Hello Desert Island Dress listeners, and welcome. We hope you are enjoying the series so far, and today we are so very delighted to share this week’s guest with you – Irish musician, singer, and songwriter, Liam Ó Maonlaí.   

My first recollections of Liam were as the lead singer of Irish band, Hothouse Flowers – I was probably about 9 or 10 years old, and we’d have the anthem ‘Don’t Go’ blaring on our family road trips from Dublin to Mayo. This, interchanged with The Saw Doctors, helped keep us upbeat as we’d crawl through inevitable bottleneck towns like Kinnegad in the midlands of Ireland.  

Listening back to those songs, brings me straight back to that time, the journey, the excitement to see Mayo relatives, the chaos of a jam-packed car, the expectation of the summer holidays ahead. The power of music transports me back, but also, looking at the music videos and posters of Liam with the band, and the aesthetic of the late 1980s/early 1990s also has that power to transport me – I am remembering older kids from my neighbourhood I haven’t thought of in years that dressed similarly, just snapshots of memories – the way they’d walk, what they wore, the waistcoat over a paisley shirt, long shoulder length hair, sideburns ... maybe they’d flick their hair just as Liam characteristically did, and still does! The power of clothing can be just as powerful as music to tap into the senses and memories.  

The day before we were to record this episode, I attended a friend’s launch of a short docu-film, sharing stories of displaced people in Ireland. Coincidentally, and unknown to me at the time, Liam features in the film, and he arrived to speak at the event. He sat down beside me, and I took one look down at his light blue Crocs, paired with a dark suit, and I quietly thought to myself, we would have a great chat the next day!

And that we did – Liam was so generous with his time, and his storytelling, and there’s a really beautiful moment in the conversation, when the sun just brilliantly shone in through the window for a moment, highlighting the star, the Réalta, that is, Liam O Maonlaí.  

🎨 This series features hand-drawn sketches of each of our guests by artist Louise Boughton @louiseboughton_

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