The Hedge Schools – An Interview with Pat Barrett – Part 1
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse chatted to Pat Barrett of the Hedge Schools about the forthcoming reissue of At The End of the Winding Day

At The End of The Winding Day is released on vinyl on April 19th, and can be ordered here.

No More Workhorse: How did the reissue come about?

Pat Barrett: In a roundabout way. They’ve been asking me for about two years and it just didn’t seem right.  A factor of it was, I didn’t know whether Joe Chester even still had the masters.  But at the back of my brain I thought, he has the masters somewhere.

When they approached me again a couple of months ago, I kind of said maybe it’s the right time to do it. It’s ten years old.  It would have been ten years old last year, when we started recording it. Because we recorded over a year. We primarily worked on Sundays when we recorded that record.  We did it over the space of a year.  A huge aspect was there were no financials up front for me.  That’s a huge thing, because I can’t afford it.

So I asked Joe and he said, yeah, absolutely. The files are still there. He had mastered the record when we initially finished it, and he was saying, there’s technology these days that will lift it again, dust it off again.  When he sent me back the files I sat for about 3 hours just listening to it again as a record.  The space that was in it… it frightened me.

I was hearing things that I never even knew were there. The bells on the title track, on the remaster it’s even more pronounced and that was what I was saying in that little video piece the other day.

That’s exactly how that happened.  I think I did two runs at it and we had just left the tape running.  The two of us kind of looked at each other.  I still had my foot on the pedal in the piano and there’s a lot of that on that record because Joe miked every aspect of the piano.  There’s the feet of the pedals and whatever else, the hammers, it was all recorded.

He went in, dusted it up, and it sounds like a different record to me.  Also it’s ten years on.  I’m a remarkably different person than I was ten years ago.  Joe is as well.  He said it was just like opening the doors with an old friend, it was still standing there.  It’s great that it’s getting a life again.  I’m really happy about it.

NMW: So you recorded on Sundays, you just fitted it into your life around that time?

PB: Joe used to work in the recording studio, which is on Blessington Street.  It was a Georgian house on Blessington Street.  There was a room upstairs that was vacant and Joe was asking, ‘would you ever do anything with that’?  It was a room that had beautiful light in it.  There was lots of room in it for pianos and guitars and stuff.  He used to call it the Living Room, and we worked in there pretty much every Sunday.  I just worked around life.

NMW: How was life at that stage?

PB: In retrospect?  Joe didn’t know it at the time, but essentially, it’s a record about home and family and stuff.  From a personal point of view, I had written a lot of those songs around the time, and my own life was falling apart.  I didn’t realise that at the time.  I didn’t realise I was writing about it and Joe certainly didn’t.  About three or four years after that, my life took a dramatic turn in terms of relationships and where you’re living and all that sort of stuff.  Ten years later, I’m a totally different person.

NMW: Is it hard to look back on that?

PB: No. There’s a gentle kindness to it, if that makes sense.  There was a gentle kindness to the way I wrote the songs back then, and I think they still mean as much, let’s put it that way.  When Joe sent me back the masters, it opens up boxes that you put away somewhere. There was something about that record that just resonated with so many people.  It was the qualities that the songs were talking about, or the values of the songs that just resonated with so many people.

NMW: What were you listening to at that time?

PB: We were listening to loads of Sean O’Riada, harmoniums, all that sort of stuff.  We had started the record and I wanted it to be an electronic record, almost like a Blue Nile-ish kind of record.  Then we started, and two or three tracks down we were going, do we keep on like this now?  Joe went away for a weekend and went to see a minimalist Japanese painting in an exhibition. And he came back to me and said, let’s start all over again. Let’s pull everything away that’s there in terms of music. Pull it away, leave your voice.  We did that with the three tracks that we recorded, pulled everything away and just built it from the ground up with my voice being the kind of central hanging piece.  Everything else around that then was just an accompaniment to it.  That worked for the three that we had already recorded.

And that was how we started working on the rest of the album. It’s just, ‘let’s have the voice front and centre’. You would take it out first, pull everything away and then put guide guitar tracks down with focus. But then we pulled the guide guitar tracks off, and then built it up again.

He would sit on the floor for a half an hour with a group of pedals and an electric guitar.  A lot of the ambience on it, like the Sleeping Song, is incredible.

He got Kevin (Murphy) to do a screechy, droney cello underneath that.  When Kevin and Donagh (Molloy) arrived in to record, the tracks were all there.  We knew what Kevin was going to play cello on, we knew what Donagh was going to play trumpet on, but we didn’t know what they were going to play.  We spent an afternoon with Kevin and we spent an afternoon with Donagh. And that was it, it was recorded.

Interview continues in Part 2… 

At The End of The Winding Day is released on vinyl on April 19th, and can be ordered here: https://store.dublinvinyl.com/products/hedge-schools-at-the-end-of-a-winding-day