interview with Irish broadcaster RT\u00c9 in February, external<\/a>, Hansard said he learned to play the guitar as a child after one was left in his home by an uncle who had gone to prison.<\/p>\nBallymun was one of Dublin’s most economically deprived areas in the 1980s, hit hard by unemployment, crime and drug addiction. <\/p>\n
“I was on a kind of a trajectory of getting into the drugs – only gently – getting heavy into drinking, very young, beginning to kind of break into things, just getting into that slightly dodgy spot,” Hansard said.<\/p>\n
But a Bob Dylan cassette, given to him by his girlfriend’s brother, changed the path of his life.<\/p>\n
“I listened to Bob Dylan and everything, like my whole world just went into the opposite – flipped,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I stayed in the bedroom, I played Bob Dylan songs every day, I learned my craft, I decided music was all I cared about.<\/p>\n
“So that was a real turnaround for me, it was a life changer and I suddenly had my path.”<\/p>\n
He said he was also fortunate that his headmaster at school encouraged him down the path of music.<\/p>\n
Hansard said he told him: “I can’t guarantee you’ll be famous, but if you start now, then you’ll always be able to live from your guitar.” <\/p>\n
He left school at 13, and went on to form The Frames and sign his first record deal in 1990, the same year he became part of the cast of The Commitments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It all started with a guitar and a cassette tape. In an interview with Irish broadcaster RT\u00c9 in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":720061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-720060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/720061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}