[dropcap]S[/dropcap]teven Sharpe is a Galway-based singer-songwriter who cultivates a witty, unapologetic style that is difficult to describe. He’s quite forthcoming about his eclectic batch of influences, citing “Nina Simone, Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson” as “the holy trinity of artists, for me”. While acknowledging that much of his music is about “being gay and shit”, and he remarks on how he “never really heard that growing up”. Instantly recognisable as jangly, guy-with-a-guitar-folk-pop, there’s an immediacy to his songwriting that exudes a confidence and authority beyond the trappings of the genre, something “stomping, fabulous, flamboyant”. The tags on his bandcamp page are an aptly laconic summation of this style, some of which include “acoustic”, “gay”, “phat”, “gay rights”, “gay lefts” and “class”.
Growing up in rural Tipperary, Sharpe found that “if you’re not really good at academics, or football, you’re not really good at anything. So I grew up with this feeling of being worthless, but then I turned out to be fucking gay, which is also the worst thing you can be in Tipperary in an all-boys school.” Upon going to college he discovered that “there’s more to life than being upset all the time”. This spurred him into picking up a guitar and writing songs that dealt candidly with the intricate spectrum of emotions generated by his upbringing, an experience he found “fulfilling, both spiritually and emotionally”; though he also quips that “this is the only thing I’m good at”.
Many of his songs create narratives about being young and LGBTQ in a country still explicitly hostile to such a lifestyle. So, to what extent are these tales drawn from his own life experiences, and to what extent are they fictionalised? “They’re slightly fictionalised, but most, if not all of them come directly from personal experiences.” Secret Love is a silky, intimate love song that has its creative roots in a clandestine relationship Sharpe once had. Work is a vibrant, playful tune that draws inspiration from an eventful night had in a gay club. It’s this motif of storytelling, the sense of being addressed, that lead many of his songs to resist conventional archetypes. His lyrics are oftentimes confessional, but he maintains that “I kind of tweak them slightly to make them more interesting. Either that or I just mesh stories together.”
More than anything, Sharpe’s eyes are set on the future. He’s recording an album with his band, the superb Broke Straight Boys, and has several festival dates lined up for the summer. His parting words are an affirmation of the incredibly fertile Galway music scene: “Bitches of Dublin, what’s happening in Galway at the moment, it’s not happening anywhere else in Ireland. Where else but Galway could you have a flamboyant singer-songwriter go up and sing about how much he fucking hates his ex-boyfriend? That’s why Galway’s fucking awesome.”
Steven Sharpe and the Broke Straight Boys play the Workman’s Club on Friday May 29, with support from My Fellow Sponges.
