I tend to cite the same small handful of artists as my early influences, but I always find myself defining the difference between ‘influence’ and ‘inspiration.’ As a kid, I was really inspired by bands like Green Day, and I loved Arctic Monkeys, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the music I make now.
You could probably draw comparisons between some of my songwriting choices and Alex Turner’s, but these bands were probably more ‘inspirations’ as opposed to ‘influences.’ In many ways, it was more about wearing a leather jacket and slicking my hair back, or pairing black eyeliner with shirts and ties, than it was about the music.
I grew up in North London, going to a lot of sessions with my parents, and I think trad music played a big part in the way I write melodies. Trad tunes are so much about repetitive phrasing and short motifs, which I think has ultimately translated into me writing music that is pretty hooky and catchy. Also, learning to play Irish music is a lot about learning tunes by ear, and I think that influenced the way I write, where melody often comes first and is generated really quickly.
Current Practice
I just released an EP called ‘if you’re bored of this city’. It’s a project about desire, obsession, and self-destruction. It’s kind of a personal exploration of my own identity, and about how relationships can become complicated by self-discovery.
I had a very complex relationship with a friend a few years ago, and that was a big drive behind the narrative of this project. Musically, I looked to the songs and sounds that were soundtracking my life at the time of that experience, so it was a lot of dark pop music off the back of the first Billie Eilish album, and the production on the early Chance The Rapper projects, and the breakout of hyperpop.
I was also really inspired by Son Lux’s soundtrack for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, which I saw while I was mapping out a lot of the production for the EP. I think that had a big influence on the project, especially when I listen back to ‘Figure It Out’.
I made a whole series of videos to accompany the project, which string each song together and use the music to soundtrack this night of partying and recklessness. The project tells the story of such a pivotal time in my life, and I wanted to retell that story to the fullest extent through this lens of the art I was into at the time.
I think that’s why the videos are such an essential part of this EP. I’m really proud of what my friends and I managed to achieve with the visual side of this project, as it was all produced independently. It’s all available to watch for free onYouTube.
Future Plans
I’m really only just getting started. Right now, I’m focusing on ways to bring ‘if you’re bored of this city’ to more people, so I’m working on new shows and various other projects.
I think it’s so important to experience music in face-to-face environments with other people, and I want my work to be a catalyst for those kinds of experiences. I love creating and engaging with content online, but live events are really where I thrive, and playing my songs live is the reason I do what I do.
I think through playing more shows and being at more events post-pandemic, I’ve also found myself considering how the music I’m making will work in a live setting, and I’m really enjoying being out, and dancing, and just having a good time.
I’m always working on new music, so it’s only a matter of time before the next project clicks into place in my mind and I start rolling out the next thing…
For anyone to become an opinion writer for the ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, requires considerable ability. But does a particular viewpoint give an aspiring columnist a distinct advantage?
It is said that if you’re not a socialist in your twenties you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative in your forties, you have no brain. Given the increasing centre-right consensus across Irish media, including the Irish Times, anyone aspiring to be a journalist there might do well to accelerate that learning curve. There are, of course, true conservative believers from the outset.
Once such appears to be the precocious Finn McRedmond, who in recent months has become a fixture op-ed writer for the Irish Times. The daughter of David McRedmond, former chief executive of independent commercial television station, TV3, and currently chief executive of semi-state An Post, Finn McRedmond attended Rathdown Secondary School, and completed a Classics degree in Cambridge University, graduating c.2015.
In a series of waspish recent articles for the Irish Times, she has attacked the Brexit movement,[i] lauded the statesmanship of Leo Varadkar,[ii] while heaping scorn on both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.[iii] These contributions situate her politics on the centre-right – liberal-conservative and Remainer – an ideological slant very much ascendant in the Irish Times.
This outlook has been evident in the paper’s coverage of the forthcoming U.K. election. Along with condemnation of Populists, especially Nigel Farage, the U.K. Labour leader is a recurring bête noire,[iv] albeit full-time U.K. correspondent Denis Staunton has generally remained impartial.
