Cheryl's Healing Harmonies! 24/6/13

Image compliments of Patrick Duddy Photography

Cheryl-Ann McEvoy is a new young talent whose name is becoming increasingly known in the City’s Music scene. Cheryl started playing as a result of having an operation on her hand. She used the movement and practice as therapy in her healing.  

“It was about three years ago I started playing guitar. I had an operation on my hand and it was really just to make my hand start to move. My daddy’s guitar was always sitting around the house and to start with I tried to play it and played the same old ‘Smoke on the Water’ or ‘Teenage Kicks’ and then I thought that I really did want to learn. I kind of fell in love with it. My daddy’s been everywhere with music so it’s always been running in the family. Then coming to the Tech in September 2010 brought out my confidence. I was able to get up in front of people and start singing properly. Started writing songs, the Tech gave me the confidence to start writing. Now it’s like the yin and yang, everywhere you see me there’s a guitar somewhere, it’s pretty much everything that I do now.”

As any proud father would Cheryl’s dad went out to buy a guitar as a present to encourage her but it wasn’t quite what Cheryl expected. “My first guitar, I cringe about it all the time, was pink! I hate pink! Anyone that knows me, knows I hate pink. It was pretty cringy but I got up and sang with that then. That one actually got broken by accident and then my daddy gave me his, it’s really old so that meant a lot to him that I was playing it.  My daddy thought it would be class, because I was a girl to have a pink guitar. I came down one morning, a Christmas morning and it was sitting there. I was like ‘Aw, that’s nice, it’s pink but it’s nice’. It was a lovely guitar, just pink but I ended up with his and I still have his now, it’s the only one I use.”

Cheryl’s attachment to the guitar her dad gave her grew when the original owner of the instrument passed away last year. “The guitar belonged to a friend of his, Seamus McBrearty. He was a golfer so the guitar just sat about the house. He sold it to my daddy and the next thing was he died then, last year. There would be a bigger emotional attachment to that. That guitar is the only guitar I can write with, I couldn’t write with anything else, I get memo blocks. It’s the only one I can actually put music to songs with.”

Like many students leaving school Cheryl was faced with the decision of heading off to uni or staying at home. She chose staying at home and concentrating on her music. “Rocket ship was written on the back of an envelope. I was playing on going to uni this year and my acceptance letter, the envelope that was in it was huge, from Cambridge like so it was one of those big letter saying ‘Do Not Bend’ and all that. I started getting idea in my head and I’ve always had a thing for rocket ships and I thought ‘Right, I’m going to write a song about a rocket ship’ and it just sort of came out. At the minute, here in Derry there’s a lot going on for music, there’s a lot of people being seen about like SOAK and different people. It’s not somewhere at the moment that’s being overlooked in the music scene. People are still making it big, look at The Clameens now making a start. It’s that process of going from your home town and getting there from your home town is far better than trying to find it somewhere else. It means more if you’re coming from your home town I think.”

Studying music at the North West Regional College has seen Cheryl’s song writing and confidence come on leaps and bounds. She’s now in a band and will soon be releasing an EP.

“Studying music now, first year of music finished, second year next year. It was class, the amount of people I met and the amount of musical ideas that have come out of Tech were amazing. Started writing a lot of stuff too for the band that we’re in ‘Don’t Get Personal’ , I’m kinda the front woman of that. There’s a lot going on. I’m going into the recording studio soon so we’ll get that EP out as soon as possible.

I do a lot of cover stuff and that’s how I fund my own stuff. I bought a wee home studio, especially for writing, maybe not for recording and doing my EP on but anytime I write something I would record it straight away.  My gigs are funding that, I don’t do any full original gigs yet because I want to have a full set that I’m able to do. I do a lot of stuff my own way and use the open mic nights to play my own tunes.”

Cheryl is running an open mic night for singer/songwriters and musicians similar to herself every Tuesday Night in Masons. It will offer a platform to people like Cheryl who may not have enough material to fill an entire gig with original music but who still want their music to be heard.