The words of Paul Rooney's sung and spoken pieces deal with everyday subjects that are made strange via lo-fi post-punk experimental-folk music or by narrative daftness, stressing the absurdity of our attempts to make meaning out of the world. From 1998 to 2000 he released three lo-fi punk pop albums as the band ‘Rooney’ (see http://www.last.fm/label/Common+Culture), featuring in John Peel’s Festive Fifty in 1998, as well as recording a session for Peel's Radio 1 show a year later (which was re-broadcast on BBC 6 Music in 2016). The lyrics of every Rooney song obsessively described mundane life, from looking at found photographs to doodling on a call centre shift. Paul's next release, the 2007 12" single Lucy Over Lancashire, released on SueMi Records of Berlin and featuring a monologue by a satanic Lancastrian 'spryte of the air', was described by Marc Riley of BBC 6 Music as "a masterpiece". His work has been played on BBC Radios 1, 3, 6 Music, Cymru and Scotland amongst many other stations. His first full length album since 2000, Futile Exorcise, experimental post-punk folk revenant songs of ghosts playing poker and haunting toilet seats, was released in 2017 on Owd Scrat Records. From 2000 he has also made audio-visual and text art works for galleries, that, like the records, mostly present an oblique take on ordinary moments and familiar places – along with the pasts that haunt them. http://www.paulrooney.info/about-2/
