From a young age, Darren Doherty knew he wanted to be a musician while growing up in Strabane, Co. Tyrone in the ‘90s. “I’ve been playing music since I was eleven,” Darren tells Post-Burnout. “I was in bands from that age, playing on decent stages, and me and my friend at the time, Peter Doherty, his name was – not that one! – we started writing songs almost immediately, you know? And that was 1997 or so, so it was very much Oasis, you know what I mean? That’s where we were coming from. It’s funny how the records that you listen to at that age stay with you, a lot of them.

“Now, the Oasis ones haven’t stayed with me so much, but I remember his sister, she was at college at the time, and she had a collection of CDs that have made a massive influence on my life, which was August and Everything After by Counting Crows. It’s still one of my top ten records of all time. Throwing Copper by Live was another one that was a massive record. R.E.M. – it was a number of them – I think it was Automatic [for the People], at the time. Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette.

“I heard a lot of them at the time, and then I went on a whole different journey then. I was in a prog-metal band for a good few years, because Tool are my favourite band. Tool are my number one. I’m one of them!” Darren also cites Radiohead’s The Bends being the first record that he purchased with his own money and the prog influences of Pink Floyd, Rush, and King Crimson (whose logos all proudly sit tattooed on his forearm) for shaping what he does today.

After many years of performing, Darren enjoyed success in his local music scene with his punky trio A Northern Light, which he formed with his best friend, Omar Ben Hassine, after moving to Belfast. The band’s tracks hit BBC Radio and they got to open for Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, and The Cribs at the Tennent’s Vital Festival in Belfast in 2012. The band broke up in 2016, and eventually mastered and released their debut album, Kingdoms, which they had recorded years prior but were sitting on, during the pandemic in April 2020.

After the band broke up, Darren moved to Glasgow to get sober. After his time in Scotland, he returned to his hometown of Strabane and began crafting a solo project. “It was as much personal as it was professional, as it tends to be,” Darren explains of this change. “Because we lived in Belfast for twelve years. […] I had to start life from the start again, and I’m in recovery, so that was very much the beginning of my own, personal journey, in 2017.

“The band had come to its natural conclusion in 2015, ’16, anyway, you know? […] When I moved back to Strabane, it was a logistical thing, and, when I got sober, my goal was to write an album and record it myself. And I hadn’t really done any of the production in the band up to that point, so I had an old Mac and a copy of Ableton, and I just got stuck into it, in my room, and I made that album, What You Do, in 2017, and that was kind of me, learning how to record.

“I still felt that I was a pretty good songwriter at that point because I had been writing for a long time, so my songwriting chops were all there, so it kind of became a mission because a lot of my hang-ups about myself up to that point were tied into not finishing stuff, and not trying hard enough, and wasted potential, and all this. So, when I moved home and it was just me, I was like, ‘No, right; this is getting done. I’m doing this,’ you know? And that’s what started this, really.”

Looking back on that album today, Darren says, “As time moves on, I start to feel the charm of that record, because, at that time, there’s a lot of hope about the new life, you know what I mean? And there’s a lot of not overthinking the songwriting, and not overthinking the production and stuff, and being naïve and going, ‘Let’s just try this.’

“I remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, Aaron – I remember it so well; I remember thinking to myself, ‘I know this isn’t going to sound fantastic. It’s impossible. It’s just not going to,’ right? But I was kind of influenced by other lo-fi records that sounded homemade that I liked a lot. One was John Frusciante’s To Record Only Water for Ten Days. I’ve always loved that record a lot, and that’s him on the back of the bus – the tour bus – and in hotel rooms, just making wee electronic beats and playing guitar.

“So, I was kind of looking at that, and I was thinking about some of the early Frightened Rabbit records, as well, that sound like wood and wire, and I love them, anyway. They don’t sound like Pink Floyd, and they don’t sound like Tool, which is hyper-hi-fi, you know? So, I was going, ‘Well, they can do that and I love those songs, so I’m going to do it, anyway.’ So, even now that I’m so far down my own production journey, I’m still so pleased that that’s there.”

After creating the album, Darren became invested in studying musicians who produced their music, from Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell to Charli XCX and MUNA. The electronic elements of the latter acts then seeped their way into his music, and that influence was further accelerated by his friends’ reactions to one of his other projects.

“In about 2018, 2019, I started to make an interesting side-project thing with one of my friends, and we ended up calling it Xavi Gallonzo,” Darren explains. “It was a very experimental, cut-and-paste, noisy, angular, weird, enjoyable thing for me and him to do together, and we wrote a whole album and never fuckin’ released it! Typical of us!

“It was funny; when I played some of that music to my friends – that we were pure casual about and we were just having fun – it got a reaction from my friends that I kind of wanted with my own music, to be honest. Like, I noticed them going, ‘Hmmm. That’s interesting!’ I noticed, ‘This is catching people’s ear, more.’ So, that played on my mind for a while. So, over the pandemic, then –  at the beginning of the pandemic – I started to think about it.”

Darren then began marrying his familiar indie acoustic style with experimental electronic beats and instrumentation; adding additional flairs in the production that were as paramount to the identity of the songs that he was making as the chords that served as the germs of their creation.

In 2020, Darren followed up his debut with two live albums, Live at the Ghostlight Sessions and Live at Diceys, both released that year. Last year, he released his first EP, The Life & Times of Me, which had a more expected production process than his first album.  “When I was recording the EP – The Life & Times of Me EP – I went to Belfast in 2021, 2022, and recorded it in a studio up there with a couple of friends and great, great producers, like Si[mon] Francis and Lee McMahon,” Darren says.

“And they were recorded fantastically, they sound hyper-produce[d], we worked at it for a long time. So, my thinking at that time was, ‘I’ve done what you do. I’ve done the homemade thing. Now, I’m going to go and do the opposite. I’m going to go and pay for everything, and I’m going to go on a fact-finding mission to see, “What do I actually need to spend money on?” and “What do I like better?”’

“When I was going up and down at the time… – because I didn’t drive, at the time – …when I was going up and down on the bus to Belfast, I was listening to demos of ‘Violence’ and I was listening to demos of ‘Darksides’ […] – so, I’m in the process of doing this thing, but the next thing’s already in process – and I liked listening to the demos better than what I was making up there. […] It was catching my attention more.”

This influenced Darren to self-produce his latest EP, Darksides, in a similar style to his debut. Released last Friday, Darksides is a dark but optimistic four-track EP. Thematically, Darren describes it as, “It’s like coming out of the darkness, in a way, because that’s kind of where I was when I was writing them: Coming out of the darkness.

“Through travelling through my own darkness, I can see the light. I’m able to see perspective, and I’m able to see perspective of new love, and perspective of potential and possibilities, and things just aren’t so dark, anymore, and that was important. Every song on the EP has an element of that.”

While speaking of perspective, Darren reflects on his time as a musician: “The longer I’m in this game, the more [I realise] it’s just not for everybody, and that’s OK because it’s a hard road. It’s a hard road. And I think, in some ways, you have to be compelled, and that’s funny because, throughout my journey – especially, before seven years ago – I questioned it, but I never gave up.”

Darren Doherty’s latest EP, Darksides, is out now on all streaming platforms. Darren will headline The Old Courthouse in Lifford, Co. Donegal on September 13^th. Tickets for that event are available from Eventbrite. You can keep up with Darren’s music, live dates, and social media accounts through his Linktree.

Subscribe to us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts to be the first to see when this full interview goes up tomorrow as part of our podcast, where we go into further detail about everything discussed, as well as the challenges of gigging in clubs when newly sober, Darren’s production influences, the place for provocative art in the modern music landscape, and much more.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.