Culture
25 Jun 09

Kitchen confidential

For most bands, a gritty rehearsal room or their parents’ garage must suffice. But Belfast indie popsters Heliopause have opted for a rather more individualistic practice space – their drummer’s kitchen.

Photographer, animator, film maker, musician: Richard Davis is a man at ease in galleries and exhibition spaces. But when it comes to Heliopause, the band that’s slowly started to occupy more and more of his creative energies, he’s found himself spending his time in a much more prosaic location.

“Niall (Harden), our drummer has us over to his house and we practice in his kitchen,” he reveals. “It’s pretty much ideal. We sit around, work out the song arrangements, have a mug of tea. Some biscuits.”
“It’s great,” adds guitarist Chris McCorry. “Although Niall’s flatmate, Johnny, might disagree. He has a hard time making his dinner some nights.”
This marriage of the mundane with the high-minded is perfectly in keeping with the Heliopause aesthetic. To date, the band have been notable for the artful way in which they slip smartly off-centre ideas into apparently straight-forward songs.
Last year’s Dark Matters EP was a case in point – what seemed, on initial listen, to be nothing more than a collection of fairly standard slow-core indie, slowly revealed itself to be a work of great emotional and musical subtlety.
Six months on and their latest release,The Moment Of Recognition, sees a continuation – and refinement – of the bands M.O.
In places, the songs are so sparse, they’re almost diaphanous, but bend in closer and you’ll be startled by the quality of the detail. While the two tracks on offer, the title-cut and ‘Mon Peu Rimbaud’, differ in tempo and volume – they’re instantly recognisable as blood relatives.
In fact, if you were to guess they were written and recorded in a huddle, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
“We took off to a small house in the country around Glenarm,” Richard reveals. “It did a lot of good. It was great to get that kind of freedom. It’s so rare when you live in the city and everyone has day jobs that you get an opportunity to concentrate fully on the music, or even just to hang out together. It was a really great place. There was no real phone network and no wireless access. No one to bother us.”
“Except for the landlord,” adds Chris. “He’d rap the door and we’d find him standing there with a Battenberg cake. Lovely man.”
If the haunting, quietly choral, ‘Mon Peu Rimbaud’ is anything to go by, splendid isolation inspires startling results for Heliopause.
“It was written in Curfew Tower in Cushendall,” Richard resumes. “It’s a really beautiful place. But weird as well. It was a unique place to work. It’s another place where you have trouble getting a signal for your phone. But it’s bang in the middle of the town and the locals just rev their cars and drink outside it. I’m not sure they know what to make of it. It’s a very busy town, but once you’re inside you feel pretty isolated. When you’re there you’re supposed to create an artwork relating to the local area. I did that – I made a stop-go animation using objects I’d found around the place. But I also wrote ‘Mon Peu Rimbaud’. ”
The Tower, now used exclusively as an artists’ retreat, is owned by Bill Drummond. Unfortunately Richard had no dealings with the great man.
“He has others who manage it for him, so I never got a chance to meet him,” he rues. “But his influence is there. As soon as you walk in, there’s a sign up that reads: ‘It’s All Shite’. Apparently he came to look at the work that had been left during the first year and decided it was rubbish. He invited all the artists back and lit a bonfire made up of all their work. Apparently everyone had a great night.”
With creative projects bubbling along in lots of different fields, it’s difficult to see where Davis will fit in recording sessions for the upcoming Heliopause album. The man himself, though, doesn’t see any problems ahead.
“I’m doing a lot less video and animation at the moment. I’m devoting as much time as I can to the band. The temptation is always to fit your creative work in around the rest of your life, I’ve been trying to focus on the music as much as I can. I’m really enjoying writing music at the moment. Animation is an incredibly slow and detailed process. One of my pieces took me three months to complete and it lasted three minutes. It does make you wonder at times. That’s what I love about songwriting. I can write a song, go into the kitchen with the guys, and we just play it until if sounds right. It’s a much more immediate process.”