Arlene Bailey

 

 

‘I was thinking about my childhood just yesterday,” says country-rock singer Arlene Bailey. “And when it comes to mental-health issues, there regularly seems to be some sort of a trigger from some childhood experience, but my childhood was idyllic, it really was. I couldn’t have had a better mam and dad.”

There isn’t, she believes, any easy answer to why she has suffered with mental-health issues from the age of about 15, only finally being diagnosed as having bipolar II within the last couple of years. “It’s just not always as black and white as ‘you went through something traumatic in the past’,” she says.

Arlene, now 43, brought up in Kildare, has just released her third album, Bailey, a collection of fierce, beautiful, country-rock songs in which she sings about love, lust, loss and pain, all with a deep reservoir of experience and hard-won knowledge in her voice. It is, she says with a laugh, “music that’s got a bit of arse to it”.

Her father’s side were singers, her mother’s side were musicians, and Arlene, from the age of about four, was a performer. “I sang mostly because of my dad,” she says now. “He recognised something in me. He’d give me stuff and say, ‘Listen to this, learn this’. A lot of it was American country. If we went on holidays — Salthill, Tramore — any opportunity he had to get me on stage with a band, he’d take it. I’d go up grudgingly, and then never want to get back down again.” Keep reading here

 

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