Singer- songwriter and actor Niall McNamee told David Hennessy about his biggest London headline show to date, supporting big names such as The Wolfe Tones and his debut album which arrives next year.
Niall McNamee (30) is preparing to play his biggest London headline show to date when he takes to the stage at Omeara on 21 December.
Also known as an actor, Niall learned his craft playing the Irish pubs of London and holds the record for the fastest selling show at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith earlier this year.
Recently signed to new management and live agent deals and with a debut album set to land next year, these are exciting times for Niall.
Born in Leicester, Niall grew up in the Dundalk area although where he was living was nearer to South Armagh.
Moving to London at aged 17, Niall worked on building sites in the day and sang in Irish pubs at night.
His talent for acting would soon see him play Romeo in Romeo and Juliet in London’s West End before moving into film and TV.
A notable appearance with Jackie Chan in The Foreigner led to his first lead film role in the 2023 award-winning feature film Love Without Walls for which he also wrote the original soundtrack.
You must be looking forward to your big gig coming up at the Omeara It’s the biggest one you’ve ever done, isn’t it?
“It’s been a great year.
“I’ve finally got a live agent and a manager.
“This seems to be the biggest gig I’ve done in terms of with promoters and with an agency, and with an album coming out next year.
“It feels like a massive, massive moment.
“It’s become a tradition for me to do a gig just before Christmas every year since I moved to London.
“I started off in The Antelope in Tooting.
“People were paying five pounds on the door, and I literally had a box of coins.
“Now we’re here with a full band in Omeara, so it’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait.
“It will be the biggest Christmas send off.
“I want to make it feel like a London Irish Christmas do for everyone.”
Niall’s current run of dates leads up to the release of his debut album next year.
“We’ve got a few dates around the country and just leading up into the album next year which I’m delighted with.”
How does it feel to be talking about ‘the album’?
“It feels great. It took a long time.
“We’re finished with it now but in January 2025 will be two years since I started it.
“It took time.
“I’ve had to go back and change stuff, loads of new songs have popped up.
“I have to say I’ve written some plays, I’ve directed, I’ve been in theatre, I’ve been in TV, I’ve done small gigs, big gigs, written songs, loads of stuff- The hardest thing I’ve ever done is record an album.
“It was really, really difficult and a learning curve but now I’ve finished, it feels totally worth it.
“When it was finished and I listened to it in full, I just burst into tears.
“I’m just so delighted to have what was in my head down because there’s something really stressful and upsetting when you’ve got this idea and you can’t find a way to get it out of your head.
“Some people go, ‘Making an album is like giving birth’.
“I won’t go that far but it is hard.”
Among the biggest compliments Niall has received are when people have mistaken his songs, like Magie with a Mullet, for a folk staple by Christy Moore or someone else.
“I’m delighted with that.
“It is a compliment if the song feels like that it’s already there, especially in the traditional sense because I think if you’re Irish, you give so much legitimacy to those old songs.
“So for people to think it’s an old standard or an old folk song that might be Christy Moore’s or Paul Brady’s or even before that is brilliant.
“That song kind of fell out of me.
“Sometimes you feel like those songs do exist somewhere in the world.
“That’s why they call songs airs, because people believe that songs exist and they just fall into certain people’s laps.
“I love that song, I’m delighted with Magpie.”
The older folk influence is clear in your music. There is that song The Knowledge which reminds me of England’s Motorway…
“I love that song and I’ve released a version of England’s Motorway by Ewan MacColl.
“Purists always call it Come, Me Little Son but I call it England’s Motorway.
“I suppose they’re very similar stories.
“That’s the thing: Everyone is so different and so many people have different stories but there was a point in history where a lot of Irish people’s family stories were very similar.
“If you’ve got a song about your grandfather or your father who came over to England to work, people have very similar stories.
“That’s what happens when there’s mass immigration.
“Everyone’s got very similar stories in Kilburn and all that.
“It’s a specific time in history.”
You have also taken inspiration from your own family background, haven’t you?
There is that one song about your grandfather.
Was he following your grandmother when he flipped a coin about whether to go to London or Birmingham, went to Birmingham and.. found her?
“Yeah, that’s right.
“I’m finally releasing that on my album next year.
“That took some time because I wanted to get it right.
“They were pen pals for five years and they lost touch.
“He didn’t know if she was in London or Birmingham, so he went to Holyhead and flipped a coin and landed in Birmingham.
