Writer-director John Carney has made several films over the years (eight, by my count), but for some reason, it’s his three works about the process of creating music that have touched and stuck with people the longest, beginning with his groundbreaking film ONCE from 2007, which blurred the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and was all the better for it. Three years ago, Carney struck a different kind of gold with the infectious and charming BEGIN AGAIN, starring Mark Ruffalo, Keira Knightley, and Hailee Steinfeld.
But there is something about Carney’s latest film, SING STREET, that cuts right into the heart and soul. Set in Dublin, during the 1980s, the film is about a 14-year-old boy named Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), who attempts to escape his strained family life by starting a band (called Sing Street, named after the actual street where their school is, Synge Street), with the hope of becoming good enough to move to London. Said band would not be possible were it not for Conor and his creative and songwriting partner Eamon (Mark McKenna), a multi-instrumentalist who questions every lyric until the resulting rings true and is worthy of this band of school chums.
The film’s story feels and is deeply person for Carney, and the film resonates with authenticity and results in a joyous journey, a great love story, and a slap in the face at the establishment (namely the Catholic Church’s education system). I had a chance at the Sundance Film Festival in January to sit down with John Carney, Fedia Walsh-Peelo, and Mark McKenna to discuss the origins and execution of SING STREET. Please enjoy…
Capone: So as a one-time card-carrying member of the Duran Duran fan club when I was in high school, I’ve had that conversation with people about the merits of them as musicians, and about videos being art. It was like you reached into my brain and pulled out those conversations. But I’m guessing I’m not going to be the last person to tell you something like that about this film.
John Carney: Yeah, there’s been a bit of that, which is good.
Capone: The mid-1980s, is that particularly fascinating to you because there was a transition happening at that time as the music industry was becoming more of a visual thing, and it was about music, the look, videos—that was a really unique period.
JC: It was a really unique period. And you’re right, the scene in which in the movie where they’re watching “Top of the Pops,” and you have this suburban, middle-class, Irish family. What I wanted to do with that theme, and you can kind of see it, it’s almost like this new art form was being beamed into these living rooms, and it’s interrupting everyone. You can see in the film it’s interrupting, obviously, the kid; but also the sister, who’s trying to do her essays, and the father, and they’re all suddenly talking about this new art form, and they have various different theories.
That was what it was like in my home when “Top of the Pops” would come on. My grandmother would be sitting doing her knitting. She’s a woman who was born just after the turn of the last century. My father was born in the ’30s; my mother thought Simon Le Bon was quite good looking; and my brother was telling me what was cool and what wasn’t cool. It was really like this thing was being beamed into us. It was like what MTV was for America for the early ’80s. Suddenly, all these clothes, homosexuality, heterosexuality, guys dressed as girls. All the possibilities of who you were as a person were being affirmed though the box in the corner in a really free-spirited, independent way. Now, it was a crazy, drug-fueled, hedonistic way as well, but it was an amazing time. To me, Thursday evening, “Top of the Pops” or “The Old Grey Whistle Test”— that was a chance to find out who you were.
Capone: So you were both musicians. This was your first film. Talk about the crash course you received in this era of music, or did you know it already?
Mark McKenna: I’ve always been quite a big fan of ’80s music. I love bands like Scritti Politti and The Blue Nile. I’ve always been massive fans of those kind of bands. It was really, really fun to learn all of these new songs. It was like learning to write ’80s must—I didn’t write any of the music, but learning the whole process of how to go about writing music, and the kind of guitar playing that you use and base lines and synch. So for me, it was a hobby more than a job really.
JC: For you and I and our generation, the ’80s are nostalgia. For these guys, it’s a history lesson. You know what I mean? So that was fun, wasn’t it?
Ferdia Walsh-Peelo: Yeah, for me as well. I had only really gotten into punk music like two years before that. I was 14, so I was only really starting to play music. I used to do classical music. So I was only really starting out in that world and I hadn’t really reached 80s music yet, and I was going through all the decades. I was at around the late ’60s at that stage, and then I had to jump to the ’80s. But that was great. I learned so much about it. At first, it took me a while to get into it, but once I got into it, I loved it. I love all the Hall & Oates stuff.