The cartoon drawn by Martin Turner on December 3rd provides a good example. It features Corbyn alongside Boris Johnson with a list of some of the calumnies we have seen during the election. The point seems to be: these are two extremists – one as bad as the other.
Martin Turner, December 3rd, 2019.
Even apparently centre-left Fintan O’Toole was moved to describe Corbyn before the 2017 election as: ‘a highly problematic leader, not least in his inability to think about how to create a majority in England for this radical social democratic vision.’[v] Curiously, O’Toole has not expressed views in any articles on the Orwellian campaign of online distortion characterising U.K. election 2019.[vi]
In her latest opinion piece, McRedmond laments the loss of Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames, Nick Boles and Philip Hammond from Conservative ranks, and reventilates paper-thin allegations of anti-Semitism[vii] orchestrated to discredit Corbyn, concluding: ‘there is no good choice, and no obvious way through this election.’[viii]
While still a student, McRedmond revealed she gave her vote (presumably enjoying that right as an Irish citizen) to in the 2015 General Election to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who won an overall majority for the first time in nearly two decades. Published in the The Cambridge Tab just after the election – with austerity in full swing as over a million people relied on food banks[ix] – the headline read: ‘Being a Tory does not make you a bad person.’
McRedmond supported David Cameron over the then moderate Labour leader Ed Milliband. Perhaps in response to university peers whose “hearts” may have ruled their “heads,” she protested:
I’m not a bad person because I voted Conservative. I voted to decrease the deficit. I voted to raise the basic state pension by 2.5% a year. I voted to increase the health budget by £8bn by 2020.
I didn’t vote for closing the NHS, I didn’t vote for free champagne for all FTSE 100 CEO’s, I didn’t vote to “literally kill vulnerable people”. I didn’t actually vote for Satan. I voted for the party that I think this country needs.
…
I didn’t vote Conservative for low taxes so I can keep my mansion while everyone else can live in a slum. I don’t even have a mansion. It’s a townhouse.
No party is perfect. No party will be the indisputable moral saviour of Britain. The bedroom tax is odious. Cutting benefits is sad and maybe not the best way forward. The country isn’t going to be absolved of all moral transgressions with Labour or LibDem or Greens in power. In the same way that Conservatives aren’t going to do that either. But I am sick of people occupying the moral high ground because for some convoluted and laboured reason they see their party ridding Britain of all immorality and filling it with biscuits. God Ed Miliband loves biscuits.[x]
It is noteworthy that McRedmond attended Peterhouse College while at Cambridge, among the oldest and most traditional institutions in the University. In the 1980s it became association with Conservative, Thatcherite politics, counting Michael Portillo and Michael Howard as alumni.
Since graduating McRedmond has been writing – alongside Irish Times work – for British commentary and news magazine Reaction. Its editor-in-chief Iain Martin was previously head of comment for the Telegraph group, while Chairman of the board, Lord Salisbury, was once Conservative Leader in the House of Lords, opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, and offering freelance services to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s.[xi]
Its advisory panel includes luminaries such as Lord Hill, a former European Commissioner and advisor to John Major, as well as Adam Boulton, Editor at Large for Sky News.
McRedmond’s association with the publication perhaps came about through Deputy Editor Alastair Benn, whose Linkedin profile reveals he too graduated from Cambridge in 2015, also with a Classics degree, and with whom McRedmond has collaborated on a number of podcasts.[xii]
Finn McRedmond clearly has no taste for the Populism that has overtaken the Conservative Party, and being Irish, no truck with English nationalism or Brexit either. But anti-left bias might be detected in a recent somewhat snide Irish Times article she wrote entitled: ‘Are Sally Rooney’s heroines too skinny?’
