peter
“As a music teacher you can’t say you have favourite students but there is this girl… She is only playing for a year or two, she’s very, very young and one of those who find it hard to learn things from books. So sometimes, when we both lose our patience, we just swap and start playing music together. One day, I had this idea to get her to come up with random stories. They were really insane, crazy stories, but we used them as lyrics and wrote songs around them, one is called ‘Hotel Chandelier’. It’s about a very posh hotel on the side of a pier full of expensive chandeliers and rich guests, but for no apparent reason there is this tarantula who lives in the building and it keeps scaring all the guests. It appears in their food, waking them up on their faces or chasing them down the hallways… In the end, it turns out that the tarantula the owner’s pet and he is actually a very friendly and misunderstood animal. He is just trying to have fun and makes new friends… Anyway, the song is three verses long and has a chorus. It’s a proper song! But it’s totally mental. When we finished, we decided to perform it in front of her parents and they absolutely loved it. So later we sang it in front of a small crowd of friends and family and they loved it too! A few months later we performed it at a recital in front of like a hundred people. I was very nervous, I thought this is totally mental and nobody is going to like it, but ended up getting a huge ovation… I find it hard to stay afloat in Dublin with the crazy rent prices and sometimes I wonder if I should shave, cut my hair and look for a proper job. But then I get students who create something like this and I realise that I love my hair and I love what I do…”