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Irish Examiner

October 1st 2005

Object of Desire by Patrick Brennan.

Given all the current attention towards Bob Dylan it’s strangely appropriate that one of Ireland’s newest singer song writers, Downpatrick-born Steafan Hanvey, should chose as his object of desire his father’s early vinyl copy of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

“I was ten years old when I first encountered Dylan’s music,” explains Steafan. “For the past 25 years my father, Bobbie Hanvey has presented a programme called The Ramblin’ Man on a regional radio station in Ulster called Downtown Radio.

“He’s also a musician, photographer and a writer. Basically, I would escape into what was his record room, the place where he kept all his records and wrote out his script for the radio show, which involved him travelling all over the country collecting stories from people.

“At the time my parents marriage was going through a bad time. They eventually divorced in the 1990s. This room was a great refuge to me and I would spend hours in there getting lost in the music. However, initially, I got into this habit of just picking out my dad’s records simply based on what the sleeve looked like.

“The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan features Dylan arm in arm with his then girlfriend Suse Rotolo. Looking back on it that idyllic picture must have contrasted with the conflict between my parents. What also struck me, though, was how similar my dad looked to Bob Dylan in that picture.

“I’d been listening to The Beatles, Planxty and the Clancy Brothers but when I put on Dylan I just couldn’t believe this strange, other-worldly nasal voice. I’d never heard anything like it before. It was like a whole new world was opening up to me and in my own ten-year-old way I tried to make sense of the things he was singing about.”

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan features such timeless classics as Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. These days 30-year-old Steafan understands that the album was groundbreaking and captured Dylan on the cusp of changing the face of modern music.

“Now, I love the album because it features a young Dylan with all that idealism and hope yet he’s someone who also has enough cop to understand that there are limits to the hope,” continues Steafan. “Dylan also captures that whole spirit of change informed in the beginning by the black civil rights movement. Songs like A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall are like the prelude to all that came in the 1960s.”

As it happens, both Steafan’s parents were traditional musicians. Under the moniker Houl Your Whist they even got around to releasing a couple of albums in the 1970s. The eldest of three children Steafan’s sister has also gone into music and is currently in the process of trying to carve out a singing career for herself.

At the age of 16, Steafan formed 50/50 with Kenny and Carl Papenfus of Relish. Although he fronted the band as lead singer and co-wrote many of the songs it wasn’t until he was in his early 20s and living in Finland where he was doing a master’s degree in international politics that Steafan finally decided to embark on a solo career.

“I had a brief but devastating relationship with a girl called Mia and it was really as a way of dealing with the fallout of the aftermath of the end of that love that I took up song writing again,” says Steafan. “At the time, I had no intention of ever taking these songs out to a public. They were really the only way I could sort out what had happened.”

Steafan also formed two groups in Finland - Aloof and Rig Ma Roll. Eventually, he started to introduce his own songs into the groups’ mixture of Irish and Finnish folk repertoire. In March 2001 he got to work with renowned Finnish recording engineer Janne Viksten and finish a solo mini album which he called Sole.

On the strength of Sole Steafan left the good life he was leading in Finland - it was getting a bit too luxurious, he suggests - and returned to Ireland. An initially unfortunate liaison with a PR company that folded didn’t help his cause. However, earlier this year he managed to self-produce his debut CD with no less a personage than Kieran Lynch at the mixing desk (U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and Elvis Costello’s When I Cruel, which Kieran co-produced).

Old friends the Papenfus brothers came on board for Steafan Hanvey and the Honeymoon Junkies, the title of Steafan’s debut disc. With songs drawn from a six year period Steafan explains the idea behind that title of ‘honeymoon junkies’.

“There’s a basic theme about love running through the album,” he says, finally. “A honeymoon junkie is a person who stays in love with someone until the honeymoon period ends. However, influenced by a book, The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, I began to think of how you can get beyond this and continue to stay in love.

“The Road Less Travelled is all about how we are conditioned to view love in all kinds of fashionable ways but the point at which you feel love is beginning to fade is really where real love starts. The book is all about learning to do your own thing and go your own way. Hopefully, my debut album will give people a similar feeling.”

Steafan Hanvey’s debut single, Desperation, is released in November. The album, The Honeymoon Junkies will be in the shops in January 2006. More info: www.steafanhanvey.com

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