A grandmother’s grocery bag is not the most likely place to find the inspiration for a career but among the twisted brown paper bags of carrots and cauliflower, a battered copy of Bill Withers’ “Still Bill” lay in wait to work its magic. Having grown up in a household with little to no music to be heard, the ten-year-old recipient was so enamoured with this worn gift that he consequently began his own collection of vintage albums. This collection grew to cover many walls and floors through schools, colleges, digs and houses, spanning the works of numerous soul and folk singers, and leading the young Oliver Darley to spend many hours sitting on floors next to a second-hand record player, scribbling his own lyrics and impersonating everyone from Tim Buckley to Scott Walker.

His voice found its first home at boarding school, not in the choir as might be expected, but as the lead singer of Beltegeux, the school’s first fully fledged rock band - a group that continued for more than ten years with some shocking costume decisions along the way. Oliver’s success in the group led to his first offer of a recording deal at the age of 17 - an offer decisively squashed in alarm by parents and teachers alike. Thus Oliver was compelled to take the only path available to him - three years at college. Years he would fill with performances in as many live shows as possible.

Later, while living above a fresh fish stall and performing acting roles with The Royal Shakespeare Company, in order to sate a continued desire to write and sing, with a couple of friends he opened what would turn out to be the first of three live music clubs. The Regency Rooms became one of London’s most successful cabaret nights, helping launch the careers of many of our most popular comedians, including Matt Lucas and David Walliams, Armstrong and Miller and Sacha Baron Cohen.

It was during an evening at The Regency Rooms that Oliver was first spotted and within a week, was signed to Warners to record an album of the exact music he had listened to all those years before. Emboldened by the interest, Oliver asked if he could contact Arif Mardin – a name embedded in his mind from long scrutiny of countless influential album sleeves - to enquire if Mardin would have any interest in working on the project, insisting that a couple of recent demo tracks were sent along with the letter. Eyebrows were raised but the request granted and it wasn’t long before a tall, skinny boy from north London was sitting in a certain lush apartment overlooking Central Park, being poured a cup of tea by an immaculately dressed Mardin and sharing vintage stories of Sam Cooke and shotguns over fresh, white, crust-trimmed sandwiches. This meeting and Arif’s subsequent enthusiasm for the quality of Oliver’s voice resulted in a gold-selling album and performances alongside artists such as Joan Armatrading, B.B.King and Ray Charles.

Back home the singing continued, pulling him in one direction after another, from large tours to the regular slots at his London clubs, where people would return week after week to hear him perform on stage, alone, with a piano and a glass of Jack Daniels. But he was still singing other people’s songs and increasingly realising it wasn’t what he wanted to do. With Mardin’s words on the power and importance of a well-crafted song ringing in his ears, and an overwhelming desire to return to his days of scribbling lyrics, Oliver decided to make a change. And with all the ties he had in London, he knew that change had to take place somewhere else, somewhere entirely fresh and unknown.

So, when the opportunity arose for him to move to Dublin, a melting pot for so much creative talent, he took it. Having bought himself a guitar, he shut himself away, and set about the task of fulfilling the long-held wish to write his own compositions. The cloud of extended insomnia gradually passed, and, through the haze of early mornings and Guinness, late nights and belly laughs with visiting friends, walks along the coast, through dressing up warm against that cold and rain, to the rugby matches and tales in pubs, through the birth of his nephew back in England and the trickling away of time, the songs of “The Castaway” were born.