I love listening to and performing music. I’m rarely happier than when I’m singing songs I love to people who want to hear them.
I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember and started playing guitar when I was around eleven or twelve years old (after a few years of violin/viola lessons). Wherever I’ve lived or travelled, I’ve looked for opportunities to perform in pubs, bars and cafés, at parties, festivals and open mic nights, or busking in the street.
A year of earning my living from music in my mid-20s taught me that it was probably possible for me but also that it might ultimately negatively affect the joy I take from music (as well as being a fairly precarious existence). So I chose to follow a professional career doing other things and keep music as something I will always do, wherever I find myself.
I’ve always had a wide repertoire of songs covering everything from sixties rock’n’roll to classic acoustic rock, britpop and indie, Irish folk, singer-songwriters, etc., and in recent years I’ve been singing my own songs more and more. Recent highlights have included the privilege of supporting well-known Irish folk-singer Luka Bloom in Geneva in April 2017 and the whole Moi Aussi project that led to many kids around Suisse Romande learning one of songs in school.
A brief bio
I was born in the town of Sligo in Ireland in 1977. I have since lived for varying periods in Ballinasloe, Gweedore, Greystones, Glasnevin, Limerick, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and, as of April 2013, the Vaudois village of Vich, midway between Geneva and Lausanne.
I met Nadine in April 2002 in Paris and we got married in October 2009. Our son Robert was born in 2011 and his brother Declan was born in 2014.
While I cut my performing teeth singing cover songs, in recent years I have more and more been singing my own songs. I started writing songs around 2002. I was most prolific during our first years in Switzerland and our time in Amsterdam, i.e. before the kids came along, but I usually have at least one song in the pipeline, even if finding the time and headspace can be difficult with work and family life.
I haven’t spent a whole lot of time in recording studios. I recorded six songs in Ireland in 2008, which I packaged as a mini-album called Distance To Go. In 2013, I went to a studio in Lausanne to record simple acoustic versions of four songs, collected together on an EP called Highs and Lows. And part of a gig I did at the Geneva venue Le Box in 2015 can be heard on my Live at Le Box collection. In February 2019, I recorded four songs – relased as the Wiser Heads EP – with Olivier (my partner in The Papas) and a bass player. All of these collections can be found under SONGS.
The pandemic saw me (along with every other musician worldwide) setting up my webcam and playing live from my basement. The streams are all archived on my YouTube Channel.
As of 2022, I’ve started to play some real gigs again, including a new act with vocalist Helen Von Dadelszen, Duonomy.
(In case you were wondering, Eoghan is pronounced like “Owen” and is the Gaelic version of the name Eugene.)