Early Years
Flannery was reared on farmland outside Blarney, County Cork.
Coming from a family with a keen musical interest, Flannery was introduced to folk and blues music at a young age.
| “ | My mother's side were big into music, more than my dad's side. My mother is a singer and she plays the guitar. She recorded an album of her own actually two years ago. And it was her brothers and sisters that kind of got me into music. At those family nights there was a good bit of Tom Waits, a bit of Dylan. Most of the singers would be female, my aunts, and they would sing Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell. | ” |
Flannery cites an encounter with the music of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana as a direct influence on his desire to become a musician. Seeing Cobain perform "The Man Who Sold the World" on MTV Unplugged he promptly purchased a copy of MTV Unplugged in New York. He soon bought the album Blonde on Blonde as well. Flannery claims to have written his first song at the age of fifteen. His first completed song was called "Mad Man's Road", a tale of a murder which took place on the road in which he lived. He has been dismissive of his earlier material, referring to it as "tripe".
However, he is keen to express his fondness for stonemasonry and its position alongside his music: "I wasn't going to sit in a room and write songs seven days a week and live on bread and beans. I liked doing stonemasonry as well". He still does it on an occasional basis: "We wouldn’t be carving gravestones or anything. We’d do the fronts of houses, entrance walls, stuff like that".
Read more about this topic: Mick Flannery
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