Capone: It’s almost a game when you’re watching the film, spotting the parts of each song that are borrowed from whatever they’ve just discovered the day before. Jack’s character says, “Here’s something,” and they just make a song with those elements.
JC: Yeah. Well, I’m glad you noticed that, because there’s a lot of attention to detail in that.
Capone: I saw you’re credited as one of the co-songwriters. That’s got to be harder almost than just writing an original song. You’re trying to squeeze in these little elements.
JC: That’s where Gary Clark came in who was writing songs in the ’80s in the band Danny Wilson, the Scottish band. So I phoned him up, and he became not only the main songwriter, but also like an informal consultant just because he lived in that time so it was a great collaboration. Do you remember the way, in 1983, when suddenly every singer started singing like this, and it became a thing [singing a lot like a combination of Morrissey and Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet]. He knew so many references that I didn’t know. Gary actually knew those guys. So we would drop in little hints and little nostalgic references throughout the songs that these guys are writing in the movie. So I’m glad they’re coming across.
Capone: More like slapped me across the face. Actually, when I spoke to you last [in 2014], you had started prepping this, and you had mentioned Bono and The Edge were writing some tunes for you. Did that not pan out?
JC: That was the plan. They were helpful in terms of helping me realize the movie, but in the end, the dates didn’t work. I think they were like recording their last album, so it was super busy for them. It just didn’t happen for those reasons real—the dates of when we were filming shifted, and it didn’t happen that way, but the guys were very helpful.
Capone: I almost wonder if they would have been able to pull off what you pulled off. Those songs might have sounded too much like them. I know those guys are music historians in their own right, but you knew exactly how close you wanted to get to the sound of a Hall & Oates song or a Cure song…
JC: Yeah. You kind of forget that U2 were in an ’80s band. One doesn’t associate them with Japan and Duran Duran, but they were huge at that same time.
Capone: I didn’t know they weren’t involved until I saw the credits last night, but I thought the Sing Street band would get around to them eventually, especially since they’re in Dublin.
JC: That’s a good point. But in a way, Irish bands, like school bands at the time of U2, I could understand Irish bands that wanted to get away from U2, because U2 was just so big. People who did U2 were like cover bands. So if you were an original band in Ireland, you didn't want to become too close to U2 because they were such a giant thing. So that worked I think in the movie’s favor. The guys in my film were more impressed by the English music that was coming over from England at the time.
Capone: Talk about the casting call process for you guys. Somebody might have whispered a story in my ear about [Mark] not really wanting to do it at all.
MM: [laughs] There are two different versions of this story. There’s John’s version, then there’s my version. John’s version is that I didn’t want it, and my version is I was trying to be subtle
JC: He was playing me.
MM: John was like, “So how would you feel about being in a movie?” I thought to myself I was going to play this cool. I don’t want to look desperate. So I was like, “I suppose it would be pretty cool.” John took that as, “Don’t cast me.” I got cast in the end because of it anyway.
JC: He’s a clever guy, isn’t he?
MM: It was all business oriented.
JC: He’s a smart guy. He’s going to be producing films and directing them in a few years. He’s going to be my enemy.
MM: I’m going to take John’s job. I won’t be your enemy; I’ll just wipe you out, John.
FWP: Both of us went to an open casting. I think pretty much all the lads did.
JC: I didn’t want to cast with child actors particularly, because I wanted them to sound like they were making the dialogue up and I didn’t want it to seem like it was learned. Obviously, it was a mix between professional actors, like Jack [Reynor] and Aden [Gillen] and Maria [Doyle Kennedy] and various other characters in the film, and then the non-actors. I think that’s a very nice mix. It makes the film feel real.
Capone: What was it about these guys? What did you see in them?
JC: Well, Mark is very closely based on a guy that I went to school with called Eamon, and Mark had a similar ambivalence about music. Not a love-hate thing. but an ambivalence about it, but more a grown-up wariness about what he wanted to do. He didn’t come in like, “Hi! My name is Conner, and I’m a—,” like so many child actors are who are selling themselves really hard. I like the kids who came in and were like, “Here’s what I can do. I don’t know if I can do that.” There’s a certain fun in exploring and seeing if they can actually flex new muscles and discover something about themselves. That’s the thing with actors, they’re not going to show you themselves. They want to show you something else, so with people that are non-actors it’s fun to find out who they are and to let that come across on the screen. I think there’s lots of who you guys are in it that wasn’t necessarily on the page. <
Capone: I want to ask about the fantasy sequence. I guess it’s really a music video. That’s different than anything else you’ve done in these music films. Where is that coming from?
