Man Alive

"Kodaline guitarist Mark Prendergast hadn’t always intended to go solo, and when he did he almost didn’t land on the pseudonym Man Alive. For a year, up until just weeks before releasing his debut single ‘Be Someone’, the musician was going to launch the project under the banner of Blood Type until a friend told him, “that name is s**t and it just doesn’t match your music”. That friend was actor, comedy genius and fellow Irish export Aisling Bea. She’s part of the reason he’s here today as Man Alive, but more on her later.
 
The important thing is that Prendergast realised that the name represented an “opportunity to create a whole new entity, world and persona” outside of what you already know him for. He remains enigmatic about the meaning of Man Alive, but ultimately “it just fits the music”.
 
A decade since Kodaline’s debut album ‘In A Perfect World’, Prendergast steps out as Man Alive having found his own voice. “I've always written songs and demoed them for myself, but I’ve never released them because I wasn’t the singer in the band,” he says. “Then, and I hate to bring it up, but it was a f**king lockdown thing – I broke up with a girl I was dating for a couple of years and then went into lockdown, and ended up writing a tonne of songs that were just so personal.
 
“I never had aspirations to be a singer, ever, but the songs were just too personal to hand over to someone else to sing.”