Bard To The Bone

He’s more than capable of thespian trickery, but, right now, I have a feeling Exit Pursued By A Bear’s Tadhg Hickey is giving it to me straight.

“We’re risk takers. To be honest, a lot of them haven’t come off. You have to keep trying. What’s the alternative? To do nothing? I find myself at gigs a lot of the time, even with bands that I like, being very bored because I don’t think the band has considered the difference between putting on a performance and putting on their record.
“Our set-up is extremely lavish,” he assures me, describing what sounds like a mad scientist’s laboratory of bells and whistles. “Someone could easily be singing, playing guitar and playing synth all during one song.”
Having worked as an actor most of his adult life, Hickey cut his musical teeth in straight-up rock outfits before giving himself over to the electronic side.
“I was desperate to get away from the rock scene,” he stresses, “I had completely grown tired of it. I’d been singing in rock bands for a while, with some success. But I was completely bored of the guitar, bass and fucking-banging-away-on-a-kit sort of nonsense. I wanted to get away from that and see how the vocal would sit on something else.”
Everything changed for the frustrated frontman when he met multi-instrumentalists Eoin O’Sullivan and Paul O’Driscoll, who were busy conjuring up electronic beats and bleeps in their bedrooms. While Hickey was happy to have a new sound to play with, he was not about to let his dramatic flair go to waste.
“We try to imbue what’s essentially an electronic act with elements of theatre," he says. "It gives people something to talk about before they listen to the music. Trying to drag the lads into doing something theatrical at the start was a struggle. Now they’re as up for it as I am! They had very genuine worries about how we’d be perceived if we put ourselves out there as a theatrical band.”
Luckily for Hickey, the other four members plunged themselves into unknown waters last year when they agreed to soundtrack Hoodwinked, a play-turned-musical in which they’d been cast.
“From then on, the lads were very open to whatever hair-brained scheme came next!”
Bizzarely, what came next was Irish Pole Dancing Champion Arlene Caffrey, wielding her trusty three-metre stripper pole.
“She contacted me on Facebook and said, ‘Here’s what I do. I’ve been looking for a band that would fit and I think you’re the band.’ I had a look at her performances and I thought, ‘Yeah this is fucking great. So she came to our practice room and broke the ceiling! She basically burst through the roof with her pole! But we were watching her perform and it was one of those moments where we were all like, ‘Oh my God, this is actually gonna work.’ We have a song on the album called ‘Hug’, which is about a stripper. When she danced to that, the energy in Crane Lane was immense. I sing the song to her from the perspective of somebody who’s infatuated with a stripper. It worked a storm, it really did.”
Of the 10 tracks on their eponymous album, eerie spoken word number ‘Erstwhile’ seems to be garnering the most attention. Kicking off with the melodramatic exclamation of “Ireland! That damn word still stings and startles…”, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a rant on the peril of our bailout-era government.
“The intention of ‘Erstwhile’ was almost to have a kind of gag on the album,” Hickey says. “It’s like a moment of comic relief from the seriousness of what had gone on before. It certainly wasn’t my intention to make it a political song. If anything it’s an apolitical song. It’s more theatrical and philosophical than political. It’s intended as a character song. The person who’s ranting is, in some sense, not me, or not my voice. It’s a byway between two phases of the album, a tongue-in-cheek kind of gag. It’s got lavish Yeatsian imagery in it about old Ireland. But it was written during boom time Ireland, so it’s really a two-fingers-up to what the character perceives to be an Ireland going wrong. That’s the strange thing about songs. You write something in 2007 and it comes out in 2011 – its relevance changes right before your eyes!”
The 50-minute debut is a melodious mash-up of ricocheting beats, jolting guitars and sinister plotlines, although Hickey has a bone to pick with my last observation.
“I certainly don’t think of the album as being really dark,” he notes. “If you take something like ‘Squirm’, the world that it’s set in is an extremely dark, negative, bleak place, but by the end of it there’s an uplifting resolution. It’s like ‘Yeah, it’s really fucking dark out there, but Jesus, it’s really bright too.’”

Exit: Pursued By A Bear is out now. The band play Tower Records, Dublin (March 24) and Crawdaddy, Dublin with Arlene Caffrey (26). You can watch the video for 'Amedee' on hotpress.com now.