Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic At the start of this month, one of Ireland’s biggest stars played his biggest headline gig in the UK. The venue was Finsbury Park, a municipal green space in north London — muddy from earlier downpours, but fortuitously sunny when Hozier made his appearance. He thanked the crowd for collectively willing away the rain clouds of the damp British summer.Craning my neck to see the singer-songwriter, I was reminded of a riddling line from his latest album, Unreal Unearth. “Are there limits to any emptiness?” he asks on one of its tracks. At Finsbury Park, the answer lay in front of him. Empty when he did his soundcheck a few hours before, its expanse was now filled with 45,000 people, a bobbing mass of heads stretching into the distance.The next day, I meet Hozier at a swish hotel in another part of the city. The musician, full name Andrew Hozier-Byrne, is sitting with a Caesar salad and a black coffee at the back of a dining room overlooking a different London park, Kensington Gardens. Tall and slender, with long hair drawn back in a man bun, he has a thoughtful manner. He looks down at an angle towards the floor when starting sentences, but ends them by looking me directly in the eyes.After the previous night’s show he had been “pretty wired until late”, he tells me. Adrenaline was the reason, it turns out, not some mad bacchanal. “Gin o’clock”, to quote another of his songs, is absent from Hozier’s tour schedule. “I think when I was a younger man I would have been burning the candle a little bit,” the 34-year-old says, prodding at the salad. “I wasn’t crazy, but it’s just realising I function better and I’m happier when I’m sleeping better and drinking less. Touring is all about personal maintenance, keeping your body and mind at a functioning level.” His current tour comes a decade after “Take Me to Church”, his gospel-blues breakthrough hit about sex and sin that charted worldwide in 2014. Some thought it would be a fluke, that the young man with a guitar from County Wicklow was destined to be a one-hit wonder. But he is still notching them up. In April, he became the first Irish artist to have a US number one single since Sinéad O’Connor in 1990 with his song “Too Sweet”. It is a sleekly seductive number whose hedonistic protagonist stays up late: wired, too — on whiskey and coffee this time.The next leg in the tour is the US. Among the dates is an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, an iconic fixture in the musical calendar. It is where the axe-wielding folk revivalist Pete Seeger apocryphally threatened to sever the power cable when Bob Dylan swapped acoustic folk for electric rock in 1965. Hozier has played the festival before. He used to scour the internet for videos of the famous folk and roots musicians who have graced its stages.“As soon as YouTube was a thing [after 2005], it was a way that I could watch all these voices that I had only ever heard on CD and in my dad’s record collection,” he says. “I could see footage of Skip James playing or Muddy Waters playing.”Love for these vintage bluesmen came to Hozier via his father, John Byrne, a blues drummer. His mother, Raine Hozier-Byrne, is an artist who did the cover artwork for his first two albums, 2014’s Hozier and 2019’s Wasteland, Baby!. He initially grew up in Blackrock, a Dublin suburb, his father having swapped life as a gigging musician for the more reliable income of an office job. The family moved to rural County Wicklow, south of the city, when Hozier was a small child. His childhood was steeped in classic soul, R&B and blues. So are his songs. Combined with his poetical lyrics, they place him on the Van Morrison wing of Irish music, a form of Celtic rock ’n’ soul. He has a powerfully resonant voice, one moment intimately crooning as though into the shell of the listener’s ear, the next doing bluesy hollers. The style comes naturally to him. “There’s not a kind of persona or anything that I’ve attempted to cultivate on stage,” he says.“Too Sweet” owes its chart success to TikTok, where it took off before being released as a single. But Hozier does not subscribe to the always-online logic of modern pop stardom.“There was maybe a time when I would share more of my personal life on social media,” he says, “but I found myself feeling more alienated rather than connected. It doesn’t feel that there’s anything authentic about it at all if you’re going out of your way to do it.”His father suffered a life-changing injury after a failed spinal operation when Hozier was a boy. “I wouldn’t necessarily go into that all too much,” he says of its impact on his outlook. “I definitely bore witness to a very broad range of stuff from a young age that was challenging and difficult — to see a loved one suffering. But everything in my experience colours the lens through which I look at the world.”At 16, he joined the long-running choral troupe Anúna, singing traditional music from different eras and places. He studied music at Trinity College, Dublin, but dropped out when Universal Music Ireland offered him studio time to record his songs. “Take Me to Church” was a slow-burn hit. Released in 2013, it went viral thanks to its music video, which transplanted verses about sexual repression and the Irish Catholic church into the topic of institutionalised homophobia in Russia. The song was adopted as an LGBT+ anthem. At Finsbury Park, he ended its rendition by tying a rainbow flag to the microphone stand. His continuing popularity with an LGBT+ audience was clear from the many same-sex couples present, especially female ones. Some fans have even gone so far as to nickname him “King of the Lesbians”. He gives a bashful laugh when I mention this honorific. “It is an extraordinary one,” he says, eyes fixed downwards, as though gathering his thoughts. “I think that’s part of making any piece of work, watching it grow and change and be interpreted and adopted. I can’t really comment on the ‘King of the Lesbians’ type thing. I feel honoured,” he says now looking me in the face, “that the song has meant so much to people.”Unreal Unearth is, for me, his best album. It wears some very weighty influences with impressive naturalness. The cover artwork, which shows his smiling mouth, was partly influenced by Samuel Beckett’s monologue play Not I, in which only the actor’s mouth is made visible. The songs are inspired by the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. James Joyce is a frequent reference point in his music, while Seamus Heaney’s deathbed words — “Noli timere” (“Don’t be afraid” in Latin) — are tattooed on his arm.“Certainly as an Irish musician or anybody who is putting pen to paper in Ireland, the work of Joyce or Heaney has shaped the creative collective consciousness in a big way,” he says. The idea that these mighty names of literature are too lofty to be cited in popular music is alien to him. “This is a canon of work that I believe belongs to everybody, regardless of whether you’ve done a degree in it or not. I think it’s an awful shame not to celebrate that and enjoy it.”His tour ends in November in New Zealand. There will be more days to come hoping for rain to clear, and more nights lying in bed afterwards wired on the buzz of live performance. “There are times when your brain goes, ‘OK, there are 45,000 people here and they’re all singing the lyrics’,” he says. “It’s a really wonderful moment.”hozier.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
