Twelve Angry Men.
From a chance encounter in a bar to sharing a microphone with Ollie Cole in Turn’s heyday, Dundalk fivesome REDTWELVE have pretty much seen it all.
Celina Murphy, 09 Mar 2010
Allow me to sound like a David Lean movie for a moment: sometimes even the briefest encounter can change your path in life. RedTwelve were born eight years ago out of a chance reunion between school chums Ciaran Boylan and Paul Mullen.
“I had just broken up a relationship when I met Paul in a bar,” Boylan tells me, “I hadn’t been in a band since I was 13! Paul came over and said; ‘Ah, you still singing man? My band is looking for a singer!’. I took a chance and did an audition. We wrote a song which at the time that we thought was the best thing since sliced bread, and it kind of progressed from there.”
It seems like things got off to a cracking start for the Meath rockers, so I have to wonder why 2009’s debut album, Mines, took a full three years to record.
“It was pretty epic!” he laughs. “We recorded it in a box-room in a three-bedroom house, so it was a very drawn out process. It was a learning curve too though. I mean, six months in we decided we didn’t like the guitar sound we had and went back in and rerecorded all the guitars! Before we started, we had skeletons of songs, the songs we would have had for years, but when you’re recording you kind of have to sit back and look at your songs and take it, not necessarily in a new direction, but certainly add to it.”
So how does the noise on Mines compare to the infamously frenzied RedTwelve live experience?
“Our whole thing is our live show so to try and embody that in a recording was very bloody tough. The album is probably a bit tamer than the live show itself – we tend to play a little bit faster and a bit harder live. But I’m glad we got there in the end with the album. We had to say enough is enough, I think we were entering Chinese Democracy territory!”
Technical difficulties aside, the power rock fivesome certainly know their stuff, having cut their teeth touring with noughties favourites Turn.
“It was brilliant,” Boylan beams, “we even played New Year’s Eve in Whelan’s with them. You can learn a lot from a band like that. I went up and sang a song with the guys, ‘No More’ from Forward, which is a great album. We’d be fairly quick with our soundchecks but Turn were the exact opposite – I remember going on stage singing this song with them and it all sounded exactly like it did on the CD, so I saw why they spent so long at it!”
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