Tracks Of My Years: Keeley Moss

Session Motts singer, guitarist and co-songwriter Keeley Moss is a music obsessive with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ’80s and ’90s UK scene.

She is also a true crime blogger;  The Keeley Chronicles, detailing her investigation into the 1988 unsolved murder of German backpacker Inga-Maria Hauser in Northern Ireland, went viral after its launch last year.

Inga-Maria Hauser

Reviewing the group’s new single, Plundered Past, released this week, leading music website Goldenplec said, ‘Singer Keeley Moss, whose revered crime blog The Keeley Chronicles has investigated the case in great depth, gained the support and praise of Hauser’s family in the process’.

Session Motts trademark ’80s-Modern sound – a hybrid of Post-Punk, Northern Soul, Disco and Burt Bacharach – was first heard on their debut single Chip Shop Fights, released in January this year. Nialler9 quickly named Session Motts ‘New Artist of the Week’ in The Irish Times, and the group soon picked up similar accolades from DublinLive.ie and DublinConcerts.ie. The song gained regular airplay on RTÉ1, Newstalk, 98FM, 8Radio and Dublin City FM. The follow-up, Plundered Past, has picked up where the debut left off, immediately gaining airplay from RTÉ1 & 2FM, Newstalk, 98FM, 8Radio and various radio stations around the country since its release last week.

Also featuring studio wizard Ingmar Kiang (late of this parish) and guitarist Daniel Kane, Session Motts have chosen the Harbour Bar in Bray as the venue for their first-ever live performance on Thursday June 15th, alongside Montauk Hotel. The show starts at 9.30, admission is free and both bands will be playing a full set.

Tracks Of My Years…

Cocteau Twins Rilkean Heart [Acoustic Version]
There are so many songs that make me emotional that in order to pick a mere ten, I decided I’d have to only pick the songs that regularly make me reach for the Kleenex otherwise this list could include a thousand songs never mind ten (and even then it was torture having to limit this list to just ten!) The version of this song that’s on the band’s Milk and Kisses album is gorgeous but for me this one narrowly has the edge. It’s one of the most basic and barren-sounding things the Cocteaus ever did, shorn of their usual multi-layered textures and featuring only Liz Fraser’s unique voice and a solitary piano which makes it all the more moving. An extraordinarily-beautiful song.

Beck Morning
I only heard the album this is from (Morning Phase) recently and immediately fell in love with this particular track. The album starts with a short but stunning surge of strings that then flows seamlessly into this song, which is very moving and yet incredibly uplifting. There’s an authoritively-sorrowful gravitas in Beck’s voice as he’s gotten older, especially since his 2002 album Sea Change which chronicled the decay of a long-term relationship and Morning Phase marked a return to that sort of nakedly-emotional songwriting in an Alt.Country style which is my favourite feather of the many-winged bird that is Beck’s oeuvre. This is one of those songs where I listen to the intro and think “How hard can it be this time?” then we’re into the verse and I’m like “Yep, I can handle it” until all of a sudden the chorus erupts with an astonishing emotional torrent and my composure crumbles quicker than the most brittle biscuit.

Radiohead Codex & Give Up The Ghost
These two songs are on the same album and try as I might I just couldn’t pick one over the other so had to include both. The King of Limbs is probably Radiohead’s weakest album overall but ironically its high points are among my very favourite Radiohead songs, these two being a case in point. Dripping with the sort of eerie poignancy that Radiohead do better than anyone else without ever trying too hard, these two songs are mini-masterpieces of stark subtlety perfect for late-night listening and never fail to bring me to tears literally every time I hear them.

Clearlake Trees In The City
Another immensely-sad song, one that almost wilts under its own weight so powerful it is. And yet, it’s a song (and a band) that’s virtually unknown which to me is a maddening mystery and a travesty. Their first two albums are great, with many standout moments. But this is I think one of the greatest songs ever written. And undoubtedly one of the saddest.

The Clientele An Hour Before The Light
Like Clearlake, another magical but ludicrously little-known band. Any time I listen to this song it causes me to visualise Inga-Maria Hauser (the young woman murdered in Northern Ireland in 1988 whose unsolved case I’m devoted to) in London, where she began what would unwittingly turn out to be the last week of her short life. I’m so fascinated about where she went and what she did during that time, and it makes me cry to listen to this song knowing what would happen to her just a few days after she’d been in London.

Harry Nilsson Remember
Speaking of weeping, this one’s guaranteed to open the floodgates like few others. I think its one of the greatest songs ever written and yet hardly anyone knows it. For me it always evokes thoughts of Inga-Maria Hauser’s childhood, and imagining what her early years might have been like. I love how music has the capacity to do that – to conjure up thoughts and feelings totally unrelated to what a song might actually be about, but which only serve to strengthen your connection with the song. It’s why I think that once a song is released it doesn’t really belong to the artist anymore, as the meaning of it can mutate so much depending on however it’s emotionally interpreted by the listener.

Microdisney Bullwhip Road
One of my favourite songs of all-time, by my favourite Irish band ever. A song I find incredibly-emotional, and again one that always makes me think of Inga-Maria Hauser, but in a different way from most of the other songs on this list. There’s a gorgeously-poignant chord change that coincides with a line in this song that goes ‘They brought him back, he’s seen the stars, now he’s back on Bullwhip Road’, and even though this song has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of my blog, and this song refers to a he and not a she, it always makes me think of her being brought back to Munich after her life had been so cruelly taken, not just the lyrics but the melancholy melodies exquisitely crafted by guitarist Sean O’Hagan that bookend each chorus. Which is another amazing thing about music that’s I think so often overlooked – that a guitar part is just as capable of triggering particular thoughts and memories as words are.

Real Estate Suburban Dogs & Martha Wainwright Far Away
Another joint entry as I just couldn’t separate them nor bear to leave one out. The first is a beautifully-bittersweet piece of lo-fi Indie-pop that dreamily drifts along as an eerie waltz and features some remarkable lyrics far removed from the sort of banal blandness that passes for most Indie bands’ song words. The second is as powerful, as poignant and as goddamn great a song as you’re going to hear anywhere. Both songs again always make me think of Inga-Maria’s early life but why that is I have no idea as neither song has anything whatsoever to do with her.

Don McLean Vincent
A colossal song and to my mind the true unimpeachable peak of greatness in Don McLean’s canon, leaving the far more ubiquitous American Pie trailing in its wake. It’s that rarest of songs – a devoted ode to an artist that’s delivered so beautifully and incredibly-poetically. Far from a conventional love song and all the better for it, describing Van Gogh’s struggle with mental illness and his subsequent slide into suicide in the most unflinchingly-raw manner. For me this song shows a very rare insight into the nature of what being a true artist often involves, and the resistance and opposition they face when trying to do something brave and beautiful. And never have I been able to get through even a minute of it without welling up.

Session Motts Chip Shop
Maybe it’s cheeky to include one of our own songs but sod it, if I’m going to go I might as well go out in a blaze of glory…

You can catch Session Motts’ debut gig at The Harbour Bar, Bray on Thursday, June 15th as part of a double-bill with Montauk Hotel. You can follow the band on Facebook here, and on Twitter here. You can also follow The Keeley Chronicles right here.