Take me to church

Don performs at Cavan's Townhall Theatre, October 15

The metronomic clack of sliotar on smooth ash, like the soft, gentle crack of an egg, travels with Don Mescall. Though he now calls Cavan “home”, it’s not where he originally hails from. Two large fields make up the townland of Ahane, east of Limerick city, and holding the comforting and identifiable curvature of a hurl still grounds him there.

“When I’m writing, and I go hit the ball around, off the wall. There’s a musicality to it, almost rhythmic. It takes me right back, to my earliest memories,” says the second youngest of 11 - eight sisters and two brothers.

Aged just 10 years old, Don tragically lost his Dad.

“I was with my father when he passed, at a hurling match, which is bizarre. He died quite young. [Hurling] is not something I want to let go of, even up here in a footballing county.”

“Things were simpler” back then, considers Don, and though much water has passed under the bridge of life since, there’s a real sense he’s edging back to those roots after moving to Belturbet.

The multi-award winning singer-songwriter first arrived in the Erneside town in early 2020, when the pandemic was in its infancy. Soon the first of successive lockdowns set in. “I’d all my recording equipment in Greenwich (London). I’d been there seven years. The first lockdown was just about to happen over there, and I said to myself ‘This isn’t going away any time soon’.”

Don had purchased Quivvy church in mid-to-late 2019, and with studio clients cancelling, he made one of those oft later looked upon life-defining decisions. Packing all his belongings in several large shipping containers - which are all being repurposed as an auxiliary kitchen in the making, a utility room, and work sheds - he started out by showering under a hose while waiting for work within the church to be completed.

“There was nothing when I first moved, but in some ways it was everything I wanted,” he says.

Lockdown turned out to be a blessing of sorts. Local tradesmen forced to shelve their tools soon found work within five kilometres from their own door by helping to refurbish the 19th century church built by the 5th Earl of Lanesborough.

“They were all really interested in the building, and the project, and happy to see it being used again and not falling down, because it had been empty for so long.”

The church had, before Don bought it, been on the market for close to a half a decade. There was plenty of interest. Many made curious by its potential. But no real takers.

In the two and half years since, Don has transformed the former ecclesiastical setting into awe-inspiring grand design.

Surrounded by verdant woodlands filled with mushrooms and a kaleidoscopic bounty of berries, Quivvy has become the ideal rural retreat for Don: part home, part muse.

“Belturbet, and Cavan has, been very good to me,” reflects Don.

The chancel, once a kitchen, now accommodates his enormous classical piano, and an old store room has been transformed into a downstairs bathroom.

Arched doorways, beautiful stained-glass windows, and 35-foot-high beamed ceilings are a reminder of the building’s previous incarnation. The one-of-a-kind residence has no shortage of soul.

“I didn’t really think of the work, I just really fell in love with the building. I knew it was for me.”

Don is cautiously asked if he’s “religious”.

His eyebrows lower. The question catches him by surprise, so much so, that hours later he emails several more reflections.

‘I struggled for years,’ he writes openly, ‘especially after the death of my father with the idea of a loving compassionate God, and fell away from my Catholic upbringing more and more when I moved to London. But looking back now I realise that that same upbringing and moral instruction really helped me on my journey, and I became so much aware of a higher power as I got older. I suppose I became more spiritual, a belief in something bigger than myself, the Universe/ God, not a specific religion. For me there is something very humbling about kneeling in the morning by the bed and handing the day over to your higher power’.

He goes on to say how living in Quivvy ‘has really helped’ him spiritually - as a songwriter and as a person.

‘It took Covid to help me make such a life changing move from London and my life there. I think it was the best decision of my life... so far’.

Don’s mind runs like a C90 cassette on fast-forward. He often finds himself “lost” for hours at a time at his recording desk nestled in the choir balcony.

Distractions can be a welcome break. Like bouncing a sliotar, he reaches for a switch on an old, but newly polished, electrometer. Immediately a bulb illuminates the corner of the room in which the retro device sits.

Habit as much as hobby, Don reconditions quirky items for modern use, especially as lamps. The legs of an old broken snooker table, a trumpet, a saxophone, a 1950’s American cop car headlamp attached to some old drum hardware.

“I believe everything has an energy, and I love seeing it reused, repurposed. Like when one of my songs gets covered. If they’re doing it right, they’re bringing something new that I didn’t think of. It’s exciting. It gets new life.”

The sense of a “journey” is also of massive significance to Don.

Signposts directing Don to the here and now begin with fellow musician and friend, the late Richie Havens - from when he was a young boy nervously buying his first taped recording in Savin’s of Limerick, to years later supporting the American folk hero at London’s Mean Fiddler after impressing at an earlier open mic.

