Rapid Eye Movement

“Hey Blink, you Blink,” roars the puny, pale matchstick kid with one of those car-crash Cork accents that are probably impenetrable even to Corkonian ears. He’s just one of maybe two dozen autograph hunters straining over a barrier behind the 2FM Beat On The Street stage in the Leefields but his manic, jerky demeanour and his disturbingly wraith-like appearance conspire to make him especially conspicuous.
The boy is no more than thirteen years old and barely four feet tall, his closely shaven skull almost as white and smooth as a cue ball. Seeing as he is also cooked to the gills on Ecstasy, it might seem unnecessarily pedantic if I were to point out that the person he is bellowing at is Dermot Lambert, lead singer with Blink and not the entire Blink entity itself.
“Are you into scars,” shouts the youth intensely when he eventually grabs Lambert’s attention.
“Eh, not really,” Dermot replies, unsure whether he has just been threatened or interviewed by a pop columnist from a plastic-surgery magazine.
“Look at this,” proclaims the little guy regardless, ripping open his flimsy, collarless shirt to reveal a scrawny chest that is horrifically embossed with a spaghetti junction of welts, weals and cuts, some fairly fresh, most scabrous.
Later, on the bus back to the hotel, Dermot Lambert and anyone else who caught a glimpse of this grim apparition are able to think and talk of nothing else.
“I don’t know whether it’s more disturbing to believe that someone else did that to him than it is to believe that he did it himself,” muses the frontman, with a shiver.
It’s a rare sombre moment in what had been yet another evening of triumph on Blink’s headlong quest to conquer every point on their ever-expanding map on the universe.
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3am in the bar of The Silver Springs Hotel in Cork city. Exhausted by the exertion of beating on the street for several hours, most of the 2FM personalities have retired for the evening, and are no longer scorching us with the brilliance of their, well, personalities. A very tired and emotional Gareth O’Callaghan is still here, however, muttering conspiratorially about how unhappy he is with his radio programme. At least, no-one can ever accuse him of being out of touch with the feelings of the general public.
Boyzone, having appeared at the Beat and then having travelled to Clonakilty for a show of their own, have popped in on their way back to Dublin. Shane, Keith, Mike, Steve and Ronan (for these indeed are the names of the Boyzone boys and if they weren’t they would have to pretend that they were) mingle genially and display their ensemble expertise at wearing baseball caps every way but the right way.
Their manager, Louis Walsh, is quick to deny rumours that Boyzone’s live gigs have been (if you’ll pardon the expression) stiffing all over the place. He adds though that he is looking at the possibility of their playing more early evening concerts, a slot presumably more in keeping with the bedtimes of the group’s fans.
Louis confirms suggestions that his Boyz have been receiving regular threats of bodily harm, during their tour around the country, from teenage blokes jealous of the female attention being lavished upon them. “That happens wherever we go,” he admits. “We have to be on the look-out all the time. There was even a few digs thrown at them, especially when we were up in Donegal.”
The existence of such fatwa doesn’t seem to bother Boyzone themselves. They’re barely in the door of the bar when three of them encircle two girls perched on high stools just inside the main entrance. Seconds later, the trio are serenading the ladies with a very complex, harmony version of Cat Stevens’ ‘Father And Son’. When they conclude, one of the women returns the compliment by standing up and performing her rendition of ‘Memories’. Thankfully, before this bizarre seduction ritual gets out of hand altogether, and everyone bursts into ‘Love Changes Everything’ or worse, Louis whips his charges off to the cars for the long drive home.
In the midst of all the shape-throwing, there is something particularly refreshing about the quiet, unassuming confidence of the guys in Blink. For two and a half years, the band have been steadily pumping up their sneakers in preparation for their run at the big time and, now that the starting pistol has been fired, they’re savouring every inch of the course.
It was back in December ‘91 that Dermot Lambert, Brian McLoughlin, Barry Campbell and Robbie Sexton played their inaugural live show as a unit. In May of ‘92, they were offered their first record deal but they held out, and only signed with EMI Ireland (and then in turn Parlophone International) after they had spent almost a year nurturing and kneading their material on the road. The fact that it has taken until now for the release of their debut album (A Map Of The Universe By Blink) is testament to their determination to develop at their own sweet pace and their firm resolve to avoid the traditional Irish trap of peaking too soon.
