From St Mary's Gym to Manhattan
Mullingar musician Max Ceddo comes full circle with nostalgic new single
Thomas Lyons
A grainy video from a school fundraiser in St Mary’s CBS Gym in March 1991 is bringing back a flood of memories for people across Mullingar.
For those who attended the concert, the faces in the crowd are instantly recognisable. Teachers patrol the aisles, students cheer on friends from the stage, and a teenage band called The Phantom Limb perform with all the confidence and ambition of young musicians convinced the world is theirs for the taking.
Thirty-five years later, that long-forgotten footage has found a new audience after being incorporated into the official music video for Elected For This, the latest single from Mullingar native Cedric O’Gorman, also known as Max Ceddo.
For O’Gorman, the song is much more than a nostalgic look back at school days. It is a tribute to friendship, youthful ambition and the town that shaped him before life took him halfway across the world.
Born and raised on the Dublin Road, Cedric attended St Mary’s CBS, where his father Tony O’Gorman spent almost three decades as a respected teacher before becoming vice-principal. Generations of Mullingar students will remember Mr O’Gorman, who retired in 1999 and, at 92 years of age, remains in good health.
After leaving school, Cedric studied medicine at University College Galway before training in psychiatry. Like many Irish graduates of his generation, he looked abroad for opportunities and moved to New York 25 years ago.
“I was always fascinated by New York,” he recalls. “My older brother and sister had lived there, I’d visited during college summers and I just loved the city.”
Although medicine provided a successful career, music was never far from his thoughts.
“I’d been writing songs since I was about 14. Even when I was working in pharmaceuticals and running clinical trials, I never lost the feeling that music was what I was supposed to be doing.”
For almost two decades, O’Gorman built a career in corporate America, working in the pharmaceutical industry in Manhattan. But in late 2023, he made what many would consider a remarkable leap of faith, leaving behind a secure profession to pursue songwriting and recording full-time.
“I suppose I served my sentence,” he laughs. “I’d put in the years in medicine and pharmaceuticals and reached the point where I thought, if I don’t try this now, I probably never will.”
The decision has proved fruitful. Working independently, Max Ceddo has released 25 singles and two albums in less than three years. His music has accumulated more than three million Spotify streams, and his audience continues to grow steadily across digital platforms.
Today he has around 65,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, almost 50,000 Instagram followers and a YouTube audience approaching half a million subscribers.
For an artist without a major record label behind him, those numbers represent years of consistent work.
“I knew nothing about social media when I started,” he admits, “but what’s the point in releasing music if nobody hears it? So I learned how to use YouTube, Instagram and Spotify properly and just kept putting out songs every month.”
While his current musical home is New York, Mullingar remains at the heart of much of his songwriting.
Elected For This
His latest single, Elected For This, reflects on the school band he formed with classmates Oisín Masterson and Ronan Casey during their years at St Mary’s.
The Phantom Limb became something of a local fixture, performing school concerts and gigs around town, including shows at the Yukon and The Stables, venues fondly remembered by many local music fans and even referenced in the song’s lyrics.
The recently released music video uses original footage from the band’s benefit concert for Zambia in St Mary’s gym, filmed in 1991.
Watching it today is like opening a time capsule.
The audience is packed with familiar Mullingar faces, while a roll call of well-known teachers appears throughout the video, including Tony O’Gorman, Mary Geary, the late Liam Geary and even Fr Nulty, now Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin.
For former pupils, the video is likely to spark memories three decades old: “There are so many students in the footage that I couldn’t possibly name them all. I’m sure plenty of people around Mullingar will recognise themselves or their friends.”
The song, however, goes deeper than simple nostalgia. O’Gorman says that while it recalls the excitement of teenage musicians dreaming of making it big, it ultimately became a reflection on lifelong friendships.
“As teenagers, every little drama in the band seemed like the most important thing in the world, finding a drummer, someone leaving, who was going to play what. Looking back now, those little moments became a metaphor for the friendships we formed.”
He describes one line he wrote while reflecting on the project: “We didn’t all play instruments, but we were all in the band.”
It’s a sentiment likely to resonate with anyone who remembers growing up in Mullingar during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Despite living in Manhattan for a quarter of a century, O’Gorman’s ties to home remain strong. He returns to Ireland several times a year, making a point of spending time with his father and reconnecting with lifelong friends. “I still come back regularly because my bonds with Mullingar run deep,” he says. “Those friendships have lasted all these years.”
His decision to perform under the name Max Ceddo also has its own story. The surname is a shortened variation of Cedric, while ‘Max’ was chosen because it could function both as a first name and as shorthand for maximum, a flexible identity should his solo project eventually evolve into a full band.
The next chapter, he says, will involve taking the songs from the studio to the stage.
Having concentrated on recording and releasing music over the last two years, live performances are now firmly in his sights.
“I’ve built up enough material now,” he says. “I’ve focused on releasing one song every month, but the next step is definitely getting out and performing more.”
For now, though, it is Elected For This that is attracting attention, not simply because of its polished indie-pop sound, but because it captures a uniquely Mullingar story.
Long before streaming platforms, social media followers and New York recording studios, there was a school gym, three ambitious teenagers, and a benefit concert in aid of Zambia.
Few of those watching that afternoon in 1991 could have imagined that the performance would one day feature in a professionally produced music video viewed around the world.
Yet for Cedric O’Gorman, the footage serves as a reminder that success is not measured only in streams or subscribers – sometimes it is found in the friendships that survive decades, the memories that refuse to fade, and the town that continues to inspire the songs, no matter how far from Mullingar life may take you.