Havens’ sage advice has inspired Don’s latest musical project, tentatively scheduled for release next year.

“I’d say, ‘Oh, you know, Richie, I feel like because I’m now writing for everybody else, I’m not writing for myself’. But he said to me, ‘Listen, don’t ever worry about that. Don’t ever forget where you come from’,” says Don of the direction this new album has taken - more ‘Gen x’ radical, railing against oppression, encouraging debate.

Opening track, ‘Seven Setting Suns’, is a laser pointed criticism of the nihilistic attitude humanity has taken to climate crisis.

“It will never not be relevant so long as it’s happening,” responds Don when asked if he’s missed the boat to begin singing about such things. “The message still needs to be heard.”

The album involves a number of impressive collaborations, not least by leaning on the dulcet tones of playwright and novelist Michael Harding.

Don likens Harding’s meditations to those of celebrated American poet and activist, Maya Angelou.

“I’ve just finished ‘On Tuesdays I’m a Buddhist’ and one thing I love in that book is he said, we are stories as human beings. I mean, this is part of my story.”

When Don performs songs from ‘Lighthouse Keeper’ at the Townhall Theatre in the coming weeks - October 15 - it will be the end of that particular life cycle he says solemnly. “I really enjoyed Lighthouse, but there comes a time when you have to let something go.”

Don’s songs have featured with sales of over 20 million worldwide, and still counting, and he has worked with huge acts including Rascal Flatts, Backstreet Boys, Ronan Keating and Boyzone, Aslan and the band’s lead singer Christy Dignam, Sharon Corr, and Cliff Richard, but to name a few. The wall on the narrow staircase up to his recording suite is littered with silver, platinum and gold signifiers of those professional successes. He says each of those songs had “their moment”.

Yet ‘Lighthouse’ was important. Being Don’s first for almost a decade, for it to reach number one in the official Irish independent album charts, reminded everyone, if not himself, that he was still a musical force to be reckoned with.

Don gets up from the swivel stool he’s sitting on next to his wide mixing desk, filled with buttons and interfaces. He takes from a wall an American made Guild acoustic guitar and sits back down. Almost just by holding the instrument, he appears immediately more at ease. A plectrum appears in his hand. It seems one goes everywhere Don does. At night, while he sleeps, it rests on the bedside table alongside him. A pen too, just in case he’s struck by a the kind of song-writing inspiration that, if not captured there and then, so often fades like stars in the early morning light.

“I realised not long ago that when I’m song writing, I’m totally in the moment because I kind of block everything else out. It’s actually good therapy for me.”

He’d just laid down the last vocal for the final track for this new album the week before the Celt arrives. It had eluded him until two o’clock one morning whilst working on another recording project.

“I just felt like singing. I’ll tell you it was the easiest song on the record to sing, but five sessions it took me. It just felt right, in that moment to do it, and it worked!”

This new album has, in many ways, been a case of “going back to the drawing board” for Don, consciously “unlearning” what he feels was most necessary for him to write for others, and refocus that kismet to instead begin writing for himself.

Aside from Harding, other collaborations include Mohammad Al-Hussain, a professor of Islamic studies, and Kate Robertson, who mixed much of Steely Dan’s most accomplished work.

Don also hired a 45 piece orchestra, and a 20 piece choir, both recorded in London, and shook off the shackles of traditional pop song writing convention where several songs comfortably stretch beyond the eight minute mark.

“I’ve never done anything quite like this in my life,” he exclaims, a wide grin spreading.

“Does it make me nervous? Sure. Am I scared? No, because for the first time in a very long time I feel free. As a songwriter, you’re pitching songs for people’s albums all the time. You might not even get a reply, even though you might think it’s the best song you’ve ever written.”

The loss of some close friends in recent years, ex-Wings/ Joe Cocker Grease Band guitarist Henry McCullough (2016), and earlier this year Gary Brooker, formerly Procol Harem, puts Don in reflective mood. Both had worked on Live Long Rock & Roll, a song co-written by Don that also featured the likes of Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason.

“If you don’t believe in yourself, then why would you expect anybody else to? My life in London was this race, all the time, going from one project to another. Don’t get me wrong, I was working with some incredible artists, and I feel very blessed. But it’s not living, not really.

“The one thing that has changed for me now is getting back in touch with who I am as a person,” he pitches excitedly, fuelled in equal parts by enthusiasm and coffee. “I started from a small parish where everybody knew everyone else, and I’ve found that community spirit here [in Belturbet]. Looking back I missed that for so long living all over the world. You kind of become insular because of it. I’m pretty useless at everything else, but I do write good songs, and being here I feel life has come full circle for me as a songwriter.”