“The treadmill was invented by people who need to use the treadmill,” insists Dermot. “We prefer the scenic route.”
In Cork, as in almost everywhere else they visit these days, the deliberate delay is proving to have been well worth it. After their guest appearance at the Beat On The Street, they are literally mobbed by a throng of screaming kids, eager not only for autographs but for items of clothing, particularly boot laces for some reason, and for any spare knick knacks they happen to have in their pockets.
“I had nothing in my pockets except some snotty tissues,” says Brian later, “so I gave this girl an old bus ticket and she seemed delighted with it.” Pop stardom or what?
The night before Cork, Blink had played The Atlantic Hotel in Ballybunion, Co. Kerry. With its innumerable dancefloors and catacombic bars, The Atlantic is a unique nightclub complex by any standards and is run by the even more unique Frank Quilter. A former farmer and one-time election agent for Kerry Fine Gael TD, Jimmy Deenihan, fiftysomething Frank is a relative novice in the entertainment business but he has taken to poring over copies of Hot Press and Melody Maker the way he once pored over electoral registers, and is now regarded locally as something of a rock authority.
Frank knows what he likes. He hates bands who play too many new songs. He hates bands who don’t get the crowd up dancing and working up a thirst. And he hates bands whose material he himself can’t hum. Frank loves Blink.
For Dermot Lambert, however, the highlight of their trip to the South came during an album-signing in HMV, Cork. “We have a song which used to be called ‘Psycho’ but is titled ‘Everything Comes, Everything Goes’ on the album,” he explains. “It’s basically just one long rant, the words are all over the place. As a joke at gigs, I used to say that anyone who could come up and say the lyrics to it would get a free t-shirt. In HMV, these two girls came up and sang the whole thing to me, word-perfect. I couldn’t believe it. The idea of these girls sitting down and learning all this stuff off is just brilliant, the ultimate compliment.”
“They deserve more than just t-shirts,” says Barry. “We should award them the first ever B.A. in Blink.”
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The favoured method of time-passing on the Blink tour bus is ‘the fascinating fact’. Both the band and their crew (sound technician Denis Powell and driver Tom Mangan) are skilled experts at casually volunteering pieces of ostensibly interesting information with all the authority of a burning bush, irrespective of whether they contain any semblance of truth whatsoever. The ultimate aim is to have one of your own lies told back to you by another party who has grown thoroughly convinced of its veracity. And, the trick to retaining the credibility necessary to lure others into your particular fib is to occasionally come up with a nugget of genuine knowledge.
Here, for instance, is a representative sample from an average ten minute session with the Encyclopaedia Blinkannica: “Did you know,” posits Dermot, the quartet’s most avid triviaphile, “that eight ninths of the earth’s population live in the northern hemisphere.”
“The word ‘heaven’ is never actually used in The Bible, you know?” avers Robbie.
“There are only twenty-two cities in the whole world with a population of more than one million,” propounds Barry.
As it happens, none of these assertions is even remotely true. The ‘heaven’ one though did have something of the ring of authenticity about it. Even I, a theological scholar of some renown, found myself flicking through the Gideon in my hotel room just to check (for the record, the word ‘heaven’ actually appears in the opening sentence of The Bible and on just about every page after that).
This fondness for confusion and the selling of dummy runs lies at the heart of the Blink modus operandi. It’s not that they want their music to be in any way perplexing or duplicitous, they just love the idea of confounding expectations and of spiking their own cocktails.
“We’re not into that wilfully difficult thing but it’s impossible for us to just write a whole load of guitar songs,” declares Barry. “That would just be stupid. We like trying different things, things that are worlds apart from each other. To me, writing different types of music is just like listening to different types of music. It keeps your interest level up and it keeps your eyes open.”
