
It’s hardly a cost to pay for the opportunities that you’re given and stuff like that. “Of all the problems you can have, it’s a very small problem to have. Quickly he reiterates that he’s not complaining. To you you’re just a dude who just wrote a song and wanted to play the music he was always going to play whether there was people listening to it or not.” “Everybody kind of recognises you as something that you have no relationship whatsoever with. You’re just confronted with this otherness of your own self,” he says, fidgeting with his hood, adjusting it up and down over his head.Īmerican Gospel singer and civil rights activist Mavis Staples on stage with Hozier. “You have a hit song and everybody knows your face and everybody knows your name. When your life undergoes this incredible shift, he says, you’re suddenly presented with a different version of yourself.
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In a short period of time he went from low-key gigs in small Dublin venues to star slots on international TV shows such as The Graham Norton Show, The Ellen Show and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He’s not moaning though, and he knows what he signed up he’s just simply pointing out his life is just very different now.

Being in a bar, being in a pub and just being part of a crowd is a really nice feeling.” At some point you have to stop resisting the fact that that’s just your life now and you have to get on with it,” he says, adding that he doesn’t want to “make a show” of himself in those situations. It did especially in the first few years. There’s no point me in me saying that no it doesn’t. If he decides to go to a gig put on by one of his friends in Dublin, he knows that his presence might take time or attention away from the important people in his life. There’s no fuss to him, but with the kind of fame he has fuss tends to follow. When he’s at home in Ireland these days he keeps a low profile, he says, and avoids “trendy aesthetics or glib posturings”. Scenes are to be avoided, I think.”Īndrew Hozier-Byrne grew up just outside Bray in Co Wicklow with his family: blues musician dad John Byrne, artist mother Raine Hozier-Byrne (she designed the cover of his first album) and his brother Jon. I don’t want to be ingratiated upon in any way, shape or form. I have a strong aversion to people trying to ingratiate themselves. In certain parts of the world where people are blowing smoke, I’ve an absolute allergy to it. “I have a strong aversion to anyone in a scene-y way.

But it’s a really dangerous slope to be on,” he says, picking at a modest spread of tea and Tunnock’s tea cakes in the empty bar of Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. “I’ve witnessed people who are on a slippery slope, especially young men who fall into a scene or whatever or a place in the world.It’s just a playground for people whose stars have quickly risen. As Hozier – he turns 29 on St Patrick’s Day – prepares for the release next week of his second album Wasteland, Baby!, he says he maintains that balance by refusing to play the fame game. We exercise proud national ownership whenever the British claim one of our own (we’re looking at you, Saoirse), and show occasional flares of begrudgery if we feel they’re too big for their boots or we have a problem with how they pay their taxes (yes, Bono, that’s you). We’re very sensitive about our superstars here in Ireland. And there, quietly among them all, lies Hozier. Reduce it to the mononymous – Elvis, Madonna, Beyoncé – and you’re down to a handful of individuals. Household-name-around-the-world superstardom is even rarer.
