Sound of the underground

In the pages of classic boy’s comic Roy Of The Rovers there was a story called ‘Billy’s Boots’, in which a precocious young whippersnapper played international standard football thanks to a pair of magic football boots that had previously been owned by a veteran soccer superstar. Such totemic ancestor-worship can also be found in the music industry, and it could explain why young Jeremy Hickey, the one-man-band below the surface of Rarely Seen Above Ground (R.S.A.G.) plays such amazing swamp-blues-funk-pop-indie (live, this is a whirlwind of drums and vocals accompanied by shadowy projections of Hickey playing the other instruments). Is this because (like Billy and his boots) young Jeremy has a Fender precision bass that was played by his father back in the showband era and this has given him mad music skillz?

“My dad was involved with showbands back in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the bass was his pride and joy and it really is a pleasure to play,” he explains. “I still use it and there’s a bit of a history there... a legacy.”
Now, Jeremy doesn’t personally suggest that the four stringed “big guitar” has imbued him with any magical sonic powers, but he does credit his musically-talented family as an influence.
“My dad was involved in music his whole life and my mother was always into music as well, so there were a lot of styles going around the house. I started playing drums around 10 and I got my first kit when I was 11. It was a pretty old kit. I’m not even sure what it was. It was basically a bass drum and a tom and I built it up from there. I saved money and would come to Dublin and buy new bits every couple of weeks.”
At this point Jeremy got swallowed up by the local Kilkenny music scene.
“I was in bands from the age of 14,” he recalls. “It was just local bands. People that were in my school, a year or two ahead, they’d hear I was a drummer and approach me and ask would I be in their band. Then we’d disappear into a practice place or garage and spend a few months doing covers. It was everything from The Cure to The Jesus and Mary Chain to Spaceman Three to the Pixies. You’d just go in and perfect the songs. That was the thing back then when we started – it was all about covers. It’s not like now, where people are encouraged to write their own songs much earlier. People would do covers and learn to play them first before you’d get on to writing songs.”
But soon he got itchy and began composing his own tunes.
“I started my own thing in around ‘96-ish and did a kind of demo. It was my first proper demo. It was done on a four-track and it was back when recording was all on tape. Then I went travelling for a bit and when I came back I met Davy.”
Davy is Davy Holland, the man who mixed the current album, and with whom Jeremy toiled for years on the psychedelic soul band Blue Ghost. They met as a consequence of regular jam sessions in their local.
“There’s a pub called the Pump House and on a Sunday night there’d be a session on. There’s a band there that has been playing for the past 15/20 years called the Barflies and I still play with them now. Davy would get up on a Sunday and I saw him do a version of ‘A Day In The Life’ by The Beatles. He did the whole thing by himself including the orchestral-breakdown bit. I was so impressed by that that Blue Ghost formed soon after. That was in ‘97-ish. In ‘98 we were doing our first gigs, and we released something in 2002. To this day we still jam together on a Sunday night in the Pump House – alternative country, funk... a mixture of styles.”
All this while he knew he also wanted to do his own thing.
“The bonus disc on this record [Organic Sampler is really a double album] is actually my first album,” he explains. “I’d moved into this house with a DJ friend. We had a four-bedroom bungalow and had a bedroom and a music room each. I’d soundproofed mine and everything else. We’d both come home from work in the evening [Jeremy’s a drum teacher] and he’d DJ and I’d be there recording my stuff. I basically finished the bonus disc in the house, did a few hundred copies, played a few gigs and sold them. Then half-way through doing them and selling them, I decided I’d start on another album, and half-way through that I had the idea of releasing a double album.”
Then there was the problem of how he was going to present it live. The end result was a sort of organic-drum-and-vocal-based DJ-set accompanied by visuals he co-created with his friend Paul Mahon.
“I didn’t know what way I was going to do it initially,” he explains. “I always knew that I was going to play drums and do vocals live, but then what? Do the obvious thing and put a band together? I’d been in bands since I was quite young and I wanted to try something new. And then I saw DJ Shadow doing the Private Press tour, and the idea of a one-man show really appealed to me. The whole idea of the shadows came from German expressionism, but it was really about keeping things as simple as possible. I didn’t want to overcrowd the whole show and I wanted to keep the visuals to suit the actual music. In the end it was a very simple way of portraying an image.”
Indeed it was, and six months, one album release, a Choice award nomination, a tour, and many glowing reviews later, Jeremy Hickey is still a little stunned by the response. His profile has been further increased of late by his impressive showing on the Sony Ericsson Raw Sessions.
“It’s been amazing really, the amount of attention I’ve got in such a short period of time, particularly after being involved with music for so long.”
So will he ditch the visual element, get in a full band and grow an interesting, asymmetrical haircut?
“No, I don’t think so,” he smiles. “This is really more about having a vision than having a band, and I don’t mean that in a pretentious way. The whole sound, the detail of it; it’s the way I want it. It’s about the feel, the groove... a gelling of styles. It’s more about music in general than the sound of a particular band. It’s at a stage now where it’s what it is.”

R.S.A.G.’s Organic Sampler is out on Psychonavigation.