Talent borrows but genius steals. Much of Blink’s music is a gleeful larceny of styles and cues from almost every genre you care to mention. Early comparisons to EMF and Carter USM are now redundant, not because traces of such bands don’t exist but because they are merely single threads in the warp and woof of a very wide tapestry. And, if anything, the scope of their patchwork is only going to expand in the future.
At the moment, one of the new songs causing most excitement in the camp is a track called ‘The House That Illuminates Your Thoughts’ which Dermot describes as “a cross between Chris Isaak and Stina Nordenstam.”
Inevitably though, this kind of creative hopscotch can pose problems of perception.
“When we released ‘Going To Nepal’ in Ireland, it did really well but when we followed it up with ‘Happy Day’, there were people who saw that as some sort of sell-out,” insists Dermot. “We lost a few of the what we call Spotty Norbert crowd. Then, there was a similar problem when ‘It’s Not My Fault’ came out. We had a proportion of the Therapy? crowd supporting us and we thought that they would think we were trying to impress them with that song. But, then we thought, ‘yeah we are trying to impress them, we’re trying to impress everybody’.”
One subject rarely raised during Blinkmobile journeys is music. Surprisingly, for a band whose work has become a byword for diversity, the members themselves don’t share a lot of common ground when it comes to listening choices. A tape machine on the bus would only spark rows so they don’t have one. Instead, they play the radio. They all agree that that’s shite.
“When someone asks us what kind of stuff do we listen to, they really do have to ask each individual person,” explains Dermot. “The four of us actually find it hard to come up with even one song that we all like. Motown, for example, never did anything at all for me. I know they’re classics and I know they were recorded on 8 track and blah-de-blah, I appreciate all that. I just don’t like it. Barry loves Motown.
“The Beatles, I know they’re a legend but I just don’t get it,” he continues. “Ob-la-fucking-di, Ob-la-fucking-da. I can appreciate their greatness, I just don’t like the music. But I do love The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Duran Duran, A-Ha yet if I mention them to Barry he’ll go, ‘crap, crap, crap, crap’. This is very odd for two people who play in a band together but it’s the same with Brian and Robbie as well. The only music we really have in common is the music that we play.”
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Having conquered Ireland, all that’s left now is the world and specifically the American, European and British territories.
The onslaught on the U.S. begins in the new year when the album is released over there on Capitol Records. Blink’s manager, Aidan Lambert (Dermot’s brother), has already been planning strategy with their hotshot U.S. agent, Ian Copeland, brother of Stewart and Miles, and head of Frontier Booking International (an F.B.I. to go with Miles’ record label, I.R.S., and their father’s esteemed former employers, the C.I.A.). In November of this year, they travel to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and France for extensive touring. It is in Britain, however, that the band hope to have their most immediate breakthrough.
There are a number of ways in which the level of enthusiasm about Blink in the U.K. can be gauged. Take radio play. The reaction from stations all over the country to ‘It’s Not My Fault’, their first single release in Britain, was so overwhelmingly positive that it leapt into the Top 100 within a week. There was, therefore, an inevitable disappointment in the camp when they failed to secure playlisting on BBC Radio 1 for the follow-up, ‘Happy Day’, one of their more obviously wireless-friendly songs. Undaunted, however, Parlophone’s chief local-radio plugger, Kevin McCabe, focussed on the British regional stations of which, all told, there are 50.
The highest number of regional playlistings ever garnered by Parlophone was 49, for a Pet Shop Boys single. The second highest was 26, for Blur’s ‘Boys And Girls’. The third was 24, for Blink and ‘Happy Day’. In the context of a label that possesses such turntable luminaries as Richard Marx, Bonnie Raitt, Blind Melon and others on its books, this is no mean achievement. And, it is the existence of such a firm foundation in the British market that encourages the band to be so optimistic about the release of their current single, ‘Cello’.
The exceptional commitment of pluggers like Kevin McCabe and others involved in the promotion of Blink is indicative of the genuine affection with which the band is viewed by the individuals who work for Parlophone.
