Andrew Hozier-Byrne is digging deep into his own identity, Tim Hughes discovers

Like the very best singer-songwriters, Andrew Hozier-Byrne seems to be oblivious to the power of his music.

While laden with emotion, the 23-year-old Irish lad admits he is still wrestling with questions of his own identity — using his lyrics to get it out of his system.

“Love, and the loss of it, is something I’m still trying to get my head around — what it does to your identity, and what it means when it’s over,” he says.

“It begs the question, ‘Who are you?’, when it’s done. Are you the person you felt you were at the time, or the person you felt you were before that time? But at least I’m in the position where I can clear something off myself when that happens.”

It is that poetic, unegotistical, approach to songwriting which has established Hozier as one of 2014’s brightest new things. Hailing from Bray, 20 miles outside Dublin, Hozier comes from rich musical stock. The son of a musician, he began reading music at Trinity College, Dublin, but dropped out to pursue his career. While there he performed with the Trinity Orchestra and was also a member of Irish choral group Anúna — appearing as a soloist, and touring with the choir.

It was September’s EP Take Me to Church, with its UK top 30-title track single which established him as a voice to take notice of. The tune did even better at home, reaching number two when it was released the year before in Ireland — and in America, where it charted at number three.

By the time his eponymous album came out in October, the word was well and truly out. It reached number five in the UK, topped the charts over the Irish Sea and again won over America reaching number two across the Atlantic.

If his music reflects something more soulful and bluesier than one might expect from a boy from County Wicklow, then his father can be thanked for bombarding the young Hozier to his own collection of classics. “There was Chicago blues, Texan blues, Chess Records, Motown, and then I discovered jazz, but more importantly, Delta blues,” he recalls. “That extraordinarily haunting sound, Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, people like that.

“Later, it was Pink Floyd, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, plus Tom Waits was a huge influence. I was always drawn to singers with something haunting about their voices. The same goes for writers such as James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. You can’t define it, but it buries itself deep in your soul.”

For Hozier lyrics are everything. “For me, they are one of, if not the most, important factors in a song,” he says. “That’s where the story is, and where the writer is, or should be.

“Lyrics are still the thing I take the longest over in my own songs, and work the hardest at — and care the most about. And also the thing I feel the most self-conscious about; you know, ‘Am I saying something worthwhile here?’”

On present performance, it would be hard to argue against that. The video to Take Me to Church was designed to provoke — with a shocking black and white video directed by Brendan Canty, depicting a gang of masked thugs hunting down two gay men, interwoven with footage of demonstrators in Russia protesting about president Putin’s recent anti-gay legislation.

“The song was born of this idea that a child, when it is born, is born into sin,” he explains, “So, before you are a woman, or a gay man, just as a person, you are being undermined by the Catholic church as somebody who is sinful, as somebody who should be ashamed of yourself, and be begging for forgiveness. I wanted to use sex as a celebration of life; there are few things as human as the act of making love.”

His opinions inevitably bring him into conflict with the established church in Ireland.

“My mum was brought up in that culture but was very opposed to it,” he says. “I have some very strong opinions about its doctrine; in Ireland there has been a huge amount of abuse — of power, of women, of children. It’s a poisonous organisation. I wasn’t affected by it as a child, but as you get older, you become more and more aware of the hypocrisy, of the attitudes to women, of the homophobia.”

But if the lyrics pack a punch, it’s done beautifully and with tenderness. We share in his pain and jealousy — but also his cathartic joy — often in the space of a single song. So when on EP title track From Eden, he sings “I’ll slither here from Eden... just to sit outside your door”, before picturing the object of his love with “a rope in hand, for your other man to hang from a tree...” one can’t help but share his emotions — and get over it all too.

As he says: “When you write a song, it’s a hell of a lot easier to write the next one, because you can’t move on from something until you’ve dumped it on to somebody else, if that makes sense. The path is suddenly clearer.”

Hozier
O2 Academy
Tuesday’s show has been rescheduled to January 21
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