Every day has that Mundy feeling 

He says he is chilling out at his home in Dublin, when I call, but Edmund Enright, aka Mundy, is juggling a lot of things as he prepares for a summer of gigging and recording

“Trying to get everybody organised for it. Who’s playing in the band and at what time and all this kinda stuff,” Mundy says.

“I play in various different guises. As in, I do solo gigs, I do duo gigs, I do band gigs. I’m managing myself at the moment, so there’s a lot of admin to figuring out who’s playing with me and at what gig and all that kind of stuff. I have enough keeping me occupied.”

He certainly does. And while the budget and scale of the gig have a bearing on whether Mundy appears on his own or with a band, there are always trade-offs.

“There’s some places where I think the songs actually shine better and you can tell stories and be more of a kind of storyteller,” Mundy says. 

“In a rock club, it is very hard to create that intimacy, I find.”

He says: “Say if I played at a festival and there was a band on each side of me and I came out on my own for half-an-hour with an acoustic guitar, sometimes that could be way better. Because the crowd notice a difference. They’re not getting the same thing, so you going out there on your own is quite refreshing.

“I’ve done gigs like charity gigs where there’s a massive line-up and you got three songs and you rock out on your own with the guitar, and it’s absolutely amazing. Because you shine as a guitar player.

“I think I’m very lucky and fortunate that I can do that,” Mundy says. 

I mean, some people can’t accompany themselves. Some people are great singers, but they don’t play an instrument. They have to bring someone with them. So I’ve been lucky to get through all the ups and downs and twists in the road that life has brought us, where I can just scale it all back to just me and the guitar. That’s fortunate that way.

At the inaugural Macroom Music Fest next month, Mundy will be up alongside two bands, Cork indie heroes The Frank and Walters and Dublin rockers The Riptide Movement. Mundy will also be bringing his band and he’s looking forward to renewing acquaintances with Cork’s finest, having only first met them at a charity gig in New York, and then a couple of years later at the 2019 Féile celebration concert in Semple Stadium, where he found himself sharing a bill with acts he may have watched onstage when as a youngster Mundy made his own trips to Tipp.

“I was quite young when it started off,” Mundy says. “I was probably in first or second year when that started off. So it was actually weird to be part of the line-up, because Féile was quite a nostalgic thing. But I ended up on the bill anyway and it was great to see all these bands, like The Sultans of Ping, The Franks, The Stunning and Something Happens. It was good.”

Ever since the Macroom Mountain Dew festival in the late ’70s blazed a trail for rock music festivals in Ireland, they have become one of the great rites of passage, and the Féile experience was no different for the young Edmund Enright.

“It was kind of like my first day away from the family, from your parents,” Mundy says. “You’re in fifth year or sixth year and you’re all going mad at it for the first time ever. So, it was great. It was very exciting. The freedom, and to see all these bands and be hanging out with thousands of people on the streets, drinking and smoking and having the craic. It was kind of like one of my first bohemian adventures.”

Aside from looking forward to Macroom Music Fest, Mundy is recording his first album since 2015’s self-titled offering. The first fruits of these recordings appeared in the shape of his recent single, ‘Underneath Vesuvius’.

I’ve got the guts of it written, but I’m always chasing the big fish. It could arrive at any stage, but you still have to charge on, regardless.

“Like, it’s seven years since my last album. It’s been a bit of a long time now. One of my biggest thrills is playing new music and not leaning into the oldies all the time. But the Covid thing slowed everything down as well. Listen, I’m a family man and I have kids. I’m a part-time stay-at-home husband, as well as being a gigging, full-time professional musician. It’s just a little bit harder to reach deadlines as it would have been when I was flying solo, you know what I mean?”

And what is the big fish you are waiting to land?

“There’s nine songs that I’m definitely going with, but there is room for a belter. For a ‘July’, a ‘Galway Girl’, a song that could be an instant hit,” Mundy says.

“So you have to be open to change things around a little bit, or change the recipe to make room for something like that. And it could happen on the last day of recording. You just don’t know. You never know. These things, you can’t plan them, but you kind of have a feeling when they arrive as well.”

However, one can’t always tell when one has landed the big one.

“Well, put it this way,” he says, “I didn’t know ‘July’ was a good song. I remember sitting on the chair in the studio and I was struggling with the chorus.

“I thought the chorus was a bit weak, when in fact that’s why everybody fell in love with it. And I just thought it was too simple.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” he adds. “That’s all I know.”

• Mundy plays Macroom Music Fest on Saturday, June 24. www.macroommusicfest.ie