I lived in Iona Drive in Glasnevin all my life – well, until I was 25. It was a four-bedroom house of red brick. Our set-up was traditional in that my grandparents lived with us. It was their house, and my parents moved in when they married.

There were four rooms downstairs, including a kitchen and a dining room that had interconnecting doors into the living room. My grandparents lived upstairs and my parents downstairs — I have vague memories of a kitchen upstairs.

These living arrangements divided the house into two spaces, but it had only one entrance. When my grandfather became ill, he and my grandmother moved downstairs into what would become our dining room. My grandfather died when I was very young, and after his death my grandmother moved back upstairs into one of the bedrooms.

While my grandmother was still with us, my sister Deirdre had a bedroom to herself and I shared the remaining room with my brother Colm, who is three years younger than me. Brian, my other brother, arrived 10 years later.

I suppose you could say I came from a musical family. My mother played the piano and my father accompanied her on the mouth organ. They liked to play Great American Songbook standards such as I Only Have Eyes for You and Someone to Watch over Me. Their “gigs” together were an almost daily occurrence.

My primary school was only down the road, which meant I went home for lunch every day. My introduction to Frank Sinatra was through Frankie Byrne, an agony aunt on RTE Radio 1. It was a 15-minute slot, just before the one o’clock news, which began with a different Sinatra song every day. I became a Sinatra nut during those lunch hours.

After school I hung out with a gang of guys the same age. I’d come home, drop my schoolbag in the porch and disappear until teatime. We played football on the road, ran along the walls, stole from orchards and invaded other people’s back gardens, which never seemed to be a problem back then. Nowadays they’d call the police.

I found an old copy of A Swingin’ Affair! by Sinatra. He struck such a chord with me that I was unable to put him down after that. I started singing Sinatra songs in the shower before I’d go out to clubs, and on the bus into town my friend Ed would ask everybody on the top deck if they’d like to hear me sing.

About two years later I was with him and a couple of other fellas at a black-tie ball in the Mansion House. Ed introduced me from the stage and I was frogmarched up by another two fellas. I sang two songs, Night and Day and I’ve Got You Under My Skin, and came offstage floating. People cheered and whooped.

Then I kind of went overboard. They had to tell me to stop singing.

Now I probably have a repertoire of between 500 and 800 songs. Sinatra sang some 2,000.

When I was living in Iona Drive I used to swim a lot and learnt how to hold my breath for up to two minutes. This was a great foundation for learning how to hold a note. On Old Man River from Showboat, Sinatra holds a note for 18 seconds. Now I can match that.

I saw Sinatra on both occasions that he played Dublin. Without my parents I would never have discovered him. Iona Drive was where I first discovered the man and it still means home to me. I’ve been privileged to come from a great family — it was a great house to grow up in.

Sean Hession plays the National Concert Hall in Dublin with a 16-piece big band on May 13.

For further details log on to www.franklysinatra.com.

Interview by Alanna Gallagher

Explore Property

• Buying & Selling

• New Homes

• Overseas

• Interiors

• Investment

• Gardens

• Cool In Your Code

• Specials

• First-time buyer

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers