[srahman24]

We will hopefully be getting a new Damien Rice interview soon! Just a tidbit for now, from The O-Zone:

Thursday

The OZone scored a bit of a journalistic coup last week when notoriously publicity-shy musician Damien Rice finally agreed to do an interview. It was his first in three years, went very well, and I spend this morning writing it up.

Rice has certainly had an interesting decade. When his debut album O was released in 2002, he realistically expected it to shift something in the region of 1,000 copies. It has now sold more than two million worldwide.

The singer still seems somewhat bemused at O's massive success. "Well yeah, obviously it went a lot bigger than any of us had thought. Because I do remember a funny scenario where I was trying to figure out a payment for the band, you know, and I said to them, 'Do you want to get a percentage, or do you want to get payment?' And so we sat down and tried to calculate how many copies we thought we'd sell. So we tried to figure out if I paid them £100 a song, or something, would that be fair.

"And Shane [Fitzsimons], the bass player, who had been used to doing sessions for a number of different bands around Dublin said, 'I'll take the money' [laughs]. And I was like, 'Okay'. And then everyone else went on the percentage, and it was very funny . . . but we put him on a percentage later on, as a token gesture. It was funny. So, nobody had any idea."