Tommy touches down for a tune

SLIGO singer Tommy Fleming will be in Glór on January 27, singing songs from his 20-year career.
It’s the start of a long spell of touring, which will see him in various parts of Ireland as well as going to Australia and the US.
“I’m off now until January 19 and I go into the rehearsal room then for the tour. It takes me all over the country basically. We close the tour in Ireland in the Grand Canal Theatre on the eighth of March.
“I’ve one day off and I fly to England and open the tour there on the 10th. We’re doing 15 shows in England. It’s busy all the way up to July. I finish England and then I’m going to Holland. I finish Holland, have a few weeks off and I do the States. I’m off then in the summer and go to Australia in October and November.”
His show in Ennis isn’t his only one in the Mid-West. “We’ll be coming to Ennis on January 27 and with a full orchestra in Limerick on February 28, the Irish Concert Orchestra in UL. We won’t have the full orchestra in Ennis.”
Tommy hasn’t been in the studio for a while and says he really wanted a break from recording.
“I haven’t recorded in a year and a half or two years. I’m kind of giving the studio a break because I seem to have spent my whole life in there over the last few years. I’ve 13 albums out at this point so I said I won’t go in the studio for a while.
I’m working on an original album, with two or three songwriters and I’m co-writing a lot of the songs. I’ll be going into the studio for that, probably about the summer of 2013 to record it.”
He says he finds it hard to explain the songs he’s involved in writing.
“They’re ordinary songs; songs that pull on my own life basically. I’ve written about three of them already, it’s very hard to describe what they’re like, you’d have to hear them really. They’re very kind of acoustic, there’s a slight folk/country feel to some and others are laid back. There’s a narrative running through nearly every one of them, but it’s kind of a life story basically. It’s from my own history and things that happened over the years.”
He currently has an album of songs out that he recorded over the years and people going to Glór will hear a lot from his back catalogue.
“For the show in Glór they’ll be hearing songs that I recorded over the last 20 years, it’s a mixture of everything, a complete mixed bag. There’s old and new and songs that wouldn’t have been heard in a long time.”