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Unearthing Bloom’s roots
 After
a personal and musical epiphany in 1981, Kildare musician Kevin Barry
Moore relocated to the United States, reinvented himself as Luka bloom
and saw his career soar. Tom Fitzpatrick speaks to the younger brother
of Christy Moore who kicked off his British tour in London at the St.
Patrick’s Festival.
LUKA BLOOM is anxious to get a point across to people in Britain.
And one of the reasons he’s agreed to do this interview is because
he has made a commitment.
He has decided that he needs to do more for his fans on this side of the
Atlantic — something he admits he has neglected over the years.
He explained: “Because I was living in New York when I finally created
an audience, most of my work at the time was in America.
“I was following the audience. Going wherever I was told to go.
I never really worked to create a base in Britain.
“Two years ago I began to realise it was ridiculous, living in Ireland
and always working in America, Australia and mainland Europe.
“For the last 20 years I’ve been working solidly in all these
places but now I’m doing more gigs in the next year in England and
Scotland than I have in the last 20 years.
“It’s something that’s really important to me. I really
want to try and give people in this part of the world the opportunity
to hear my songs because it’s close to my home and close to my heart.”
Born in Newbridge, Co. Kildare as Kevin Barry Moore, the Irishman’s
musical roots had been established long before he became Luka Bloom, having
grown up in a musical family home in Ireland.
He said: “My mother had aspirations for a musical career but never
pursued it.
“She really encouraged us and from a very early age we were all
given a great education in the world of music and song.
“My first ever public performance was at the age of five when I
sang a song called My Singing Bird for a Christmas Concert at a cinema
in Newbridge.
“I don’t remember if it was a competition but I remember walking
out with a Christmas pudding and it was the first experience I had of
people rewarding me for my singing.”
Bloom, now 52, remembers learning the guitar by playing elder brother
Christy Moore’s instruments - that is until Christy brought the
youngster his own Gibson Hummingbird guitar from England.
“To me it was unbelievable to have this guitar. Almost immediately
I started writing songs at the age of 12 or 13,” Bloom recalls.
“I started writing lots of pathetic little love songs, which I’m
kind of still doing now.”
So music came naturally to the young Luka Bloom — “I knew
I had a deep connection with the guitar straight away” — and
the teenager spent a few weeks in Britain with his brother Christy, playing
to strangers for the first time.
After that, Bloom admits, some problems set in.
He said: “What happened to me was I showed a lot of potential between
the ages of 12 and 16 and then for about 10 years I proceeded to just
f**k it all up.
“Nothing was happening. I mean I was making records that weren’t
great, I wasn’t writing good songs and I was just feeling unhappy.
“Some people find themselves in a state of emotional turmoil and
they manage to turn it into really great songs and short, fantastic careers.
“None of that happened to me.”
In 1981 Bloom came to the realisation that he had to stop drinking and
began to listen to punk music, instead of the folk scene in which he had
previously been engrossed.
Bloom decided that by staying at home he would never make an audience
for himself.
He moved to America and changed his name to Luka Bloom.
He said: “I wanted a name that was completely pretentious and easy
to remember.
“What I say to people is: ‘Barry Moore is who I am and Luka
Bloom is what I do.’”
On arriving in America, Bloom began to introduce himself in clubs across
Washington DC and for the first time, he felt, people were reacting solely
to his songs as opposed to his history or family.
He said: “A bit of a buzz began to generate about my gigs and people
were beginning to come and see me from record companies and then I did
a tour with The Pogues in ’88, immediately followed by a tour with
The Hothouse Flowers a couple of months later.”
Bloom remains philosophical about the period of success he enjoyed though,
having experienced the lows of a few years previously.
He said: “When I went to New York in ’86 I was sleeping on
a friend’s sofa, I had no money and it was really scary. It was
an act of desperation, it really was.
“I never wanted to leave Ireland but it was just never going to
happen for me there.
“I went from experiencing nothing but rejection to experiencing
nothing but enthusiasm.
“When I was writing songs in a room full of suitcases in boarding-school,
Newbridge, Co. Kildare, I always imagined singing my songs in San Francisco
and it took me 20 years but eventually it happened.”
Bloom’s cover of LL Cool J’s I Need Love represents everything
that was exciting about Bloom’s life transformation in America.
And the rap song that Bloom made his own clearly holds a special place
in the musician’s repertoire.
He said: “I’ve never written a song that was as difficult
to write as it was learning I Need Love because it was something that
could have been a complete disaster.
“The only way to do it was to find some way to make it my own and
to make it sound Irish.
“It took people by surprise but the song embodied a really exciting
time in my life.
“It helped to shatter the image of a singer-songwriter being a dull,
self-obsessed, angst-ridden, lonely, sad b*stard and that’s something
I’ve always tried to do.”
Bloom recalls an intimate time he shared last year with fellow Irish musician
Christie Hennessy, who passed away in December, as a recent highlight
in his life.
He said: “2007 was the first time I really met Christie Hennessy
and within 10 minutes of meeting him he told me he was dying.
“A month later his manager told me about the project Christie was
trying to complete and he wanted the first recording to be with me and
my brother Christy, so the three of us got together and made this song.
“Meeting Christie Hennessy in the way that I did was one of the
most profound experiences of my life.
“Becoming a friend of his and feeling like a brother of his in the
last weeks of his life was just an enormous privilege.”
Bloom’s British tour starts in Fareham, Hampshire on Sunday, March
23. |