JC: That’s a good question. I can answer it I think by saying that the “Riddle of the Model” video that you actually see, which is so shit and threadbare and no budget. His brother then says to him, “This will be good. This is an exercise in imagination.” What made the Duran Duran videos good was just lots of money. It was realizing your imagination.
So the prom scene is in Conner’s head as if he had millions, all the money. Also there’s another element to it, which he resolves all the issues in his life in that video. All the things he can’t fix about being in Dublin in the ’80s and in a family that’s falling apart and being bullied and being abused by this teacher, he resolves and he fixes. So his brother comes in on a Harley-Davidson like James Dean, and the Christian Brother comes in and involves himself in the video and does a summersault, and the parents come in and kiss. He fixes his life in this video, which is what we do in art. That’s the great line in that film SAVING MR BANKS, at the end, that the universe is chaotic and it’s illogical and it’s disordered and it’s not resolved, and in our movies and in our cartoons, we try and resolve the things we can’t do in real life.
Capone: That role of having that slightly older person in your life—like a brother—that feeds you great music. I had a cousin that did that exact thing for me. I wasn’t a musician, but just show me how to get off the Top 40, maybe, or show me how to get into the right parts of the Top 40. Show me how to get across the ocean. Did you have someone like that?
JC: Yeah, my brother Jim was that person who was educating me and giving me my schooling in music and in an amazing way. Seeking out records that nobody else was listening to. For some reason, he was going to very obscure little record stores in Dublin and getting, as I mentioned in the screening, Return To Forever and Level 42—the most uncool stuff. He was saying, “Get past the fact that these guys look terrible on the album cover and get into the music,” because that’s, in a sense, more real than the Duran Duran debate.
Because how else do you get a music education? My school, the Synge Street School that I went to when I was 12, it had a music room and all the instruments were locked away, and the kids were never allowed to play them. It was so weird. So where else do you get your education?
Capone: Where did you two learn the most about music?
FWP: I grew up with it all around me. My whole family are musicians. I was just fed it from a young age. I was eating and breathing it.
MM: My dad had gotten me really into it. When I younger, he used to always tell me that I should get guitar lessons, and I used to always say no I want drum lessons. He said drums were too loud, so I couldn’t have them. When I was turning 15, I like came to this stand still where it was like “If you don’t get me drums, don't get me anything for my birthday.” Then he ended up getting me drums, and I just started picking up on drums, then I asked my dad if he actually would teach me guitar, then I asked him if he’d teach me piano. That molded me into a musician.
Capone: Isn’t it crazy that you’re just discovering yourselves as musicians, and if you hadn’t stuck with it, you wouldn’t be able to do this?
MM: It’s interesting.
Capone: You maybe thought it would pay off by becoming a famous musician, but this complete, weird left turn happens.
FWP: I just learned so much from it. As I said about the ’80s music thing, I think I would have come to it at some point, but it might not have been until now that I started to listen to ’80s music. I just took a leap.
JC: It’s the open attitude that kids have to learning and absorbing, and it’s the time when their brains are still developing and taking on everything, and they’re not scared of anything. That’s a wonderful time of human development. One decision leads to another. Your decision to play the guitar leads to this, leads to that. This film will hopefully lead to something else. Maybe you’ll end up being a filmmaker. I can see you being a film director. That’s what’s lovely about youth is it’s so open.
Capone: In these three films you’ve made, you’ve shown us music bringing people together, whether it’s in a romance, about family, or whether it’s about kids going to this horrible school and coming together as a band. It’s like a religion for you, but less beatings.
[Everybody laughs]
JC: That comes from sitting in my parents living room when I should have been in school listening to “Songs in the Key of Life” on a very old, 1960s turntable over and over again and just being transported. I think any decision that I ever made in my life was probably scored by some artist on the record. Any girlfriend that I went after was because some lyric was a code, or some guitar solo made me feel like I could fly and chase something. Really, all the good decisions in my life were made with a soundtrack.
Capone: Thank you guys so much. This was amazing. Best of luck.
