Mull It Over 046: All That Romance
Northern Irish-born raconteur Matty James Cassidy returns with his tumbling lament of all things poetry and romance. Plus, the Northern Ireland Music Prize returns for 2025.
Sitting in the cocktail bar of The Merchant Hotel of a Saturday night in Pride-soaked Belfast makes it hard to be lamentful about anything, really - but I will try. The lack of Guinness on tap? Sure. The small detail of a French excursion cancelled last minute by means beyond my control? Absolutely. The death of Ozzy Osbourne? Tear-to-a-glass-eye stuff. Matty James Cassidy, however, reckons that all that romance is dead on his latest offering, ‘All That Romance’ - decrying the mortality of the proverbial dandy, poet, romantic, drunk, dank and disorderly. “The Wild West has been shamed”, he spits - but is that necessarily a bad thing? Smash that subscribe button to find out more.
Matty James Cassidy seems to be living the life I once envisaged for myself when I first started to realise music would have to become something a bit more than a hobby. Dressed head-to-toe in black, looking like he walked off the set of an L.A. Guns music video; treading the boards with the likes of Spike from the Quireboys, with a low-slung bass - and from Enniskillen, no less. A town in Northern Ireland, where in 2006 it seemed that if you weren't into General Fiasco or Snow Patrol, or listened to the emo stuff favoured by the City Hall kids, there really wasn't much room for you at all. But some of us were wearing out Beggars Banquet and Appetite For Destruction on our Hi-Fi systems, wondering if there was somewhere in between that we could safely land ourselves. That space is exactly where Matty James Cassidy finds himself in 2025.
As mentioned, Cassidy is Northern Irish-born, and after stints knocking around the country in bands either playing drums or singing up front with his bass guitar, he made the pilgrimage to Camden, London - unsurprisingly. Because why would you want to be in Snow Patrol when you could be Joe Strummer? And a fair shake at it he has had - working most of the time as a legitimate cross-country troubadour, Cassidy has thus been relatively quiet on the release front. Such is the reality of the life of a working musician in 2025, if you want to get by as a singer-songwriter, then you need to be on the road. However, this is notwithstanding his 2023 turn with Tyla in from 1980s British glam outfit The Dogs D’Amour, under the name The Balladmongrels - which gifted us this, frankly, lovely single in How the Beautiful Fall.
Which brings us to MJC’s latest offering to the black hole of Spotify and YouTube Music - ‘All That Romance’. It’s a stomping, table-thumping cry that not so much as moves as tumbles along with Cassidy’s distorted vocal offering up an elegy to the tricky space that finds itself in between overt political-correctness, crusading cancel-culture and the romance and poetry of a world where both were at once the rebellious and honest antidote to the sterile politician’s-answer of the theatre that authors, artists, musicians and comics find themselves in today. I think of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, writing in the 1950s of a culture and way of living so unflinchingly and unapologetically different and offensive to those with conservative values, in both ‘small C’ and ‘big C’ conservatism. Books like Naked Lunch and On The Road and Ginsberg’s opus Howl shocked-and-awed at the time. Now they are published by Penguin Classics. Cassidy isn’t actually thumping the table against ‘cancel-culture’, as it were; he is protesting the obvious end result of those clutching their pearls ever tighter - the neutralisation of art and music and truth. Jack Kerouac was no hero, he told the truth.
So if you’re sick of Ricky Gervais espousing to the point of nausea about the the same topic, or if you’re tired already of my self-indulgent take on it - have a listen to Matty’s track for yourself. It’s a lot more fun than I make it sound. I dare say he’s close to rapping at some points. Coming to the title credits of a gangster TV series near you - here’s Matty James Cassidy with All That Romance.
Next time I’m in London, we’ll grab a pint at The Dublin Castle, man. I have questions about the Quireboys and Spike.
Northern Ireland Music Prize 2025
And just like that, another spin on the axis. The Northern Ireland Music Prize returns for 2025, on Wednesday 12th November at the iconic Ulster Hall in Belfast. It’s early doors but consider this your fair warning that submissions for Album, Single and Live Act are now open at the link below. Submit for yourself or somebody you’re a fan of - I’ll never forget the time someone did it for me when I was releasing music; I still don’t know who it was. No bribes were ever given or received.
Thanks for reading issue 46 of Mull It Over. To all subscribers, thank you for the continued support and to all of my new subscribers who joined undoubtedly after the iconic (my words) KNEECAP article - welcome! Please dig through the archives and spread the word about the ones you like. You might find your next favourite band.
Speak soon x