From this month‘s issue of GCN: Jack O’Rourke’s Silence, released to wide acclaim during the marriage referendum last year, is a gay coming of age song. It was a long and difficult road to get to the point of writing it, he tells Brian Finnegan.

This time last year, in the lead-up to the marriage referendum, a raft of Irish artists released singles in support of a Yes vote. A few rose to the top, among them Ciara Sidine’s ‘People Get Ready’, and The Nualas’ ‘Yes2Love’, but of all the songs calling for equality, by far the most moving was Cork native Jack O’Rourke’s ‘Silence’.

A stripped-back piano ballad about a boy’s struggle to come to terms with himself as he grows up gay, it’s so deeply personal that O’Rourke’s parents weren’t sure he should release it in the first place. “They were really impressed when I played it for them, but they worried that it was too honest, that I was making myself vulnerable,” he tells me over coffee in GCN’s offices on a rainy Friday evening. “But I thought I’m old enough, big and ugly enough to put it out there.”

Chatting away on the GCN sofa, O’Rourke comes across as very confident in his own skin, but it wasn’t always this way.

“I didn’t come out until I was 25,” he says. “You know the way a lot of homophobes turn out to be gay? Well I was the opposite of that. I had lots of gay friends. I was so down with it, but I wasn’t out myself. I think I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be the best heterosexual ever’. It went on for many years. I went out with a lot of girls.”

At the same time O’Rourke was progressing through school and college, graduating to study music at UCC, and fronting a number of bands along the way. His life of performing with his mates might have seemed carefree on the surface, but behind the scenes, it was anything but. “I was on a very self-destructive path,” he says. “I was drinking a lot and I would often have to be very drunk to get on stage. I really had no self-confidence; I became almost a caricature of myself. It’s very difficult to lie unless you’re playing a part. So, performing was about hiding for me.”

Eventually it was O’Rourke’s mother who called it. “She asked me if I was gay, and I was able to say it,” he says. “Then when I did come out I felt the need to tell everyone I was gay. I think I was saying it to so many people, it was kind of saying ‘it’s alright’ to myself.”

Describing his journey towards coming out and beyond as one of “self-acceptance rather than the acceptance of other people,” O’Rourke says the song ‘Silence’ “kind of wrote itself.”

“It fell out. It talks about listening to Maria Callas and being almost ashamed, wanting to push myself aside rather than indulge it. I was rejecting stereotypes, and in doing so rejecting myself. It’s about what many young guys and girls go through.”

‘Silence’ appeared on O’Rourke’s debut EP, which he released last year, a collection of songs that delve into similarly personal territory. “One song, ‘Shining For You’ is about the dark time in my life before coming out. It’s like a love letter to myself for getting through it and coming out the other side. ‘Naivety’ is about the ending of my first relationship with a guy. It’s another letter to my past, nostalgic and hopeful for the future at the same time.”

Although O’Rourke was given a coveted spot on to The Late Late Show to perform ‘Silence’, it wasn’t until after the referendum. “RTÉ were very paranoid about playing it beforehand. It’s not a call to arms. It’s just a story, at the end of the day, but it elicited empathy, for the gay experience. It was getting no play at all. My dad said I should write a ‘No’ song as well, so I could get it on the radio!’

By day, O’Rourke job-shares as a music teacher in a Cork secondary school. He’s fascinated about the difference he sees in young gay people today. “If kids want to come out, and do come out at my school, as far as I can see nobody bats an eyelid. It’s really good to them coming out at 15 or 16; they still have their own journeys to go through, but they inhabit it and own it. A few of my mates have said there’s a slight envy there, but you can be empathetic towards them too, because it’s great, we’re all moving on.”

In his non-teaching time, he’s working on his debut album, Dreamcatcher, which will be released later this year, and performing to packed houses across the country. His rapidly growing fanbase might be put down to the fact that he’s not using the stage to hide his true identity away these days.

“Now I feel very comfortable when I go out on stage,” he says. “It’s a weird juxtaposition because you’re making yourself quite vulnerable, but it’s almost like a release.”

Jack O’Rourke’s EP, ‘The Other Side of Now’, is currently on release. He plays The Academy on May 6, tickets from ticketmaster.ie