Glen Hansard: ‘Funny as it sounds with all the success, the money is not something that you just have’

“You have to enter Dublin like a Spitfire. Full armour.”

In a hotel room in New York, Glen Hansard is pacing the thick carpet as he directs his thoughts over a WhatsApp video call, describing a typical day in his hometown. “Often Irish people will just come up and start a conversation in the middle: they don’t bother with the hello.”

In Helsinki, where Hansard winters with his wife, the Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, and their son, Christy, it’s different. “It’s great for me, because – not to sound like an eejit – no one gives a f**k. In Dublin you might be a bit self-conscious. You have to have the energy.”

It’s unsurprising that many Dubliners feel they can dispense with the formalities. Ever since he played Outspan Foster in The Commitments, the Alan Parker film, from 1991, of Roddy Doyle’s first novel, Hansard has been a mainstay of Ireland’s cultural scene.

With an Oscar for the song Falling Slowly, which he wrote with Markéta Irglová, his Swell Season partner, for Once, the other iconic film he was involved in, and any number of fantastic records to his name, whether with The Frames or Swell Season or as a solo artist, Hansard is a household name even in households that aren’t interested in music.

These days there’s more salt and pepper than flame in the beard, and with his neat black jumper, earring and good haircut, he’s half indie rock musician, half coolly minimalist Silicon Valley tech employee as he flashes a tentative grin.

But Hansard still has a will-o’-the-wisp way about him: we talk not the first time we’re meant to but in an impromptu way, after he texts two days later, apologising. Turns out he bumped into a pal who inveigled him into an encounter with the black stuff, leading to an epic hangover and a tech hiccup.