“The first person he bumped into, pretty much, was my grandmother, and that was it.
“That’s just an unbelievable story, a story that just wouldn’t happen now: People have phones and the world is a smaller place.
“He could have been over every weekend to see her.
“I do draw from personal experience in all songs to the point where if I run out of stuff to sing about or if life’s too good, I start asking mates about their breakups or their stories and write songs about them instead.
“They (the songs on the album) are all songs about trying to work life out and things going wrong, and the positives and negatives that come from that.
“Heart break and hardship which I think we all go through.
“Having lived in London for so long, it’s a very particular landscape.
“Heartbreak and hardship happens anywhere but there’s something particularly harsh and grey and wet and sweaty and drunken about London.
“It’s crazy to me now, thinking about me as a 17 year old moving to London on my own.
“But there’s a reason they send young men off to war, or they always did.
“It’s because when you’re that young, you don’t believe you’re going to die, so I was just excited about it the whole time.
“This is the thing with life.
“When you’ve got no money or nothing when you’re 19, it doesn’t matter.
“I always had the feeling of, ‘I love this. This is a great story for when everything works out’.
“That’s what life is about, isn’t it?
“We all have to go through that skint phase.
“You don’t care about being skint when you’re 19 because everyone is.
“I think it’s your mid 20s when people slowly stop being skint and you still are that you go, ‘I thought we had a deal’.
“I thought we were all in London and all skint.
“And then you go, ‘Right, I better sort something out’.”
You mentioned that it’s been a great year. We’ve seen you supporting The Wolfe Tones in Finsbury Park as well as warming up the crowd for the BibleCode Sundays’ big show at Scala back at March..
“Yeah, this has been an unbelievable year.
“Supporting the Wolf Tones was such a dream come true and we just had the best time on that huge stage.
“With the BibleCode Sundays, I love those boys. They’ve become really close friends and we’ve done a lot together.
“I think it will be a long lasting friendship, that we’ll continue to work together. I love those lads so much.
“They’re great boys.”
Scala wasn’t the first time you supported them, was it? Didn’t you support them when you were a much younger performer?
“Yeah, I think I was about 21 or 22.
“I supported them in and then ended up playing with them at McGettigans in Fulham.
“I remember looking up to them even then.
“They were lovely but we didn’t know each other, so it’s really cool to be in that clique now, the London Irish thing.
“They’re awesome.”
Back in the early days, didn’t you join Fulham Irish Gaelic football team which ended up being a great thing for your gigging. It all started from there, didn’t it?
“Yeah, them and Tooting Celtic (FC).
“I think my first load of gigs, it was people I worked with on the building site, football teams, GAA teams, rugby teams, and everyone brought their girlfriends.
“It nearly felt like having a lad in their team who sang was a good excuse to get the women out for a night out that didn’t seem like a big, rowdy football social.
“It was great.”
Did you play much with Fulham Irish? “No, I played one friendly exhibition match in the end because with a GAA team, you have to be there every week.
“I there was two summers where I was in pre-season, getting fit and ready to do a season and then just as the season was beginning, I would get a part, an acting job and end up having to go away.
“Then suddenly you’re two months into the season and you can’t quite get back to it.
“I felt like an honorary member of Fulham Irish because I seemed to be at all the socials, you know?”
You were working on building sites but wasn’t that difficult because every time you got an acting gig, it would nearly cost you the day job?
“It did and it would not even be a job.
“I was working as agency so I would be working on a job for a week or sometimes a day or sometimes a month and if an audition came up then you’d have to say, ‘I can’t come in tomorrow’.
“They’d get someone in to replace you and then you’re onto a different building site.
“So I was all over London.
“I quite like looking at buildings and stuff that I was involved in.
“I was trying to live the Christy Moore London experience but it was very different to what the songs say.”
That’s exactly what you found, isn’t it? You had a romantic idea of London and then you came over and found you were the only Irish lad on the sites…
“That was it.
“Everyone had gone, everyone was working in the city.
“I was the only Irish man on the building site apart from the bosses and the bosses were kind of look at me going, ‘What are you doing here? We don’t do this anymore’.”
Niall was working on building sites when he got his break of a role in the film The Foreigner starring Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan. The only thing is not everyone believed it..
“The people on the building sites must have thought I was a lunatic because the movie didn’t come out for two years. No one believed me.
