Husband and wife duo Lost Chimes told David Hennessy about their new album produced by Gerry Diver and being inspired by the stories and people of Ireland, in particular Tuam, Co. Galway.
Celtic influenced folk/ roots duo Lost Chimes, made up of husband and wife Nicky and Gemma Kirk, are set to release their second album this summer.
The recent single Something Different was the first taste of the follow-up to their 2021 self-titled debut album, Now I Swim.
The song focusses on how relationships evolve and endure over time.
The new album has been created with producer Gerry Diver, who has worked with big names such as Van Morrison, John Cooper Clark, Graham Coxon, Billy Bragg and many more, and delves into the exploration of healing intergenerational trauma, honoring ancestral resilience and identity.
Let’s talk about the song, Something Different. It is the first single off the album so you must feel it’s representative. Where did it come from? What inspired it?
Gemma: “It’s about relationships.
“It’s about relationships of all types whether it’s romantic or friends, or relatives and just about how they adapt and evolve and endure over time.
“You know what it’s like, depending on what happens in your life, whether it’s things around us, environmental or things happening or deaths or births or other happenings, the relationship changes because it has to and it should.
“But sometimes those changes are good, and sometimes they’re more difficult, but generally we all get stronger through adversity and through life experience.
“That’s what it’s about.
“It was a reflection on our relationship over 25 years that we we’ve now got the children and I’ve lost my parents six and 11 years ago.
“That really changes the relationship and it changes my outlook on life and I’m not the same person anymore.
“Over my time, I’ve been doing a lot of development work on myself in terms of my parents who were never very happy, unfortunately, and that affected me a lot, affected me and my sister and that relationship which we’ve now successfully healed going forward.
“And Nicky similarly, sometimes complicated family arrangements.
“It’s just all about how we’re constantly learning and none of it’s perfect, is it?
“It’s messy but I think it’s just something that everybody can relate to.
“And when we wrote it, we thought this might resonate with people.
“It’s not a traditional love song and a kind of, ‘Oh, I love you so much’.
“It’s a kind of, ‘Oh, you know, things have changed’.
“Actually, it’s the type of change to build a structure strong.”
I saw you play the song on BBC Radio for the Gaby Roslin show.
Gemma: “Oh my God, that was so much fun.”
Nicky: “Yeah. Really, really fun.”
Gemma: “It was so, so random.
“And Gabby was very nice.
“She’s 60.
“She does not look 60.
“She looks amazing.
“They made us feel so comfortable.
“It’s lovely.
“They were very, very sweet.”
Nicky: “And it’s a really great experience getting to the BBC.”
How valuable is it when you get that sort of support from outlets like the BBC?
Nicky: “It’s really quite humbling in a way.
“I don’t think we had set out with any particular expectations especially when we started playing music together.
“We did our first album which was released in 2021 with a producer that we knew for years.
“Sadly he’s died now but he was great really.
“He really encouraged us and off the back of that, we got quite a lot of gigs and people seemed to enjoy it.
“We enjoy playing live as well, both of us.
“That’s one of our passions.
“Playing live is something that’s really wonderful.
“That feeling is something that is unlike any other, it’s that really sort of visceral excitement of being able to play your music and be lucky enough for people to want to listen and to have people put us on the radio, have people like yourself talking to us or anybody be interested in the music that we create is a huge bonus and a real compliment.”
How did Lost Chimes come together?
Gemma: “We met 25 years ago at Sheffield Uni.
“Nicky was doing architecture and I was doing modern languages.
“Then we sort of moved down to London after our degrees finished.
“We were both in different bands.
“Nicky was in a kind of a punk band and I was in a quite heavy rock band and then we went on to be in other bands.
“I had a folky band called The Miners.
“We had loads of bands basically.
“And 13 years ago, we had our first daughter and it was obviously harder to do stuff with bands in the evening so we said, ‘We should be in the same band. It would be a lot easier’.
“And it was, not at the beginning obviously.
“We’ve got two daughters.
“We actually went on a trip to Galway before the first one was born and it was that really which inspired the theme of the band in terms of Lost Chimes and the feel and the folkiness of it.
“And the fact that we were sort of purposefully settling down from some of the other music that we’d done and we didn’t really purposely design it, it just sort of happened.
