DJ and producer Tim O’Donovan and actor/musician Neil Watkins have combined their eclectic skills to create a new band, Buffalo Woman. Hearing O’Donovan tell the story, the two quickly struck a rapport despite their different creative backgrounds.
“I met Neil in the Fumbally cafe, over in Dublin 8,” he recalls. “Good food, good people, and he was working there. We just got chatting about music, and I saw him do an acoustic gig in that cafe. I said, ‘Pretty good tunes there, did you ever think of putting beats or synths behind them?’ And he said, ‘Well, no, but off you go’, and I sort of messed around with the tunes that he had been writing. Buffalo Woman, as we know it, came together from there.”
So what does it look like when a DJ and an actor pool resources to form a band that plays gigs at venues like the Olympia? “Neil is so well known in the acting world, he has a very good performance streak in him,” says O’Donovan. “He can command a stage, shall we say. He’s very much into drawing the eye and keeping the attention of the audience. Be it through what he says, his dancing, anything like that. Stagecraft, I think you’d call it. But me, I’m very conscious of reading the crowd, beat wise, tempo wise, building the set to a climax, and the ebb and flow of that.”
Those who do get to see Buffalo Woman will recognise some familiar influences. “Often when people hear us, they say they hear Depeche Mode, LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk,” says Tim. “That’s all fine by us. We beg borrow and steal from everywhere, like all good pop musicians.”
Hear: Their single ‘U Make Me High’ on Spotify
See: Their Facebook page for the latest news on gigs and relases – facebook.com/buffalowomanIRL/