Picture This - The Secret of their Success

As Picture This sit across the table in a Dublin coffee shop it’s hard to wonder if there’s not some sort of Freaky Friday-shit going on. The success of a veteran act, with multiple albums and hefty touring schedules stretching back over a decade, has been assumed by a pair of young pretenders.

The following day, the duo will play a free gig in Athy. It will be their first time performing in their County Kildare hometown, where a full 5,000 tickets were snapped up within hours. In a town with a population of around 10,000, that’s both utterly incredible and a local burglar’s dream come true. A not dissimilar number of fans will pack out the Olympia Theatre across three nights in November, with the sold out signs flung up almost immediately after tickets were released. The last act to draw Dublin crowds like this despite less than a year’s experience under the belt was Pope John Paul II.

We meet on the morning that their eponymous debut EP hits the shelves. A week later it will crash straight into the Irish charts at No. 1, an independent release consisting of five self-produced tracks storming ahead of major-label records that were probably finished before Jimmy Rainsford and Ryan Hennessy had even met. It’s all enough to make Hot Press’ head spin, so can the boys themselves make sense of it?

Ryan shrugs: “It’s all happened in such a short space of time. Everyone’s just taken to us.”

That much, at least, is pretty evident. Just ten months ago, the pair were no more than acquaintances, unaffiliated musicians from the same small town. “I was trying to make it as a drummer,” Jimmy says. “But I was still living at home in Athy.”

“I was on the dole, doin’ nothing” Ryan mumbles. “Absolutely nothing.”

We’ve been chatting for less than five minutes, but already the boy Hennessy is adding to the considerable Picture This intrigue by coming across as the least likely frontman of all time. It’s not that the perma-bandanaed 21-year-old isn’t personable – a droll and intelligent bloke, he’s the type you can imaging sinking a pint or six with down the local – but his slow-and-low delivery and matter-of-factness isn’t quite becoming of a pop sensation.

“Not here, it’s not,” he grins sheepishly, acknowledging that a 10am meeting in a city centre cafe – with management, handlers and assorted other associates waiting to rush them off to a radio station an hour later – isn’t quite a relaxing or natural environment. “On stage it’s very different. I wouldn’t call it an alter-ego, but I get a buzz off the crowd when we play. Away from the stage, though, I’m very introverted.”

Accordingly, 23-year-old Jimmy, who cut his teeth as stickman for Ryan Sheridan, assumes an equal role as spokesperson. Not that it makes a massive amount of difference, as he points out. “It’s crazy how alike we think sometimes. Every single day it happens, when working on some idea or song. We’ll think it, and say it, at the exact same time. It makes it pretty easy to work together.”

Indeed, that much was clear from the start, it seems. Unlike a lot of bands, who might spend a nervous period feeling each other out, with mannerly appeasement turned up to 11, there’s been a measure of single-mindedness since Jimmy approached Ryan about working together after seeing an acoustic performance on Facebook.

“We had our own ideas of how we wanted to do it – based on what we thought people wanted to see,” Jimmy says. “It wasn’t in an arrogant sense, but we said we’d do it our way and do what we thought would work. And when it did work, well, we stuck with it.”

Ryan takes a more direct line: “A lot of bands have everything except the songs. They look cool, and have lovely social media, but the songs are shit. So we went with the songs straight away. Nobody even knew who we were or what we looked like, it was just a song: Picture This, ‘Take My Hand’, and that was that. We were barely even in the video, and we saw that that worked too, so we kept the mystery for a while. Nobody knew who we were, and we kept out of interviews or anything like that. And then we came out with a bang when we revealed ourselves later.”

The release of ‘Take My Hand’ last October was quickly followed by an almighty clamour to get a piece of the hottest new property on the block. That the tune – a summery, radio-friendly acoustic ballad with an anthemic chorus – would win favour was hardly surprising, but the speed with which things snowballed wasn’t quite foreseen. Their first gig at The Academy – the only band to ever sell the venue out for a debut show – was a headline grabbing set-piece, but from the inside the first signs of business picking up were noticed a little bit before.

“One of the moments that really hit me was when we started to get national radio play,” Jimmy says. “It really took off on 2fm and Today FM. Social media is very strong, it really is, but it hasn’t taken over the way people say it has. We looked at our Facebook, and saw just how much the fan count went up from having our songs played on air. Radio was almost like verifying it – ‘OK, so this is real.’”

The band have taken a unique approach to promoting themselves, releasing a steady stream of new songs rather than a full album.

“We’re doing it differently,” states Jimmy. “Often, before anybody knows who they are, a band will put out an album and promote it and promote it until it becomes popular. The way we’re doing it is we’re giving people songs every two months, and giving them content on social media. There’s no covers, none of that shit. It’s new song, new song, new song, and now an EP. It cuts down the work load of trying to promote ourselves, ‘cos there’s something on a regular basis. I had a YouTube channel with drumming videos, and that’s the formula that worked, and it was the same with Ryan doing videos on Facebook as well. When you give people quality content on a regular basis, they attach to it more, and they’ll subscribe to you in a subconscious kind of way, and they’ll always be there.”

