JACKIE HAYDEN (HOT PRESS) TALKS TO TOMMY KEYES ABOUT THE ALBUM “STORYTIME” WHICH IS RELEASED ON SEPTEMBER 30 Tommy Keyes’ songs invariably come across as complete compositions based around a specific subject with intelligent lyrics, without becoming academic exercises or lectures.  The constants that make his latest album Storytime work as a single listening pleasure … Read More

My new single is called Suzi Quatro (Teenage Discos ’73).  Well, to be honest, it was written as Suzi Quatro and that’s how I introduce it when we play it every week in Darkey Kelly’s, but on the very last day for signing off on the artwork for the single I had misgivings that some … Read More

Saturday 16 April Bright and early, three old-school musicians and a young gunslinger of an engineer arrived at Hellfire Studios in the Dublin Mountains.  All my albums start off the same way, with the same 4 core personnel.  Apart from myself, there’s Dick Farrelly (guitars and bass), Ger Farrelly (drums and percussion) and Mick Heffernan (engineer … Read More

“Radio Days” is my new single, released on 28 July. It’s all about the enduring importance of radio – even today when music can be consumed in so many different ways. I won a cassette tape recorder as a prize in a competition at school. They weren’t long on the market and I’d never seen … Read More

Sometimes the nicest things that happen to musicians are actually quite random. Like the fact that an Australian radio station has “adopted” one of my songs and has now been playing it on a daily basis (and sometimes more) for three months. Banks Radio Australia has played Listen To the Rain more than 100 times … Read More

Last May, during the first lockdown, the weather was glorious. Each day I’d sit in the garden, enjoying a coffee in the sunshine and listening to the music of the birds as they enjoyed the freedom denied to us. A song emerged, I put it on one of my daily Facebook performances. That led to … Read More

Walk Away is one of my favourite tracks on the new album and it has been a very popular live song since I started performing it in 2018. I’m releasing it as a single on September 28 and I’ve just launched a video to promote it.  You can see the video here. I’m really pleased with the … Read More

Ageing With Attitude is my fifth album and (as you’d expect me to say) my best to date.  In February I reassembled my core crew and got to work in Black Mountain Studios in the Cooley Peninsula where we laid the foundations with drum, bass, guitar and piano tracks (and some unreal harmonies from Thomas … Read More

When COVID-19 shut everything down, including the recording of my album Ageing With Attitude,  only one track was fully complete. Fortunately, Go With You was a song that I had earmarked as a possible single, so I decided that I might as well release it in the hope of picking up some airplay during the lockdown.  That turned out to … Read More

I played my last gig on Tuesday 10 March.  By the following weekend, all music venues were closing.  I also had to abandon work in the studio on my album Ageing With Attitude which was 75% complete. Everything else I was involved in, including the football matches I attend and the social football I play … Read More