in the landscape of my mind, is and always has been the UK. And I think it always will be. I don’t envisage ever writing a song set anywhere else.
There’s a million songwriters out there who’ve tried to capture the spirit of Americana, and I get that, I’m partial to it as a listener sometimes, but it’s not where my head is ever at. If that means I won’t ever sell a million records, so be it. I wouldn’t sell a million records no matter what I did, and no one else will either unless their name starts with Taylor and ends with Swift. So for me as a music lover and as a music-maker, a specific reference such as the Cicely Courtneidge singalong ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty’ from The L-Shaped Room being used to herald the beginning of The Queen Is Dead is so perfectly astute, poignant, amusing and sarcastic all at once. Taking myself back to dear old Blighty is ultimately what I’ve been doing all my life from when I was decaying in Dublin as a perennial bedroom-bound doom-dweller dreaming of escaping to my spiritual home of England, up to the point where I finally managed to emancipate myself from the charred carcass of Dublin and leapt with a salmon-like lunge across the water to the pastoral pastures of the green fields of Foreverland, to the cobweb-clad creative cave that is my beloved Keeley Towers.
As a teenager, after I found The Smiths, I found The Cure and New Order, then I found Joy Division who are probably my favourite band of all, then I found Suede and The Stone Roses, then Oasis and Blur, then Saint Etienne and The Jam, then The Velvet Underground and Manic Street Preachers, then Buzzcocks and Kraftwerk, then Echo and the Bunnymen and Happy Mondays, then The Charlatans and XTC, then The Clash and the Sex Pistols, then Super Furry Animals and Nirvana, and Spiritualized and Pink Floyd, and Genesis and Roxy Music, and The Police and Dexys Midnight Runners, and Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Pretenders and then a hundred other beloved bands and solo artists.
Then I got into prog, psych-rock and psychedelic folk, then into shoegaze, dreampop and Krautrock and more ambient soundscapes. All of these ended up in the melting pot of magnetic magic that bubbled up to the frothy brim until I myself fell in. I’ve been happily drowning and swimming there ever since.
What are your plans for 2025 and how do you envision KEELEY’s sound evolving in the next few years?
Our wishes for 2025 are one thing. Our plans are another. Our plans are subject to certain limitations that we have to strive to navigate and overcome. But overcome them we will. I will not be stopped. Even Ireland with its million manacles could only hold me back for so long. I’m done with being smothered in a straitjacket, I’ve had it with my ankles being annually shackled, I’m making a break for fresh frontiers, as will be very evident from the next record my magpie eyes are hungry for the prize…
We want to tour rampantly, as that’s the gateway to becoming an even better live band which is one of the most determined urges of my life. I want us to support as many bigger bands as possible, which is very much in line with what we’ve done over the past 18 months, having supported Echobelly, Terrorvision, Miki Berenyi Trio, The Darling Buds, The Woodentops, The Wolfhounds, The Frank & Walters, Alain Whyte and Morrissey’s classic solo band, Badly Drawn Boy and The Smyths. In early 2025 we’re set to support Desperate Journalist, The Boo Radleys and lnspiral Carpets, and Miki Berenyi and The Smyths again. I love doing support slots, there’s so much value to playing those shows. I want us to become the best support act in the world.
So my main goals for 2025 is to continue our upwards curve, continue growing our fanbase, release our best album yet with the release of our third full-length album in the Summer, and play twice as many shows as we played in 2024. In 2024 we played more than twice the number of shows we played in 2023, so this would be in keeping with that level of growth.
Ultimately, I want us to get better and better, and create more moments of magic for the cats who see us live.
And to continue to do right by Inga, who is achieving an incredible thing from beyond the grave 36 years since she was last on Earth, by fulfilling the highest purpose of art. Bob Dylan once said, “The highest purpose of art is to inspire”. Which is what Inga does every time the inspiration of her life and her personality gives rise to a new song, a new single, a new album, a sonic novel in the shape of Beautiful Mysterious. I think that’s an amazing thing.And it’s something unprecedented in music, certainly on this scale, where every song and every album for years on end is inspired by her from beyond the grave.
Who else has done that? No one. Inga has managed that, and she’s not even alive. There are billions of people who are alive who will never achieve that once. And yet even though she’s not alive, in another sense she is. What more meaningful and life-affirming thing is there in life but music? Inga IS the music. She’s my muse and she’s my music. So because nothing is more alive than music, and Inga is my music, then in a sense Inga is very much alive. She’s alive in these songs.
As for how do I see the sound evolving in the next few years, I’ve always been really keen to explore and expand the atmospheric textures in certain songs and stretch out into more ambient areas. I love spacious soundscapes and the floaty feel. But on the other hand I love the electric essence of raw rage, of rabid energy, of sudden sonic jolts of joy. Of, basically, rocking out. I love guitars, I love blissing out by thrashing about, and assaulting my guitar onstage by pounding it with fingers of fury.
So I think there’ll always be those two strands really – the blissful and the brutal. I’m a Gemini, as was Inga, and that contrasting duality with maintaining two polar extremes and as a result achieving a sense of balance, is something I’m naturally drawn towards. A lot of my favourite music is too. With Suede for instance, for every raucous rocker such as ‘The Drowners’ or ‘Metal Mickey’ you’d get a sombre delicate dream-like reverie such as ‘She’s Not Dead’ or ‘The Next Life’. I love those contrasts, I think they’re really healthy. So with us, for every bright burst of melody-drenched effervescence such as ‘Arrive Alive’ or ‘Forever’s Where You Are’, there’s a gentle tear-soaked gem such as ‘You Were The Beauty’ or ‘Travelling in the Opposite Direction’. And then there’s also that sense of frontier-forging expansiveness with ‘Last Words’ and ‘Trans-Europe 18’, songs that are as much about spacious sonic landscapes as they are about lyrics and melodies.
One of the tasks I’ve set myself is to stick doggedly to delivering one album of original material every calendar year. We’ve done this in 2022, 2023 and 2024, andwe’re on course to do it in 2025 also. Now if it was purely down to releasing batches of songs, we could put out ten albums per year. But there’s so much to do around an album release. I design all the artwork for the albums and the singles and we release A LOT of singles, so the demand for me to produce artwork is pretty much constant. I also design our concert posters and tour posters, and we gig and tour all year round, with rarely a month off.
And if we do get a month off, we usually release a new album in that window, and then I’m obliged to complete a bunch of Q&As for interviews, or do a series of podcast interviews to promote the band or the record. Up until now I’ve also produced and edited all but one of our videos too.
And I do almost all our social media too, and that’s posting every day separately on all the platforms. And writing all the songs. And recording them with Alan. So with all that in mind, and having to juggle all the life stuff going on in the background as well, releasing one album a year every year is quite the undertaking. But I think all bands should abide by that as a golden rule. It’s not beyond them.
Look at The Beatles. No band has ever been so big and had to deal with more demands on their time than them. And yet those cats managed to release two albums a year most years, for 7 years in succession! And a load of non-album singles and B-sides as well! While touring their asses off and doing a million TV shows and interviews. And they were living in the advanced world of the 1960s where the press was on their case all the time, and their fans were baying at their door morning, noon and night. So if they can do it, anyone can do it. Therefore, for me it’s not so much “Die young, and leave a good looking corpse” as “Die old, and leave a good-looking discography”!