McRedmond opines: ‘Rooney speaks the language of the so-called Woke Left. She is interested in political activism. And she has made her career writing about young people sensitively.’ But, she warns: ‘Her frequent references to thinness feels unconscious. A writer who is so careful and precise in her descriptions of people and their relationships has, like us, a culturally produced blind spot.’
‘This recurrent theme,’ McRedmond warns, ‘that women who are thin are more interesting than those who are not, and that women who are thin are the only ones worth writing about – is potentially dangerous.’ She counsels that ‘we should be sceptical of novels that propagate ideas most harmful to those supposed to find them most relatable.’
McRedmond is certainly a capable writer, and displayed refreshing candour in revealing her political choice. There is no reason to believe she is a bad person, but given the current orientation of media, her rapid progression to become a regular opinion columnist for the Irish Times – the national paper of record – while still in her twenties, is surely connected to the political ‘maturity’ she has displayed.
[i] Finn McRedmond: ‘Getting Brexit done is last thing Farage wants,’ Irish Times, November 9th, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/finn-mcredmond-getting-brexit-done-is-last-thing-farage-wants-1.4076850?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffinn-mcredmond-getting-brexit-done-is-last-thing-farage-wants-1.4076850
[ii] Finn McRedmond, ‘Neither rogue nor wily fixer, Varadkar confounds British’, Irish Times, August 17th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/neither-rogue-nor-wily-fixer-varadkar-confounds-british-1.3988483?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fneither-rogue-nor-wily-fixer-varadkar-confounds-british-1.3988483
[iii] Finn McRedmond, ‘ British voters trapped between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson’, Irish Times, November 28th, 2019,
[iv] For example: Chris Johns: Who would I vote for in the UK? Anyone who would defeat the Tory candidate, Irish Times, December 2nd, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/chris-johns-who-would-i-vote-for-in-the-uk-anyone-who-would-defeat-the-tory-candidate-1.4100958?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Feconomy%2Fchris-johns-who-would-i-vote-for-in-the-uk-anyone-who-would-defeat-the-tory-candidate-1.4100958
[v] Fintan O’Toole, ‘Fintan O’Toole: Corbyn’s nostalgia less of a fantasy than May’s’, Irish Times, June 6th, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-corbyn-s-nostalgia-less-of-a-fantasy-than-may-s-1.3108284?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-corbyn-s-nostalgia-less-of-a-fantasy-than-may-s-1.3108284
[vi] Frances Perrauden, ‘Twitter accuses Tories of misleading public with ‘factcheck’ foray’, The Guardian, November 20th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/twitter-accuses-tories-of-misleading-public-in-factcheck-row
[vii] Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, ‘Smoke Without Fire: The Myth of a ‘Labour Antisemitism Crisis’’, Jewish Voice for Labour, November 26th, 2019, https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/smoke-without-fire-the-myth-of-a-labour-antisemitism-crisis/
[viii] Finn McRedmond, ‘ British voters trapped between Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson’, Irish Times, November 28th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/british-voters-trapped-between-jeremy-corbyn-and-boris-johnson-1.4097084?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fbritish-voters-trapped-between-jeremy-corbyn-and-boris-johnson-1.4097084
[ix] Patrick Butler, ‘Food bank use tops million mark over the past year’, The Guardian, 22nd April, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/22/food-bank-users-uk-low-paid-workers-poverty
[x] Finn McRedmond, ‘Being a Tory does not make you a bad person,’ The Cambridge Tab, (more than five years ago), https://thetab.com/uk/cambridge/2015/05/11/tory-not-make-bad-person-52498
[xi] Anthony Seldon, ‘The Saturday Profile Viscount Cranborne, Conservative Peer: The last true blue blood,’ The Independent, November 21st, 1998, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-saturday-profile-viscount-cranborne-conservative-peer-the-last-true-blue-blood-1186204.html
[xii] Alastair Benn and Finn McRedmond, ‘Deconstructing “I’m literally a communist, you idiot”’, Reaction, July 25th, 2018, https://reaction.life/deconstructing-im-literally-a-communist-you-idiot/