It’s strange to hear the unassuming, down-to-earth drummer talk about their career in terms more readily associated with some hot-shot hipster in digital marketing. It’s stranger still when Ryan confesses that the music they write is far from what you’ll find them listening to on their own time. “We always say the music we produce is not the same as we consume. I like John Cooper Clarke as a writer, but none of our lyrics are much like his. He’ll never write ‘Take My Hand’.”

Knowing the Bard of Salford as we do, Hot Press is inclined to agree.

“And Jimmy loves Metallica,” Ryan continues, “but there’s none of them in our songs either. I write best on moods. When I’m writing a song, it’s for other people – actually, for thousands of other people to sing back to me. I don’t like that whole thing of ‘Oh, I’m writing this for myself.’”

“Pretentious bullshit,” Jimmy scoffs.

The flipside of that, of course, is that critics can easily take aim at music made purely to sate demand, suggesting it’s a cynical exercise.

“Well, it’s not like I don’t feel what’s in the songs,” Ryan objects. “It’s more, I feel like this so others will feel the same.” He pauses: “It is a little bit cynical, since we’re making it for them.”

Jimmy jumps in: “If you can write songs that aren’t extremely personal – to the point where people can’t connect with them – but personal to the point where people can say ‘Yeah, I know what you mean there’, well that’s where people can get attached. We’re musicians, and good musicians, but we’re never going to be musos; the type that make something that they think sounds amazing, but most of the public don’t even know what they’re listening to.”

As Ryan notes, the work ethic of Picture This – they’re capable of knocking a song a day in Jimmy’s studio – means people connect with the rawness of the songs, which contrasts with manufactured pop. The band’s DIY ethos is also seen to great effect in the charming guerrilla videos they’ve released, which have been eaten up by a growing following ravenous for anything new. Most notable among these were their ‘Traffic Jam’ clips, a first cousin of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke segment. Aslan’s Christy Dignam, Gavin James and Danny O’Reilly were just a handful of the names to clamber into the backseat of Jimmy’s motor to lend their voices to what quickly became a social media phenomenon.

“We were coming back from Maynooth – I think – and I had my camera with me,” Jimmy explains. “I said ‘Hey, let’s do a cover’, and that’s how it started. We have the facilities to jump on moments, so when we have an idea we do it straight away.”

With a phonebook filling with contacts for musicians who’ve been there and done that, you’d think the pair might seek advice along the way. “I haven’t yet, but I think I should start,” Ryan says. “We play football with Danny O’Reilly and stuff, but we don’t really be asking him during games.”

Is there an Irish music five-a-side that we’ve been missing out on, Ryan?

“Well sort of, yeah. It’s Danny O’Reilly, Brian Ormonde, Bernard Dunne, plus two Dublin GAA players whose names I can’t remember, versus Picture This.” Catching the confusion on your correspondent’s face, he quickly adds, “as in us and our crew! It’s not five-on-two.”

Sticking a former world boxing champion on the pitch is a canny tactical move by the opposition – is anyone brave/stupid enough to tackle Dunne? “I don’t,” Jimmy laughs. “I can’t!”

But while chats with the Corona-in-Chief over the halftime oranges aren’t part of the agenda, there’s sage council coming from other quarters. “We’re friends with Glen Power from The Script, and he gives us excellent advice,” Jimmy reports. “It’s cool, but at the same time we’re not the kind of people who are gonna go pick people’s brains. We’re quite shy, so when we get advice it’s great. We’ll always listen.”

Another recent highlight for Picture This came in late August, when the band made their US debut in New York. Coupled with a first tour of the UK, the horizon for the lads clearly stretches beyond our shores.

“We expected our New York gig to be a showcase gig,” Jimmy explains. “But when we asked on Facebook if people wanted to go, we’d used up our guest list within an hour. The UK is selling pretty fast, and obviously we’re touring here, but our focus is worldwide – we’re looking everywhere.”

Despite the glamour of such excursion, both members of the group still live at home – though the amount of nights spent there are dwindling quickly. Concerns outside of music are not showbiz romances – they’re both single – or wild hedonism: “All we do is play FIFA,” Ryan swears.

Even the suggestion of getting five-star treatment on a night out has them recoiling. “We’d rather drink pints in a quiet pub than drink champagne in some fancy nightclub,” says Ryan.

“What’s happening is crazy,” Jimmy concedes. “But the people from our town, and our friends, if they saw us going to a VIP nightclub? I just don’t think it’s necessary. That stuff just feeds your own ego, and we don’t need that.”

The radio session they’re off to is just one of at least four that day – they kicked off the morning live on air at 7am. Having fit in a few in-store appearances around their most triumphant of homecomings, they clambered onto their transatlantic flight, and while in New York could toast their EP knocking Christine and the Queens from the chart summit. Feeding their own egos is redundant alright – there’s enough reminders for Picture This of just how special they are.