Stealing the show with their melodic pop rock repertoire, Dublin band Beach recently won first prize at the European Emergenza Music Festival, a prestigious international competition held in Paris last month.

During the seven years that it’s been running, The Emergenza – a hip version of the Eurovision Song Contest – has emerged as a major sifter of unsigned European talent. Before Beach even got to Paris, they had to compete with 63 other bands in the Irish Emergenza heats (this was the first year that Ireland sent an entry, and competition was intense). When Beach – to their absolute surprise and delight – found themselves receiving First Prize in Paris, it meant that they’d been voted top act out of 1,800 bands from 24 cities around Europe, a validation if ever there was one.

“It was fantastic playing to a foreign audience,” enthuses Scott Maher, lead singer, rhythm guitarist and songwriter with the band. “It makes a serious difference, gives you great lift. There was nobody we knew there, no family or friends, so we actually had to go out and win them. When you’re gigging in your own country all the time you can get lazy, you just get up there and play your stuff, whereas when you go away you have to say, well these people don’t know us at all. And if they like you, it means they really like you.”

Beach’s win comes hard on the heels of their recent single, ‘Bare’, a hot little ditty which appears in several guises on the CD, including a slick trip-hop version.

“That song is a few years old,” explains drummer/keyboardist/ vocalist Shane Power. “So we just reinvented it to make it a little bit more modern. But that and our last single, ‘Misunderstood’, are very acoustic-written songs, which is kind of an advantage because you can add stuff to it. The newer stuff is still acoustically-written, but we’ve put a 90s edge to it, a bit of a harder edge.

“It’s still melodic pop-rock,” continues Shane, hitting on Beach’s main musical principle. “We can listen to The Prodigy and dance music and techno music, or electronic music, but often it’s all just production, it’s not really verse and chorus. Luckily everyone in the band is a big fan of songwriting; we’re a song band, and the production is secondary to that, really.

Tony Byrne, the youngest and most recent member of Beach, has high praise for the band’s method of song composition. “Scott and Fran are the main writers in the band, and it’s great, because when they bring in something, the foundation is there, and the rest of us can build on it.”

Tony is one of the band’s two lead guitarists. Two lead guitars is an unusual feature, and it’s working very well for this band. Scott outlines the advantages:

“Like loads of bands, we used to go into a recording studio and end up overdubbing things and laying down tracks with guitars, and before, when we were a fourpiece, we’d try it out live and find that we couldn’t reproduce it. So the beauty about having another guitar player is that you can produce what you have on record. You don’t have to use backing tracks: when you go out live, what you get is what’s on the record, probably better because you’re getting the live atmosphere.

“I haven’t seen a band with two lead guitars and harmonising guitar parts since Thin Lizzy,” he continues. “It’s not very Thin Lizzy, our stuff, but the idea of having another guitar player playing lead guitar, it’s kind of different; it’s like having two bass players or something. Radiohead are huge exponents of it.”

Both Shane and Scott cut their musical teeth as members of cover band The Quarrymen, though now they plan to devote their full attention to Beach’s original material. The Emergenza prize includes the recording of an album and its distribution in Europe, a great opportunity for any up-coming Irish band.

As a group Beach work seriously hard, constantly writing, rehearsing and gigging. They rarely get a chance for a holiday.

“We don’t mind though,” says Tony, “because it’s what we love doing, and it’s what we are. We don’t really know any different at this stage either. A day on your own, and you start looking for your four other shadows!”

Beach’s single ‘Bare’ is now available on independent label, Sinus.