“People would come onto the site and they’d go, ‘See that fella. He ‘fought’ with Jackie Chan. God bless him. He’s harmless’.
“By the time the movie came out, I wasn’t on the sites anymore.
“I like to think that there’s a few people on the site going, ‘He did. He wasn’t lying’.”
Did you learn a lot from gigging around Irish pubs, I bet that crowd will let you know what works and what doesn’t..
“Yeah, definitely.
“I would say the biggest thing all the years playing in pubs did for me was give me stamina.
“There’s playing for three hours non-stop in a pub where no one’s listening to you but you need to sing over them and loud with sh*t speakers that aren’t loud enough, so you have to really make yourself heard.
“It makes an hour and a half gig of your own music with a full band feel a lot easier.
“Even from an acting point of view, I would do plays and musicals and stuff and people would be doing big warm ups to get ready for this show.
“I’d be like, ‘There’s ten people in this play and we’ve got three songs each. That’s nothing compared to just singing non-stop for three hours’.
“Stamina is a massive one that it gave me.
“Omeara feels like a massive, massive one.
“I’ll be nervous before that. It is going to be great.
“What a great way to send off the year for everyone just before everyone goes home.”
It was around this time last year that we lost Shane MacGowan. You played at the London Irish Centre’s tribute night..
“I was there for that and we all gave him a send off.
“That was a remarkable night and then I actually ended up in in Nenagh for the afters of the funeral.
“We sang with Cronin and Andy Nolan from the BibleCode Sundays.
“Sharon Shannon was there.
“It was an absolute honour to be able to sing at that because I never met Shane but he is my number one hero to the point where I’m not ashamed to say that sometimes if I’m writing a song and I have something that I want to say in the song, I’ll write down what I want to say in a really basic way and then I think, ‘How would Shane say that?’
“And that seems to work as a lyric process for me.
“Fairytale of New York, some people say it’s the greatest Christmas song ever written.
“I would say there’s argument for it being the best song ever written.”
We also saw you at last year’s Bloomsdays celebrations at Embassy Gardens..
“It was brilliant.
“It really signified something that I’m really excited about in London, which is that the Irish scene is back.
“There’s lots of new spots opening up and have opened up: The Devonshire, Homeboy, the Faltering fullback has been around for a while but it’s more popular than ever.
“When I moved to London, I was quite sad because it felt like I had got there at the end of an era for Irish pubs.
“It felt like Kilburn was dead.
“This is part of the Christy Moore thing.
“A lot of the places that are mentioned were either shut down or they weren’t really Irish anymore: Kilburn wasn’t a thing and it just felt like there was a pocket of a few places left.
“Now the Irish centres in Hammersmith and in Camden are flying more than ever.
“And you’ve got these new pubs.
“I know it sounds daft but even Guinness is bigger than ever.
“Then actors and musicians: Fontaines DC, Paul Mescal, the Mary Wallopers.
“We’re having a moment again.
“What’s great is Irishness has been redefined again.
“This is the biggest redefinition of Irishness since Jack Charlton in the 90s.
“We’re professionals and we’re not a small country in the scale of the arts in the world anymore.
“You look at the Oscars.
“I’ve seen a load of acting and music awards where there’s ten nominees for the world and three or four of them are Irish. That’s insane.
“We are fighting well above our weight.
“Kneecap as well.
“And Lankum.
“This is the time.”
You must be excited for the next year and your album?
“Yeah, it’s a lot of work but it’s exciting.
“Honestly, I couldn’t be prouder of all the songs.
“I’m really delighted with it.”
Does it feel like everything has been leading up to this?
“Yeah, it really does.
“I mean, supporting the Wolf Tones this year, getting asked to do certain gigs next year.
“I’m really getting to hang out and play with some of the biggest heroes in my life and people I’ve met.
“Even in the last couple of months playing with Lewis Capaldi and Glenn Hansard in the Devonshire and all that.
“It feels like everything’s coming together.
“It feels like more and more often people are coming up to me and going, ‘I really like your songs’.
“Magpie with a Mullet was a big moment.
“So it feels like it’s coming together.”
Niall McNamee plays the Canteen in Bristol on 19 December, The Met in Bury on 20 December and his biggest London headline show to date at Omeara on 21 December.
He then plays Glad Café Glasgow on 30 January for Celtic Connections, The Victoria in Birmingahm on 31 January and Upstairs at Whelan’s in Dublin on 8 February.
The album is out next year.
For more information, click here.
