At home with: Shampain in Galway

Teenagers in Inverin, back then, weren’t typically into dance music and basketball, and as a result, Cóilí “didn’t have a lot of friends”. However, he’s quick to point out that his hometown is not the same as it was 10 years ago. “If you go back to Inverin now and talk to people who do music and stuff, everyone’s lovely,” he says. “It’s just at the time, when you’re younger, you feel like the world’s against you. And I still meet people today who give out about Ireland for the same thing; they had a bad experience, and they’re automatically like, ‘I fuckin’ hate [where they’re from], it’s so backwards’, but it’s not really like, [they] just had a bad time.”

The years of Cóilí longing to be from New York are well over. Today, he often leans into his own Inverin-rooted culture. “When I did my Boiler Room, for example, the first track I played was a track from Inverin,” he says, citing the song ‘Cailleach an Airgid’. “My friends were just like, ‘Whoa, that’s crazy to think that we used to do that one in primary school, and now you’re playing it on Boiler Room, and it’s perceived as really cool, you know?’ And I think that’s just really, really cool.”

After lunch, we browse the labyrinthine Charlie Bryne’s Bookshop before settling into the red banquettes of Freeney’s Bar. Over another cup of tea, Cóilí tells us about his time at National University of Ireland in Galway, where he studied Journalism and had his first foray into DJing.

Cóilí had a show on the college radio station, Flirt FM, where he interviewed local people in music, like the DJ/promoter duo Maze, who ran parties in local club Carbon. After one such party, Cóilí started chatting with one of the pair in the DJ booth, and was shown how to mix a few tracks. “I was like, ‘Fuck, why didn’t I do this sooner?’” he says. “The second I did, I really enjoyed it. And I had so many CDs, I used to be listening to music constantly.”