Fionn Regan returns to Live At St. Luke's touring his eighth studio album; 'Berlin Berlin'

“I had a craving for something minimal,” says Irish singer/songwriter Fionn Regan of the road to his eighth album. Arriving swiftly after 2024’s acclaimed O Avalanche, new album Berlin, Berlin – so good he named it twice – is Fionn’s answer to that urge. Stark yet resonant, poetic and pure, the record is a work of intuitive intimacies and radical selfcontainment: untouched by time, trend or premeditation, it’s a distilled expression of what happens when a natural talent lets his instincts lead the way.

In some respects, that instinct takes the form of a response to roads previously travelled. The album arrives both as a partner-piece to its predecessor and its polar opposite; a darker and perhaps more elusive twin that shares the earlier work’s feel for environment and emotion. Where O Avalanche was inspired by time spent in Mallorca, Berlin, Berlin evokes a citycentric mindset from its title to its portraits of characters seemingly adrift, lost in hallways and mazes. And while O Avalanche evoked sun-dappled daytime vistas, Berlin, Berlin summons a different kind of seasonal and nocturnal spirit in its references to “winter light” and star-lit skies.

Illuminated by Regan’s innate sense of poetry, drama and impressionistic storytelling, it is, however, all the better for not being over-thought. As he explains, “One of the things with the album is I made it fast – super-fast. Five days, maybe six days. I wanted the songs to feel like maybe the record is something that’s come straight out of the ground. It’s like the ‘first thought, best thought’ kind of approach. That kind of slightly [Jack] Kerouac-y idea of just doing something, not thinking about it, and then making it.”

Hence opener “Hurricane Bruise” arrives without preamble, an open doorway leading to spectral images of figures lost, trying to find a way out “to the light”. Holding its secrets close, it acts as a kind of threshold to the record’s mysteries. Regan suggests the “rich tones and black-and-whites” of classic Italian cinema as one reference point, and the album indeed plays like a half-remembered movie – once viewed in the small hours and recollected in snapshots that suggest a bigger whole without requiring over-explication. “Don’t Forget Your Friends” evokes the low thrum of McCabe and Mrs Miller-era Leonard Cohen. “Black Silk Dress” hints at a tale of mourning or another non-specified trauma, while “Berlin” seems to unspool as a tale of the city at night, rippling with missed assignations and close-guarded memories.

Although the record doesn’t follow pre-planned routes, it testifies to the precision of Regan’s instincts in its feel for shape, mood and contrast. The mood brightens by increments as it progresses, from the dappled arrangement of “Your Love Is Like Wine” to the dream-state gleam of “Michibiki No Hoshi”. “The Streets Are Wet with Rain” and “Fox Kiss” brim with romantic imagery, the reference to “Ghosts of the morning” suggesting a sort of dawning, before “Love Blood” closes the record as a kind of declaration of devotion, constant and warm.

Written and recorded in record time in East London, the result feels like a lost vinyl cult favourite, something stumbled across in record racks, unheralded yet cherished all the deeper for it. That sense of happenstance seems to be ingrained in the record, both in its methods and results. “In some ways the songs landed together very easily,” says Fionn. “There was no solid idea about it, it was more like writing stuff on a piece of hotel paper or a beermat. It's like a notebook, which brings together things that have a resonance but are also in that realm of the unexplained. Like a cosmic collection of notes that’s collaged together somehow.”

Regan has been following where his songs lead since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury-shortlisted The End of History. Since then, he has travelled between bandbased detours and the gleaming likes of 2011’s 100 Acres of Sycamore, whose worry-worn beauty “Dogwood Blossom” drew new audiences when it found kindred spirits in two TV shows, romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’s This Is England 86. Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for 2017’s “The Meetings of the Waters”, while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards, sampled by Bon Iver, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair and made an honorary memory of the Trinity College Literary Society.

O Avalanche steered Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape towards another creative peak, forging a record to lose yourself in. Berlin, Berlin continues and enriches that trajectory and calling; it’s a record made for full immersion from an artist who seems equally immersed in his writing, listening closely to where it wants to lead him. “The songs kind of tell you what way they want to go, you know,

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