Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue: ‘I got a very quick but intense focus on the Troubles in the 1980s. I was frightened, there’s no doubt’

The love affair between Mercury Rev and Ireland was intense from the outset, says the group’s singer, Jonathan Donahue. He recalls the ethereal indie band playing the Village venue in Cork in 1992, when he was in the grip of a brutal heroin addiction, and the crowd surrounding the tour bus afterwards and rocking it from side to side. “People still talk about that show. It was legendary for me. They tried to tip it over. They would push one way, and our tour manager told us to push the other way to stop the bus from going over.”

The reaction will with luck be just as enthusiastic, if slightly more restrained, when Mercury Rev play the inaugural In the Meadows festival in Dublin in a few days. They are part of a heady line-up that leans towards the folk end of the indie spectrum. Headlined by the Mercury-nominated Irish “mutant” trad act Lankum, the bill also features the post-rockers Mogwai and the avant-garde orchestral ensemble Black Country, New Road. It is something different in a calendar increasingly dominated by identikit corporate festivals.

The concert at Royal Hospital Kilmainham comes at the beginning of a new chapter for Mercury Rev, who occupy a special place in the alternative-pop pantheon because of Deserter’s Songs, the woozy, mystical LP from 1998 widely regarded as one of the finest alternative records of all time. “Over the past few years we have written so much music,” says Donahue, his voice brimming with the childlike wonder that is a signature of his songwriting. “The new album that will be released later this year is just the beginning.”

Donahue, who is Irish-American, was born in the Catskill Mountains, north of New York City, where he still lives. When he’s not touring, he has a semi-hermetic existence far from civilisation. For that reason, when the world shut down in 2020, he felt perfectly prepared. The stillness that took so many by surprise was already part of his everyday reality.

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“As strange as it may seem, and having lost many friends during it as well, I do have to self-reflect back and say, ‘You know what? I was made for the pandemic.’ I’m a very quiet person – very introverted. I don’t go out much. I live deep in the mountains. And so when everyone went inside, let’s say – both indoors and inside themselves – I was already there, waiting.”

I bought my first electric guitar in Belfast. In a pawn shop, I guess you’d call it. It was a Hondo, which was a cheaper brand of a Les Paul Gibson

—  Jonathan Donahue

Donahue grew up fascinated with the old country. In his teens he scraped together his savings and spent a summer travelling around Ireland, “on the CIÉ”. A note of awe enters his voice as he recalls his adventures.

“My dad’s family comes from Cork. They came to the Catskills during the Famine and lived here ever since. They came from Cork city. I grew up with the Clancy Brothers and many things that he [his father] would play – traditional Irish music. He wasn’t a musician. He wasn’t deeply embedded in the Wolfe Tones or something like that. He had a compass that pointed me in that direction. I was 18. I spent my own money and went to Ireland alone in 1984. I went all around Ireland and Northern Ireland.”

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Ireland in 1984 was no postcard destination. It was poor and grim – heavy with a despair you could almost reach out and touch. The trip, nonetheless, had a profound impact on Donahue.

“I saw all the stuff for myself, staying in hostels and very cheap places. It was a part of me reaching out into a past that I felt was in the room with me that I hadn’t been able to speak to. It was my first visit outside America. I bought my first electric guitar in Belfast. In a pawn shop, I guess you’d call it. It was a Hondo, which was a cheaper brand of a Les Paul Gibson. I carried this heavy guitar around with me. I didn’t know any better. I sat on the banks in Donegal and west Kerry and was learning to play these initial chords that I brought back to Buffalo, where I was in school.”

Belfast was an eye-opener, he remembers. “I could hear the drums [of loyalist marching bands] go, and I would walk down the Falls [Road]. I would make a right turn or a wrong turn, depending on how you saw things. I could get stopped every 150 yards by someone, either a civilian or one of the constabulary, I guess.”

He pauses, lost for a moment. “They would say, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I would say, ‘I have no idea – my name’s Donahue and I want to see some stuff. Where do I see it?’ And then they went, ‘You’re in the wrong city. You better turn around.’ I got a very quick but intense focus on the Troubles in the 1980s. It was full on in ’84 – very full on. I was frightened, there’s no doubt. I could hear the drums and I knew who was playing them, and it wasn’t meant for me.”

He founded Mercury Rev at the University of Buffalo with his fellow students Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak, David Fridmann and Dave Baker. Donahue was initially one of three guitarists, with the more outgoing Baker as the singer.

They were a glorious mess in those early days, their music a caterwauling mash-up of psychedelia and punk. “Sleepy-eyed vocals, jarring psychedelic effects” is how the Chicago Tribune reviewed their 1993 debut, Yerself Is Steam, with particular praise for the “three heavily distorted guitars”.

Baker quit in 1995 amid “personal and creative” disputes with Donahue and Mackowiak. (Fridmann had stepped away to become a producer and would later work with the Co Tipperary singer Gemma Hayes.)

It was a rocky transition, not helped by the fact that Donahue, now the new frontman, was lost in drugs and depression. Things came to a head in late 1995. After touring their first post-Baker LP, See You on the Other Side, Mackowiak spent five months on retreat in a monastery. Donahue, meanwhile, had a full-on breakdown.

That could have been the end for Mercury Rev. Instead it marked a point of renewal. Cleaning up and making peace with his demons, Donahue threw himself into Deserter’s Songs and tracks such as Goddess on a Hiway and Holes. Released on September 29th, 1998, it was heralded as an instant masterpiece.

Donahue describes Deserter’s Songs as the work of someone working through feelings bottled up for far too long. “I was processing [emotional problems] maybe through… childlike eyes at that time. I had come off – well, I’ll say it – off a heroin addiction,” he says. He likens the experience to blinking away tears: you don’t want to cry, but you can feel the emotions surging inside.

“My eyes were open, but they were filled with that water before you cry. You sort of well up. That is Deserter’s Songs. That is what I remember. I was doing my best not to cry, but the water was in there, waiting for me to blink, and it would drip out. I know it’s not very rock’n’roll to say that, but that’s the way it was.”

If the heroin was bad, the breakdown was even worse. “I was coming out not just of the drugs – that was fine. It was the nervous breakdown I had going into Deserter’s Songs. That’s what shook the foundation of me. It would shake the foundation of anybody. You don’t have to be an artist. Everybody knows that feeling when something is rattling your skeleton, like a train next door shaking the house. And you don’t have anything to hold on to. The music was what I held on to.”

It always remains with us. Grasshopper and I, as soon as we hit Dublin, we’re out, we’re walking all around. So many memories for me are more than nostalgia

—  Jonathan Donahue

He comes back around to Ireland, one of the first countries where Deserter’s Songs hit big. He remembers playing Dublin’s long-shuttered Red Box venue in January 1999 and being struck by the audience’s enthusiasm. Something had changed.

“It was one of our first shows on the Deserter’s Songs tour. It was the first glimmer that something magical had happened. It was the first country that we sensed something. ‘Hey, there’s something different. There’s something in the air.’”

His love for Ireland endures.

“It always remains with us. Grasshopper and I, as soon as we hit Dublin, we’re out, we’re walking all around. So many memories for me are more than nostalgia. There’s a real direct connection to the country itself. The moment the plane touches down you go ‘Aah’. This feeling, whatever country it is… there is somewhere in the world, not your home, where you touch down and this breath comes out of you that you haven’t felt in a long time.”

Mercury Rev play In the Meadows at Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, on Saturday, June 8th. Their new album, Born Horses, is due out on September 6th on Bella Union