THE tide is out at Blackrock, giving the impression that you could walk all the way across Dublin Bay to the lighthouse on Howth Head. A hundred years or so ago, you might have spotted the famous Dublin writer, senator and carouser Oliver St John Gogarty riding his horse around the bay at dawn. “You can canter for five minutes before you meet [the waves] and watch them bearing rainbows and spreading on the tawny sands their exquisite treasures,” he wrote in As I Was Going Down Sackville Street. “We inhale the Atlantic vapours and they turn us into mystics, poets, politicians and unemployables with school-girl complexions.”
Cian Nugent has long been inhaling those same vapours, even if he’s not usually up early enough to catch the rainbows. Most of the local cafés have already stopped serving lunch by the time he steps off the train at Blackrock to discuss his gloriously drowsy new album, seven long years in the making. Its title – She Brings Me Back To The Land Of The Living – suggests the moment of being roused from a long and restorative sleep, while several of the songs are culled from dream visions or celebrate the idler’s life, “kicking cans and chasing” or waking up in the afternoon to “”. “You could call that autofiction,” he smiles. “As anyone who knows me will tell you, I do have a tendency to be a sleepy man sometimes.”
