MAGIC MUNDY

HIS debut album may have the gelatinous title of Jelly Legs, but the time is coming soon when Edmund Enright will have to prove to the world that he doesn't have feet of clay. You see, Mundy - as he is known to friends and fans alike - is being touted as Ireland's newest folk hero, a worthy heir to the legacy of Bob Dylan or Arlo Guthrie. Which, for a fresh faced 21 year old from Birr, Co Offaly, must be a heavy burden to bear indeed. No wonder the legs might be feeling a little wobbly.

Mundy signed to the Sony owned label in August 1995, and has spent the past 15 months winning hearts and minds with his exuberant live persona. When he toured with Alanis Morissette earlier this year in Manchester, Glasgow and London, he impressed many a punter with his direct, unpretentious style. He's had three singles out so far - Pardon Me, To You I Bestow and Life's A Cinch - and his first long player is produced by heavyweight knobtwiddler Youth, a man who turned out to be a kindred spirit to Mundy's budding young soul.

"He's a really spiritual man, he's like a guru," says Mundy. "One of the nicest people I've ever met, totally into his music, well into his vibes and sounds, not really a technical person. A total hippie, of course. He's into setting the right mood, with the plants around us just to get that earthy feel. I went to the toilet in his recording studio and there was a framed front page of a newspaper from 1970 announcing the death of Jimi Hendrix, and he had it under the toilet bowl. I thought, respect for that."

By my calculations (and I'm not very technical either), Mundy was born five years after Hendrix's death, yet his music travels back to those halcyon days of rock, and freeze frames some of its more special moments, like when Dylan went electric, or when Neil Young first took the stage with Crosby, Stills and Nash. Real events for many old hippies, but true myths and legends for a whole generation who weren't around at the time. Is Mundy's music fuelled by rock's rich mythology?

was really into Jimi Hendrix, but I don't play lead guitar or anything like that. But they all started me. I bought and got a lend of records like Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Dylan when I was about 14, and when I listened to stuff from the 1980s, I could see that they got influenced by the same thing."

Not that Mundy spent his entire youth immersed in the sounds of the 1960s - he did buy the odd contemporary album, like R.E.M.'s Green. The Athens, Georgia band didn't sign to a major label till their sixth album, by which time they had already built up enough cred to make them worth $80 million today. Mundy, on the other hand, has been on a major right from day one, but he would still prefer the slow burn method to the flash in the pan madness.

"I think a lot of artists record their first album, it becomes successful, and then they go into a totally different thing, they try to jump past the second and third album and do the fourth album. They want to be like The Beatles straight away. I think you've got to build. I think it's important to be like R.E.M. in that respect."

Birr wasn't exactly Athens, Georgia, but it was the starting point for Edmund Enright's musical odyssey, and he formed his first band while he was still in school: "nothing serious, just twiddling around on the electric guitar". He also got a regular slot at the pub owned by his parents, busking a bunch of tunes for the entertainment of the patrons. At this early stage, Mundy confesses, he had no interest in listening to or writing lyrics.

It wasn't until after he left school that the power of words began to take hold of him, and he began to listen more closely to the lyrics of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. "They were songwriters that actually gave me shivers, and I'd never been affected like that before. I got shivers through sounds, but never through words. I guess I was just taken into another dimension completely."

And so, in the space of a rhyme or two, Mundy discovered the world of songwriting, where words can wrap themselves around simple chord shapes and have a more profound effect than any painfully constructed guitar solo. Not quite the Road to Damascus - more like the Dirt Track to Woodstock, but for the young Edmund, it was like discovering a whole new world of possibilities.

"I thought how amazing it would be to touch someone with my thoughts and my words as other songwriters touch me. That's what fascinated me about the whole thing, and that's actually why I do it, because if you've got something good to say, and you put it into a song, you can let the whole world hear your thoughts and, philosophy."

So do you have a particular philosophy that you're trying to put across in your songs? "I don't go around saying this is how it should be done", or anything like that. I don't write like that. All I do is I write about what I'm going through or what's affecting me, or what way I'm being taken over by things.

"One night I was playing in the Baggot Inn, and I had just written Gin And Tonic Sky, and this guy came up to me and said, man, that's such a brilliant song, how could you actually share that with everyone? Then he told me the whole story of his engagement breaking up, and he was nearly crying. I was like, man, I only wrote the song, I didn't come here to be an agony aunt!"

Mundy came to Dublin in 1992 leaving his parents' pub in Birr to embrace the musical culture of the capital, and he began busking on Grafton Street and guesting at Dave Murphy's weekly Songwriter's Night, upstairs at McDaid's pub. It was at this Tuesday Night Music Club that Mundy's own songs began to take shape, and although many of them were tossed aside after one airing, others showed more staying, power, and some have even lasted, right through to the debut album.

AT this stage in the game Mundy was still a bit of a fledgling, but when UK management type Sally Anne Cooper, acting on a tip off, went to Dublin to see the young Mr Enright perform, she was convinced of the boy's star potential. Cooper and her partner Paul White put Mundy on their books and then sent acoustic demos of their new client to a few record labels, almost starting a bidding war for this bright young buck; only the intervention of Epic A&R manager Alfie Hollingsworth, closed the deal and stopped a chequebook waving arms race.

It was harder, however, to keep a check on the media enthusiasm, and before Mundy even released his first record, such august organs as Melody Maker, Hot Press and The Irish Times were including him in their tips for 1996. "Neil Young meets Kurt Cobain," enthused the Maker's Paul Mathur; "the Irish Michael Stipe," added Ireland's rock fortnightly; "Arlo Guthrie energised by punk," chipped in your humble Times critic. Mundy is somewhat wary of such comparisons, and he definitely felt the pressure when he took the stage at the Heineken Green Energy Festival gig last May.

"The press has blown it all out of all proportion," he says. "I was a bit nervous at that gig because I thought that people were going to expect a bit too much from me. All I can do is all I can give, and where it takes me is where I'm going, you know, and I'm ready for anywhere."