Will the real Paul Brady please stand up?
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Paul Brady released his debut album Rural Oral in 2024, featuring tracks such as “FastBuck” and “Marmalade”.Image 2 of 4
Rapper and DJ Paul Brady back home at his dad Gerry’s The Orchard bar in Drumalee. LEFT: Brady raps about having a speech impediment, turning something that might once have been treated as a flaw into part of the music.Image 3 of 4
Brady’s confidence to get into rap came after he was called on stage to spit a verse at a Ghostface Killah gig in Dublin.Image 4 of 4
Brady raps about having a speech impediment, turning something that might once have been treated as a flaw into part of the music.There are worse ways to begin a hip-hop career than standing at the front of a Dublin nightclub in a Wu-Tang T-shirt, clutching a vinyl copy of Ironman and waiting for Ghostface Killah to notice you.
For Paul Brady, the two are connected.
The Cavan rapper and DJ has spent the better part of 12 years living and working in the Netherlands, building a body of music around a deceptively simple idea: if you are going to rap, be “authentic”.
Because, as the internet will quickly inform you, there is another Paul Brady.
One is the celebrated Irish folk-rock singer, a veteran of decades of recording and touring. The other is a Cavan man who has lived in Jamaica and Mallorca, transplanted himself in Amsterdam and released Rural Oral, the 2024 project featuring tracks such as “FastBuck” and “Marmalade”.
The distinction matters. Yet there is something gloriously Irish about an algorithm being forced to make it.
Brady’s story starts with leaving Ireland for Cyprus, then London, where his sister Julianne was working in a cocktail bar. Though Brady had grown up around the bar business - his father Gerry runs The Orchard in Drumalee - cocktails were a new language. After deciding he'd had enough of British drizzle, Brady upped and left for sunny Santa Ponsa.
At 19, the Cavan man became resident DJ at the popular Green Hills. DJing since he was 16, mostly at 18ths and 21sts, his strategy was to give people what they want “until the drinks kick in”.
“I’d literally rock up with Now, 41, disc one, disc two.”
What Brady was really into at the time was the House music genre Dirty Dutch: huge synths and four-to-the-floor beats.
The Green Hills gig was part happenstance. The club needed equipment and he had it.
Brady ended up playing seven nights a week: midnight to 3am, or 3am to 6am.
But then winter arrived and, as with seasonal resorts, the shutters came down. The strip emptied. The party moved elsewhere. Brady wasn’t interested in repeating the seasonal migration.
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