“There’s thirteen people in the Parlophone office in the U.K. and there’s probably about eleven in the Dublin office,” says Dermot. “We know every single individual in both places and some of them we can genuinely call our mates. This is not corporate bullshit on our part. This is just how we are. There are certain areas in how Parlophone operates that aren’t brilliant but because these people are our mates we are able to work with them to make the thing better.
“It’s kind of natural damage control. There’s two or three areas in Parlophone that are weak but the bits that are good are fucking good. And we can compensate for the bits that are weak, not by complaining about them but by trying to help improve them.”
Blink are big on ‘not complaining’, which probably makes them one of the rarest species in the Irish rock world. All four members are openly scornful of the oh-woe-is-me attitude adopted by many of their contemporaries, those bawling pram-rockers who prefer to wallow in self-pity about all the evil forces ranged against them (the corporate record industry, the media, the high pollen count) rather than concentrate on the writing of songs that will simply be too good to ignore. Blink know that clout is better than pout any day, and that real clout is only acquired by achieving tangible commercial success.
“Yeah, we’ve definitely learned from other bands’ mistakes,” Dermot asserts. “You don’t whinge about something you’ve done. You can’t blame your producer, you can’t blame your record company, you can’t blame your fucking mother, you can’t blame the fact that it was raining. If you’ve failed, you’ve failed. It’s your responsibility. Everything else is just excuses.”
“If something is wrong, you try and fix it,” adds Barry. “If you can’t fix it, you try and get rid of the fucking thing. If we get dropped then, in ten years time, the ordinary punter will look back and see that we didn’t succeed, that’s all they’ll know. They don’t know about Radio 1 playlists or failures in record company marketing. It’s solely up to us to get the job done.”
If they’re going to take the blame, of course, they’re also going to demand the responsibility. The long gestation of Blink’s debut album was very deliberate, not only to allow them the space to fully exploit the scope of their musical rainbow but also to ensure that they were able to retain independence and full control at every stage of their development.
“We never got into EMI for big money,” explains Dermot. “The deal we had at the very start with EMI Ireland was very small and when we signed to Parlophone, it was only a little bigger. We don’t go into the record company and scab CDs and we don’t go in and ask for favours or ask for free tickets for gigs. All we want is money to record albums. When we go on tour, we get support money from them but we look after ourselves as well.
“The whole idea being that we want to keep our independence within a major. If we’d been into EMI for flashy hotels then they would have had more of a case to tell us how to make our album but we weren’t, so they didn’t. Whatever else happens, if we sell a certain amount of albums, EMI can look at the books and say, ‘Jesus, they only sold so many albums but because they haven’t been getting limousines or wasting our money, they’re still a good investment’. Obviously, we hope that we’re gonna sell a lot of records but if we don’t then we’re working on the principle that we’ll still be a worthwhile prospect.
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The past six months have been everything that a band in Blink’s position could hope for, and more. Their support tour of the U.K. with Crowded House (as replacements for The Cranberries who had to pull out because of Dolores’ leg injury) saw them play to over 80,000 people in eleven nights. It also meant that they got to perform in Wembley Arena, twice. The reaction to A Map Of The Universe By Blink has been almost, eh, universally ebullient and the demand to see them live, especially in Britain where they are now touring, is high and growing.
Best of all, though, during a visit to Slovakia in July for a festival show, they met, and had their photographs taken with, Status Quo.
Nevertheless, there is still a degree of apprehension among the troops. They are so proud of the story so far that they dread the thought of it not having a happy ending.
“If people don’t like the album then there is nothing in me that anyone will ever like,” declares Dermot, the morning after the night they swallowed Cork. “If this album goes on its arse, I’ll be the most confused person on the fucking planet. The album itself is fucking great, as far as I’m concerned. There are no regrets. If people get to hear the stuff, they will like it. If the album doesn’t do very well and, if in a year’s time, we find ourselves back in Dublin, I don’t think I’ll be getting involved in music again because we really, really have done our best.
“It’s not like I’m just saying that we gave it our best shot or that we coulda bin contendahs, I know that this is the most complete, most fully-realised album that Blink could have made. If this doesn’t do it, nothing will.”