Pat Dam Smyth

Pat Dam Smyth is from Laurencetown, about twenty miles south-west of Belfast. His father was a folk musician who died when Pat was twelve, leaving him with an acoustic guitar and a grief that would shape everything that followed. He had his first band together by the age of thirteen and gigged non-stop until he was seventeen. After years touring with the Smokey Angle Shades, he returned to Belfast to record his debut album The Great Divide — a deeply personal record dealing honestly with the death of a parent, lost love and mental illness, tipping its cap to Dennis Wilson, Wilco and The Kinks, and hailed as a modern masterpiece in his native Northern Ireland.

A Hackney man for many years, his sound — rock-folk-Celtic soul with a soupçon of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave — sounds the way he looks: different. A leading light in a new wave of Northern Irish artists, he has been cited as an influence by his peers.

His debut Monks Road Social single was described as a vaudevillian eulogy nod to Soho that stands tall among the great London songwriters like Ray Davies, Damon Albarn and Madness. He appears on the debut Monks Road Social album Down The Willows, and has been part of the collective’s story from the very beginning.