James Walsh is 10 minutes late for our chat. When he arrives, he apologises and waves a thumb towards the street.
“It was one of those mad Belfast things,” he says, smiling nervously like a man who has spent the last year being given a crash course in all manner of mad Belfast things. “I was sitting in a cab and the driver asks me if I wouldn’t mind if he picked someone else up. I told him I had an appointment but he just said, ‘Don’t worry mate, this fella’s going the same way as you’. Of course, he wasn’t going anywhere near here; but what can you do?”
It takes quite a lot to coax a normal, sensible (non-driving) being into navigating the hurly-burly of rush-hour traffic, but at the moment Walsh has serious business to attend to.
He’s here to talk about On The Outside, the new album from Starsailor. And while his relaxed good humour betrays no apparent anxiety, Walsh, the band’s singer and main songwriter, isn’t afraid to acknowledge just how crucial a record this is in the four piece’s career.
The days back in 2001 when Starsailor’s Love Is Here grappled with the first Coldplay LP for the UK’s big-voiced-boy title, now seem like a distant memory. Silence Is Easy, the follow-up, despite boasting in the title track and ‘Four To The Floor’, a pair of absolute A-list singles, struggled to shake off the curious, distracting burden of Phil Spector’s presence.
And, since then, while their former main rivals have blazed an apparently unstoppable trail to world domination, Starsailor have found themselves relegated into a far less glamorous and overly-populated division.
It’s a situation of which Walsh is fully conscious.
“It’s interesting the different responses we’ve seen in the British press to the new record,” he reflects. “Some of it has been the best we’ve ever received, but the critical ones all seem to come from the same angle. One I read said that there were many pairs of shoes now under the anthemic rock table and that we were going to have our work cut out displacing the likes of Athlete and Keane. No disrespect to those bands, but I’m not sure you could compare us to them. We were there first.”
Even a cursory listen to On The Outside shows that Starsailor have decided against reclaiming their turf from the new kids on the emotive rock block. A burly Lancaster native, Walsh never conformed to the bedwetting archetype put forward by Alan McGee, his first label boss.
Now, he seems determined to throw his weight around. Short on bloodless ballads and quivering falsettos, the record isn’t afraid to pick at scabs and rub raw wounds. From the title on (“We don’t feel part of the music scene, but we’ve been galvanised by that. We draw a kind of strength from it.”), to the decision to uproot and record the album in LA, Walsh is adamant that it’s the work of “grown-ups”.
And grown-ups who have been keeping their eyes open wide over the past few years. Allusions to social unrest, violence and physical threat are smeared all over the record – disharmony is a recurring theme. According to Walsh, the three months spent by the band writing and recording in LA proved inspirational in all manner of ways.
“It really wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds,” he insists. “We used the public transport system every day, tried to get to know the place. You get on the subway or buses and you instantly see how clear the racial and social divide is in America. There are hardly any white people there. They’re all driving in their cars. When you’re recording in Wales, if you’ve a couple of days off, it’s usually pouring down with rain and you end up on the PlayStation. In LA it was very different from that and it’s bound to have an effect on you and the music.”
Another town known for the visibility of its divisions also makes an oblique, side-of-stage appearance on the album. Walsh and his wife Lisa moved to Belfast early last year, and while he’s found the city more than welcoming in the time since, one in-character incident provoked the song ‘Get Out While You Can’.
“My wife’s little sister was waiting on a train and this lad started chatting her up,” he explains. “ They were getting on well until he asked her her name and, when she told him and he realised she was a Catholic, his whole mood changed and it got nasty. It was a situation that really worried me. Obviously I’ve used a bit of artistic license, but I just thought it was really sad. If I was 16 and met a girl at a train stop, I wouldn’t have cared if she was Martian."
The most explicitly engaged song on the album is the eerie, acoustic track, ‘Jeremiah’, which bringsOn The Outside to a bleak, Nebraska-esque close. Based on a news report Walsh happened across on the radio, it alludes to the story of Jeremiah Duggan, a young Jewish Londoner who, while studying in Europe, became involved with an anti-war organisation that, unbeknown to him, had strong neo-Nazi links. In March 2003, he was killed on a motorway in Wisebaden, Germany, and, while the local authorities hastily pronounced it a case of suicide, his parents and friends have since then campaigned for the establishment of a criminal investigation into the murky circumstances surrounding his death.
“I heard his mother talk about what had happened and it really moved me,” says Walsh. “It was the randomness of it that got me. I can’t write a song about a child in Baghdad – who the fuck am I to write about what they’re going through? But with Jeremiah, I just thought that in other circumstances that could have been me or one of my friends. A decent, middle class kid who was against the Iraq war and wanted to get involved, who then gets caught up in something terrible. It really haunted me. We have a platform, and if we can use it to bring a bit of publicity to a campaign like this then I think we have a responsibility to do that.”
Silence is easy; some things are also worth making a noise about.