A strong candidate for the accolade of best Irish album ever, The Radiators' 1979 Ghostown collection was boldly ambitious and creatively way ahead of its time. Produced by Tony Visconti, it contained such classics as ‘Million Dollar Hero’, ‘Kitty Rickets’, and ‘Ballad Of The Faithful Departed’ – later covered by Moving Hearts. Though it was recorded in 1978, the album’s release was delayed, and by the time it eventually came out in late 1979, the band had lost much of their momentum and it failed to take off commercially.
Now, a mere 27 years later, the band’s third long-player, Trouble Pilgrim has just hit the shelves. A 14-track tour-de-force, it proves Ghostown was no accident – but why did it take so long?
“The band didn’t actually break up, we just went into abeyance for a while,” laughs founder member Steve Rapid. “It was kind of, ‘Let’s take a break and see what happens.’ We’ve maintained contact over the years and generally kept in touch. That contact drew us back together and this is the conclusion of where it should have gone after Ghostown. Though Philip [Chevron] said it sounded more like the album that should have come out between TV Tube Heart and Ghostown."
“The 27-year gap is not really relevant,” chimes in Pete Holidai, guitarist/vocalist/songwriter. “If we’d released an album within two years of Ghostown it would have been something like Trouble Pilgrim. And it’s not just a record put together by a bunch of old has-beens either. I imagine a lot of people would be happy to put it into that category, but it’s just a typical Radiators album with a lot of contemporary issues addressed on it.”
With original members Phil Chevron, Pete Holidai, Steve Rapid, Mark Megaray and Jimmy Crash, The Radiators From Space, as they were originally known, emerged in the spring of 1977 into the white hot heat of punk. Their debut single ‘Television Screen’, regarded as a punk classic, made Single of the Week in the influential Sounds magazine, also hitting number one on the alternative charts. Their debut album TV Tube Heart, also released in '77, was one of the first punk albums, and they looked set to dominate the burgeoning scene. But the commercial failure of Ghostown caused internal tensions, and they eventually went their separate ways with Phil Chevron going on to join The Pogues, Steve Rapid (Averill) becoming a design consultant to U2 (and Hot Press contributor), while Pete Holidai pursued a successful career in music management, education and production.
Apart from a one-off gig in Dublin in 1987 the Radiators didn’t re-convene until 2003 to take part in a Joe Strummer tribute night. With new members, ex-Pogue Cáit O'Riordan on bass and Johnnie Bonnie on drums, their official comeback on Bloomsday June 16 2004 was a triumphant celebration. They appeared at Oxegen that year and also guested with U2 at Croke Park in 2005.
“It started with the Joe Strummer concert but the aim had always been to produce some new music at some point but only if we felt that it was new music,” Rapid says. “In truth, a lot of it was written in the studio. It’s not like everyone had a stash of songs waiting to be used.
“It was almost organic,” he continues. “The band got together, we played and then got into writing and then did the album. A lot of effort went into it. It was recorded in the same studio as Snow Patrol’s album [Grouse Lodge]. We deliberately went out and did the studio thing and made the best album we could. We wanted to get a sound.”
A lot has happened musically in the intervening years, and the key challenge for The Radiators was to capture the essence of the band without deliberately going for a retro-sound, as Pete Holidai explains: “We used the latest technology but we used it the way we wanted to. A lot of bands who use pro-tools for example would do a take and then go off and play pool and then come back and it’s all perfectly in synch. We didn’t want to do that. It’s digital but it’s only a machine that you record into. We decided to have a little bit of movement in the tracks, to have a natural chemistry. So if anything is slightly off it’s because we weren’t going to use the machine to auto-correct things. If you listen to a lot of great records from the '70s you can hear things that are way off, but that’s what makes them great.”
The songs range from the angry menace of ‘The Concierge’ to the melodic power-pop of ‘Heaven’ and the gorgeous balladry of ‘The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs’. Unlike most of their contemporaries, The Radiators always conveyed a broad palette of styles.
“There’s so much variety, our albums are almost like compilations,” laughs Holidai. “If there’s any link to the other two records it’s the fact that the way we tended to work was to write the song and serve each song individually in the studio. But the main thing is it stands up on its own feet. If you knew nothing about the band at all you could listen to it. And it still sounds fairly contemporary, almost like a bunch of young guys.”
According to Steve Rapid the hardest thing now for the band is how to communicate to a new audience.
“It’s very hard for a young audience to accept someone like us,” he proffers. “You see it in Whelan's where people are streaming in after a gig to the late night club just to sing along to a track that they’ve heard 5000 times on the radio. For us getting in front of that audience is quite hard. But when we played at Whelan’s recently there were more people in the audience that I hadn’t seen before and who knew the words to the songs – obviously they’d bought the album. Young people have said to us that the songs are much more melodically structured than they expected. They say, ‘You’re a punk band; we expected you to be noisy.’ But I think the writing on Trouble Pilgrim is some of the best we’ve ever done. It is in many ways the best album the band has ever made.
“There has always been a sense that the band is bigger than the individuals,” he concludes. "We’re fondly known as ‘the legendary Radiators’, you don’t even hear people talking about ‘the legendary U2’.”