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It’s so interesting the conflict you have when you do a live radio show. Everything in me [during the interview] was screaming ‘This is going on too long’, because that’s how I’m trained: live radio, I need to play a song. But I didn’t want to stop her, and she was on a roll, she was just going. Your job there, if you can imagine a galloping horse, your job is just to slightly guide them in a direction where they’re going to be touching on subjects people want to hear. That’s all it is.”
Having thought very little about her Irishness for the first 40 years of her life, Macmanus is now “a person who’s constantly reminding her children they’re half Irish. I’m learning Irish. I’m wondering about moving home. I used to come to this pub on Paddy’s Day but now I come here all the time!”I am the youngest of a large family, so by the time I came along, the fussing of parenting had melted away and the general attitude was: “You’re left to your own devices. You’re alive and clean-ish. Grand.” At this point, I would have been spending my school-free days down the green – a little patch of grass about 50 yards from the housing estate where I grew up. I would play football all day with the boys, then I would climb trees. As it started to get dark, my mum would call me in for dinner, and if it was Saturday, my weekly bath. I was really active and had such lovely friends. It was a very good time. Orla has moved to London from Ireland in pursuit of a career in the music industry- Orla sings, produces and plays guitar, so music is a huge part of her existence. My children really see themselves as English. And sometimes things happen that really hammer that home, like the Euros and, you know, they’ve got their English flags, and, as an Irish person, you are recoiling The pandemic was the beginning of me really thinking about going home [to Ireland], because it was the first time I had head space as an adult
In conversation with 1883 Magazine’s Cameron Poole, Macmanus discusses her second novel The Mess We’re In, the art of Interviewing, Changes, and what success looks like to her now. Breaking news: DJ, podcaster and author Annie MacManus likes herself. The fact that the London based Dubliner has a healthy amount of self-esteem has been remarked on in previous interviews “Why is it an anomaly for a woman to like herself? What the f**k is wrong with this world that this is a remarkable thing?” she says on the latest episode of The Women’s Podcast. Now hugely decorated, she is the co-founder of an organisation called Global Optimism, co-host of the podcast “Outrage & Optimism” and the co-author of the recently published book, “The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis”.I remind her of a conversation we had in Malta in 2019, at her own festival, Lost and Found, about an unease I detected between her actual self and Annie Mac “the brand”. At the time, it appeared as though an empire was being constructed around her, and by her; her own festivals and events, massive DJ gigs, festival headline performances on some of the biggest stages in the UK. While her fantastic and friendly team buzzed around, her own energy was different, lounging happily by a pool with a drink and her husband, as if she’d just bumped into you on holiday, rather than a few hours before DJing another massive gig. It feels like now, that empire-building mentality has dissipated. Turning down an honour, as Macmanus did, does not necessarily mean you won’t be asked again. Irish people who at first declined honours include the boxer Barry McGuigan, who said no when he was offered an MBE in 1986. He went on to accept it the second time around, eight years later. Yeah. I find that when talking about Mother Mother… everything was new with Mother Mother. So the first thing I learned is that you write the book and then you spend literally a year and a half talking about it. In the talking about it stage, you understand more of why you wrote the book. That was the case for me anyway. The first question everybody asks, in regard to a book, is ‘Where did this book come from?’ And with Mother Mother, I didn’t know the answer to that because I just launched myself into writing without any pre-preparation for writing a book. I just kind of started and did all the hard work after writing it, in terms of trying to make it into a readable novel. So what I learned from that was, I think it’s probably sensible to go into writing a book knowing at the very least what you want to write about, what is meaningful to you, and what you want to explore more of. She depicts this beautifully in the novel, with Irish barfly characters contributing some of the book’s most affecting moments. “We don’t all get the luxury of belonging where we’re born,” one of them says. As she spoke to regulars in these north London Irish bars, such as The Coopers Arms in Kilburn, the pub scenes in the book “grew and grew. And I realised that this book is really about being Irish in England. And exploring who the f**k am I? How Irish am I? What does it mean to me to be Irish? Where do I belong? All of that stuff which is so prevalent for anyone who doesn’t live in Ireland any more. The kind of neither-here-nor-thereness of it all.”
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