Highway to Wells - An Interview with Ken Griffin

Ken Griffin of August Wells believes the Irish live music scene has changed for the better since his early days fronting the Hippyshakes, Shake and Rollerskate Skinny. “You can do a tour of Ireland and make enough to survive now,” Griffin enthuses. “The shows are amazing and people are hungry for music.”

Small and intense shows are key to August Wells, which varies from a duo to an eight-piece ensemble depending on the gig at hand. “We’ve done it in New York too where we’ve gone off the beaten track and played weird house shows,” Ken says. “We played a gig in New Jersey that was in a big antiques store. They just pushed all the antiques back and got 150 people in. In a way it’s much more interesting for me than your standard black box venue, because that gets a bit jaded. We just got offered seven dates in Italy. We can show up as a two-piece in a very raw space and we don’t even need a PA. It’s so much easier to communicate with people and you can find all these weird shows that you’ve never heard of, so we’re going to do a lot more of those.”

Ken has plenty of previous at the other end of the spectrum, playing arenas and huge events and festivals such as Lollapalooza. “We used to play three nights with Smashing Pumpkins,” he reflects. “To say thank you to Billy Corgan, you’d have to wait in a room and not go into another one and all this rigmarole. It’s just show-business and the bigger you get, the more people just appear that need to be satisfied and paid. I often get asked what it is like to play smaller venues, but these are my venues. I don’t feel it is a step down. I’m happy to be amongst these people and there is a very clear connection between me and them. I can turn up in a venue with a case full of CDs and sell them directly to people. Rock and roll on a bigger scale can be a very empty experience. If you look back at a lot of bands in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they used to stand close together and look at each other and connect. It’s all got a little show-businessy for me these days.”

Rollerskate Skinny were a rightfully revered Irish band, but confused their record company. “I remember playing Horsedrawn Wishes to somebody in the label and after three tracks he asked me, ‘Is this the same song? You’re either Brian Wilson or an asshole.’ I said to him, ‘Well, I could be both.’ Our whole attitude was we were just subverting this thing and at a party we’re not supposed to be at, so how do we embarrass the hosts? We were going from studio to studio trying to create this crazy album. You don’t have to tip your hat to those people.”

On their new album Madness is the Mercy, Ken’s baritone voice is a joy to behold. This makes a change from the Rollerskate Skinny days, when it was often buried under layers of noise and feedback. “Back then I had some youthful arrogance and ignorance too,” Ken laughs. “You’re supposed to move away from your voice rather than embrace it. When I was 16 or 17, I sang more like I do now. It is my natural voice. The starting off point was to experiment and move away from that. It was about escape then and creating an alternative world. Then you reach a certain age and your life has some poetry if you’ve learnt to be an artist.

“I really enjoy singing now and I’m learning more and more. It is a very rich experience for the soul, I’m not trying to hit a plateau of ‘Love me, love me’. It’s about a common experience in that room, wherever it might be. You can have the best experiences in the most unexpected places.”