Mortars Of Invention
When dreams of breaking the UK didn’t pan out The Walls decided to break all the rules and do things their own way. The former Stunning men have followed the same unconventional path ever since.
Olaf Tyaransen, 20 Mar 2012
When they did have the whole band together for touring, it was often crushingly expensive. A 2007 tour of Australia with Crowded House almost broke them financially. They wound up filming and recording their bandmates and using virtual imagery for their live gigs. While it worked very well, it was no substitute for the real thing. Happily, schedules eventually gelled, and The Walls got together with their physical bandmates to record a finished album.
A fine piece of work, Stop The Lights opens with ‘Bird In A Cage’ - an autobiographical account of their early years in Ennistymon: “I was 13 when we packed up in the city/and moved out west to a town in the country/everybody thought that we were so lucky/but I wasn’t all that sure...”
“That song kind of covers the both of us,” Steve explains. “If someone asks me ‘what’s your life story?’, it’s kind of all in there. It’s like a press release!”
Joe: “It’s like a biog. It was quite a challenge actually to get that to work as a pop song. It fits into four minutes. We came up with that idea with the music first and it was about 10 minutes long and we didn’t know what we were going to do with it. Then Steve came up with the lyrics and turned it into a song. It started with a bassline and the lyrics made it into a song.”
Steve: “Basically I think the challenge with that song was it was kind of a short story set to music. And all songs have to have that verse/chorus thing to keep the listener happy. We’ve always tended to write your classic pop songs
with a certain structure to them. That one was more difficult because the verses were quite long. So it took us a long time.”
Joe: “You can be a bit more ruthless with other songs that there isn’t such a defined story. With certain pop songs you can say ‘you know that verse there? It’s too long so let’s just chop out that bit – because it doesn’t really matter’. Because sometimes the lyrics are kind of abstract or whatever. But with ‘Bird In A Cage’, you couldn’t really do that. You couldn’t take a big chunk out of it. It’d be like taking an important chapter out of a book.”
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