A couple of weekends ago, on stage at the Sugar Club in Dublin, Siobhan McClean, who performs as Shiv, was realising her vision. She was performing The Defiance of a Sadgirl in full, bringing her new album together conceptually, musically and vocally. The venue was packed and the audience entranced. “I was buzzing about it,” she says. “I had no idea if it was going to come together. I was trying to do a lot. There were so many people involved, so many moving parts.”
Shiv was “coming off the back of a pretty tumultuous period” in her life when she began writing the songs that would become the album. In a six-week period the singer “had just moved country, me and my ex-boyfriend were meant to buy an apartment [but] broke up, my mum had been in hospital and ill for six or seven weeks, and I terminated my relationship with my management and my label: a huge flurry of massive change,” she says. “I didn’t really want to be in Dublin. I just wanted to write music and express the chaos I was feeling internally.”
Her parents were in Kampala, the Ugandan capital. “They were, like, ‘Just come over here.’ It was perfect: the sun is shining all the time, they had a spare room for me to set up a studio space, and they told me to take the time I needed. I spent three months there from October last year. The first couple of weeks I was getting myself set up. I had to process all of the stuff that happened, look after myself, mediate, do yoga, go running.”
She created a structure so she could write. “I had a target to make something every day, just put something down, good or bad. That was key. It helped me get over the judgment side of creativity. If it’s not good, it’s just flushing the tap – and if it is [good], then that’s a bonus. You can put something down that you think in the moment isn’t great, but you can come back to it, make a tweak, and it can end up being your favourite song. I was trying hard not to put expectations on anything: just make what you make, and see what happens.”
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
Shiv ended the process with almost 20 songs. Then the whittling down began, as did studio work with members of the hugely creative Irish group Bricknasty (who also played with her at the Sugar Club) and with Adam Shanahan, her fellow executive producer on the project. Soulful, tender and vulnerable, the album leans into the uncertainty of the turns a life can take, before coming down on the side of self-acceptance, resilience and hope, communicated through elevated neosoul, mellow R&B and down-tempo hip-hop flourishes, with piano its foundational instrument.
One of the artists who took part in the gamechanging Sugar Club show was Osazee Aiguokhian, who had also been performing as part of the band for Thisispopbaby’s show 0800 Cupid, at Dublin Theatre Festival. When Shiv went to see it, she was “super inspired”, as she noted a connection between what she was wanted to do on stage and what Emer Dineen was doing. “It’s kind of similar in a weird sense, the theatrical element, the music: it’s a story of life. When I saw 0800 Cupid it bolstered what I was trying to do.”
Shiv’s career began after she studied psychology at University College Dublin. She was about to start a master’s in educational psychology but instead took a gap year, which is when she began to DJ and to write songs. “Then Covid happened. I was in receipt of the pandemic unemployment payment at the time. Covid stopped, and I was earning a passive income from streaming. I was, like, ‘Wait, is this my job now? I’m a full-time musician?’ Out of nowhere, one thing led to another, and I just found myself deeper in this career.”
She’s passionate about the need to build a sustainable independent music industry. “Some of the older generation, or the people who have run the music industry in the past, I’m not sure if they’ve fully caught up with what the modern music industry is yet,” Shiv says. “It’s our responsibility as artists to establish ourselves and our personal ethos, because, fundamentally, we’re building the industry and the infrastructure for people who don’t necessarily fit the stereotypical ‘Irish musician’.
“There’s so much more to us now, of diversity, depth – and I’m not just talking about race: it’s everything. Ireland is at a point where it feels like a melting pot of a lot of different stuff going on. We’re blessed to be part of seeing this shift in real time, and I think we have a responsibly to bring that to a world platform. It feels like a privilege to do that.”
Shiv, who has also just performed at Cork Jazz Festival, as part of the Nasty Sessions, says that Dublin needs more mid-size venues, to bridge the gap between smaller spaces and larger rooms, and that the national broadcaster should be more proactive. “I’d love to see an initiative from RTÉ and 2fm where it isn’t just, ‘We’ll put you on the radio,’ but about building community, bringing people together, putting people in studio sessions.”
A shortage of cultural space and the cost of living are also stymieing artists’ ambitions. “Rent is so high. It’s hard to find places here creatives can go, hang out, meet each other, share ideas.”
The music scene is incredibly eclectic at the moment, with numerous overlapping parts. But it has never felt competitive, she says. “We all have the same motive right now. We know how talented our country is. We just want to put Ireland on the map. We want to establish ourselves and the scene and let people see that. We can all sense there’s something special bubbling.”
