St. Dominic's Disappearance

 

St Dominic’s Disappearance comprises eleven songs featuring long-time friends and collaborators Miriam Ingram, ex-Mary Jane Simon Good, Shane Wearen (The Pale) and violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire. 

“When I needed people for parts, it seemed obvious to call on my old busking comrades, even Leslie Keye who did the mastering,” Acko says. 

St Dominic’s Disappearance, he adds, deals with themes of friendship, loss, the passing of time. 

 

 “At least half of the songs on the album are about a long-lost friend of mine, someone I haven’t seen for at least half the time I’ve known him. It’s funny how some people have a massive effect on your life and then disappear, but you still carry them around with you. I like to tell people that it’s a concept album, but only in the loosest sense. There’s no storyline as such, just a common theme to a few of the songs. 

“Time is a strange thing,” he continues, “I feel as close to these songs as I did when I first recorded them 10 years ago. I started the album with ‘This Is Where People Love You’, which offers some sort of solution to a relationship that may have gone off the rails. The key songs are what I call the Quiet Trilogy: ‘Quiet and Me’, ‘Dear Quiet’, and ‘How Quietly You Leave’. I end the album with ‘We Should Be Singing’: it took me a long time to learn the lesson of that song.” 

The album emerges from a period of some disillusion and indirection that ended in the Spring of 2019 when Acko went busking for the first time in years. It was a return to year zero moment, a rediscovery of roots. 

“I went out one day out of sheer boredom, and something amazing happened. I fell in love with singing all over again. I went out again the next day, and the day after that I bought a PA and started looking for gigs. I just wanted to sing.”