Bressie comes out fighting
He fantasises about killing Bertie and Biffo, armed himself with a baseball bat during the London riots and has some choice words for people who think he walked out on The Blizzards. He’s also made a solo album, Colourblind Stereo, which he hopes people will care about enough not to illegally download. Niall Breslin pulls no punches talking to Stuart Clark.
Stuart Clark, 29 Sep 2011
How did it go down then?
“I wanted to make a third album and for it to be better than the second album. The second was better than the first so I wanted to keep progressing, and in order to do that it would’ve taken an awful lot of work and an awful lot of sacrifice. We had a five-record deal with Universal and our expected budget for the third record was almost quartered. It’s very difficult to make a great sounding album for less than €50,000 and we had nowhere near that available to us. Plus, priorities change. The guys in the band have children and they found it very hard to go touring, which a band like The Blizzards has to do. They’d say, ‘Well, The Killers have kids.’ The Killers have millions of pounds behind them. We didn’t have that. I turned to the guys and said, ‘I can’t commit to this album… yet.’ I will do another album with them. We didn’t fight, we didn’t fall out.
“They’re actually far better off financially than they were with the band. Declan and Doran run a very successful bar in Mullingar – they’re making money for the first time and they can bring up their kids. I don’t think they’re as happy as they were when they were making music, but the trade-off is that they get to be at home with their families.”
The Blizzards must have earned a decent few quid from playing the big festivals and their various corporate hook-ups?
“Yeah, but you haemorrhage it too,” he reflects. “We’d put money into an account and pay ourselves a small wage each week and if a bigger gig came along we might give ourselves a few more quid, but we weren’t really making a whole lot. I was the writer, which was okay and we got some nice royalties for TV stuff. With success comes bigger responsibilities – you’ve got to put on a better show, have a better crew. Expenses go up too. We had our own crew and we paid them well. The one thing I’m happy about with The Blizzards is that we walked away owing nothing to anybody.”
So The Blizzards ended because the others couldn’t commit to three months in a studio and a year of non-stop touring after that?
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