“When we came back from Galway, it’s just so beautiful, so remote and we had this idea of chimes.
“We were interested in storytelling but at that time Lost Chimes felt like a nice band name.
“Nobody else had it and it’s bloody hard coming up with a band name.”
I knew your music took inspiration from Ireland but I didn’t realise it inspired the actual concept of the band and the name and everything…
Gemma: “Yes, that’s right and probably subconsciously at the time, because I didn’t know that I had Irish heritage and that’s all Galway related.
“Gerry Diver’s uncle Mickey Coen was very well known.
“From Tuam in Galway, he moved to Manchester to be a cobble fighter in the 60s and he was really renowned, a very sort of wily, wiry, funny guy who ended up, after his boxing career, being a nightclub promoter and all sorts of things.
“Many people have written songs about him.
“I discovered then looking at my ancestry tree that my ancestors, the Gormley family, are also from Tuam in Galway.
“What are the odds?
“And my great uncle, Joe Gormley was president of the national miners union before Arthur Scargill, so a big figure.
“And then Sheila, who’s one of the people who we interviewed about their childhood to get her story on this record Now I Swim is also from Tuam in Galway.
“Something uncanny and slightly wonderful and magical has happened.”
Nicky: “We should go visit Tuam really, shouldn’t we?”
How brilliant is it, Gemma, that your great uncle was so big fighting for the miners and you were in a band called The Miners?
Gemma: “Yeah, that was very purposeful.
“Actually one of the songs on this album is called People Gather and it’s about people using their voices.
“Really it’s about the union and people standing up for themselves.
“His voice is on the record, we found it on YouTube, on an old ITN interview.
“It’s amazing.”
Nicky: “There’s some kind of subconscious influences coming through and then some of the very purposeful influences.
“These Irish stories that we’ve recorded, these two women, one’s Sheila and one’s Anetta.
“They both live in Clogherhead near Drogheda.”
Gemma: “We went on holiday, went to Corfu with our girls a couple of years ago.
“And when you’re in a hotel and you meet some other people who you get on with and you just have a really nice time.
“And they also had girls the same age and at the time we were planning this album going, ‘What are we going to write these songs about?’
“And we had the idea to ask people about their childhoods, to preserve lost stories- the lost chimes- and that people could draw on their ancestral strength to heal intergenerational trauma.
“That’s been a real sort of theme about this album.
“We interviewed all four of the adults, the men and the women and the two women’s stories are the ones we’ve used on this record, and we may use the others.
“Sheila’s story was about growing up in Galway and how precious it was spending time with her dad who was a pro wind surfer.
“He got her into magical fairy stories and things.
“And then he died a few years ago tragically.
“She didn’t say how but she said, and it just came out, ‘And now I swim. Now I swim every day in the Irish Sea to connect with his memory’.
“And that was really lovely.
“We went away and wrote the song and then Gerry Diver produced it.
“Then we sent it back to her and she was absolutely over the moon and quite emotional.
“And then Anetta told me about her grandparents growing up in Poland.
“It was quite a difficult time because her granddad was alcoholic and he was quite abusive towards her grandmother.
“And then Annetta met somebody in Poland, got married, and it turned into the same thing and it was an abusive marriage.
“She got out of that and she moved to Ireland and eventually met her husband now who’s a Scottish guy who used to work on all the lifeboats in Ireland and now she’s very happy.
“It’s really, really lovely. Very moving.
“They both cried when they told us these stories.
“They’re just wonderful friends, new friends but we feel like we’ve known them forever.
“Also, we tied it in with a visit to the Epic museum in Dublin which is all about people emigrating and finding a better life.
“One is called Thousands are Sailing.
“It’s taken from an old Irish poem called Thousands Are Sailing.
“So there’s lots of lovely Irish influence in there.”
Did you find the Epic museum moving?
Nicky: “Yeah, it’s a very impressive place.
“There’s so many stories and so many kind of journeys in one place and it’s done so effectively and so well.
“It’s a stunning place to go and visit.
“I’d definitely recommend a visit there.
“We thought it was really, really fascinating.
“That was lovely to see.
“We were in Dublin midway through when we were writing the songs for the album as well so it arrived at quite a nice point.
“Then we had quite an epic journey of our own coming back from the West Coast across to the East Coast.
“As we were getting close to the East Coast, we kind of got into a real predicament on a very steep hill so we were stranded.
“Our car broke down on this hill and we couldn’t turn around or do anything.
“That ended up with lots of local people coming out, asking us if we were alright and bringing us sandwiches and checking if we were okay because we were still stranded there for about five hours while we waited for the tow truck to come pick us up.
“That was quite a quite an epic journey across from east to west.
“That was in the middle of us writing these songs and getting the album recorded.”
What did your producer, revered Gerry Diver, bring to it all?
Gemma: “He is amazing.
“We had a couple of meetings.
“It’s like dating, sort of building a relationship..”
Nicky: “To suss each other out and see how compatible it might be..”
Gemma: “And he’s fascinating because he’s so interested.
“And I guess he wouldn’t have done this unless he really wanted to work with us which is very flattering.
“It really felt very special.
“He was very impressed with what we were doing and said, ‘I’d really like to work with you and I think I can massively take your work to another level’.
“And we knew that that was true because we could hear all of the other work that he was doing with massive names like Shane MacGowan and Van Morrison, John Cooper Clark, Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn and various people.
“So that felt really nice.
“We had that theme of telling stories and of healing intergenerational trauma and of drawing on ancestral strengths and every conversation that we had seemed to kind of solidify that.
“We came up with this mood board on Spotify of some of our favourite tunes and he basically said, ‘This is it. If you’re going to do something, you need to make it really pop, really big in some way, and sort of go smack people in the face because there’s so much out there, there’s so much traffic’.
“And he said, ‘I think that you’re really good but we need to really create a splash if we’re going to do this’ which all made sense and has actually worked as a strategy, I think.”
Nicky: “We recorded over at his place.
“We popped down to his studio to record down in south London.
“We would kind of go over when we could: At the highest point maybe twice a month or something- over the period of sort of four or five, six months or so culminating in the last sessions which were last summer.
“Gerry’s been a brilliant inspiration and help just to really kind of push us in a direction and really make the most of it and just really give us the kick up the a**e I think is necessary.
“It’s brilliant.
“We’re really, really pleased with the results of this record and Gerry’s work. It’s fantastic.”
Gemma: “Every time we went down he said, ‘Right, what are we doing today? And we had probably sent him a rough scratch, sent him some demos and then he would sort of map it out and then he’ll go, ‘Right, what’s this about? What’s this actually about?’
“He’ll get out his dictaphone and his notepad and he’ll really drill down into the emotional feel and the detail of each song because he was like, ‘Well, if we don’t cover that, I won’t be able to accurately produce that and make people feel the desired effect. What’s the overall feeling of this? Is it angry? Is it romantic? Is it sad? Is it wistful? Is it this all of those details all together?’
“It’s good because you have to be quite vulnerable with somebody that you’ve only really just just met but he’s just so gorgeous, lovely and funny.
“And you have a bit of a laugh and you tell some stories along the way.
“And then he would always feed us.
“He would always have some stuff in for sandwiches.
“He’s just a lovely, lovely guy, and very humble in terms of what he’s achieving.”
I meant to ask, what did Sheila and Anetta think of the songs their stories inspired?
Gemma: “They love it.”
Nikcy: “Yeah, they’re really over the moon. And we’re so pleased.
“They’re such lovely people and for them to contribute in the way they did, they really helped shape especially those songs and more in terms of the tone of the album as well in certain ways.
“But they’re really over the moon.
“Obviously they’re quite emotional songs so they’re touched by it and the sentiment behind it, but at the same time, they’re very just really pleased for us as well to see that we’re kind of really going for it with these songs and they’re very excited for how they’ll be received when we release those ones.
““They’re very, very, very pleased.”
Have you got the chance to play in Ireland as of yet, and is that a plan because it would be quite full circle if you brought the music back to Ireland, wouldn’t it?
Gemma: “Definitely.
“The plan is definitely to go over to Ireland and do some sort of tour.
“We just need to figure out when.”
Something Different is out now.
Now I Swim is out in June.
For more information, click here.
