Ryan O'Reilly - St. Mark's Hotel
On an otherwise unassuming December day in 2010, my ex-wife and I were meandering through the Portobello Rd markets in London.
We were at the tail-end of a fairly epic holiday which had already included New York, Washington, Boston, Munnerstadt (Germany), Amsterdam, Paris, Marseilles, the Cinque Terra, Venice, Florence, Rome and was culminating in London. All of this in six weeks. Fair to say we rushed it.
This day was the first of the trip that hadn't been jam-packed with activity. Enjoying the ability to be understood in English once more, we headed from our hotel in Paddington to the infamous Portobello Rd markets. As a child of the 90s, my attraction to this landmark was of course based on the film Notting Hill. Yet, when I left that day, it's mark on me would be completely unrelated to the area itself.
After about a half hour of perusing stalls, we were searching for somewhere to obtain some variety of refreshment. While scanning for a coffee shop or something similar, my ears caught the sound of a live band. My brain is hard wired to follow any kind of live music lead, so I promptly forgot the drinks and headed toward the sounds.
What I found was a four piece, most strumming acoustic guitars, singing some of the most stirring harmonies I'd ever heard. At the time, they announced themselves as the Ryan O'Reilly Band. When Ryan spoke, his distinctive Irish accent only added another layer of intrigue. I was hooked.
I stayed put for the whole set, clapping in the appropriate places and smiling like a total fool the whole time. If I like a sound, I become something of an instant superfan. It can lead to some rather embarrassing behaviour. Thankfully, this day, I managed to keep it to some gratuitous compliments and the purchase of an EP - on a burnt CD.
The cover of that EP looked like this:
The disc looked like this:
Those four songs were definitely on it. I understand this next part will sound fictitious, but I swear on my life it is true. The EP I got was remarkably similar to what's pictured above - except for one thing. It featured a fifth song - a live (I think) version of a song called 'St. Marks Hotel'.
It was a hauntingly beautiful song about a man who sits alone in a New York hotel lamenting the loss of a lover and making situational observations about the people and places around him. It's a stunningly simple tune, with all the hallmarks of traditional Irish folk. I damn near wore that CD out listening to this one song. I loved it like few before it.
Somewhere in the process of divorce a few years later, the EP was lost.
One evening in 2020, safely locked down during the pandemic and accompanied by a bottle of Barossa Valley shiraz, I was disappearing down a YouTube rabbit hole of obscure live performances from my favourite artists when I stumbled across a video of Ryan performing 'November'. All of the memories of Portobello Rd and the EP came flooding back. I frantically began searching for 'St. Mark's Hotel' but for the life of me could not find it anywhere. I dove as deep as I knew how across the internet to find this song but in an age of streaming it seems it was one of the few tracks that had never made it into a database.
I found one or two very obscure live performance videos of the song but the arrangements, understandably, weren't the same as I remembered it. I even tried reaching out to Ryan himself via Facebook and to his credit did get a reply. Something along the lines of, "maybe in the future." At least he had acknowledged the existence of the song and I could rest assured I wasn't losing the plot.
Something that's true of me as a music lover is that I'm quite the polar opposite of most artists. The older I get, the more I learn about music, the less complicated I like my songs. Give me raw and real over uber-production any day. I think it's that respectful modernisation of a very old sound that I love so much about this song. That and finding the lyrics all too relatable.
I did end up finding a video somewhere on the internet of the original recording of 'St. Mark's Hotel'. So I ripped the sound from it and was using the mp3 when I needed my fix. So imagine my unadulterated joy when one day last year I was re-scanning for songs and realised that Ryan had eventually added the single to Spotify. As of the writing of this post, it has 1563 plays. I imagine several hundred of them are mine.
It was a physical journey that allowed me to hear this song for the first time, an emotional journey that caused me to lose it and an electronic journey to rediscover it. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere about the meaningfulness of journeys but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is. Anyway, do listen. A more beautiful song you'll seldom ever find.