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Velvet Underground & Mark O'Leary; Retrospections and Intersections

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  In a modest, unadorned conversation captured on camera, Irish guitarist, composer and electronic musician Mark O’Leary talks about The Velvet Underground with the kind of authority that comes not from mythology, but proximity. He begins with the Brian Eno line that has become almost liturgical: the first Velvet Underground album may have sold only 30,000 copies, but almost everyone who bought it started a band. O’Leary doesn’t dress the observation up. “All the bands that have influenced me, about four out of five have been influenced by the Velvet Underground.” It isn’t rhetoric, he suggests. It’s empirical. After decades of playing, teaching and listening in Ireland and beyond, O’Leary has watched the influence replicate itself generation after generation. Mention almost any important alternative band and, sooner or later, the Velvets appear somewhere in the family tree. The story of how that happened remains almost absurdly unlikely. Lou Reed was writing disposable songs for P...
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The Scritti Politti Constellation: Mark O’Leary at the Intersection of Jazz, Hip-Hop and Hyper Pop

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The Scritti Politti Constellation: Mark O’Leary at the Intersection of Jazz, Hip-Hop and Hyper Pop There are musicians whose careers can be understood in a linear trajectory. There are others whose significance lies precisely in the lines that cross through them. Mark O’Leary belongs to the second category. To look at O’Leary through the lens of Scritti Politti is to discover that the relationship is considerably more substantial than a chain of coincidental musical acquaintances. The connections run through jazz, progressive music, sophisticated pop, hip-hop, electronic music and, eventually, the contemporary world of Charli XCX and the BRAT aesthetic. What initially resembles a game of musical six degrees begins to look instead like a network of shared musical ideas. At its centre is O’Leary. The most important connection may be the simplest. O’Leary has indicated that Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 helped shape his sense and sensibilities of pop. That statement places Scri...
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