In the breathless quest for musical appreciation, the one thing that most bands don’t have is time – time to make decisions, time to plan their next move, time to assess where they’re at as a band. The Chapters are one outfit who made this kind of time for themselves and have emerged in a slightly different form to the one we might be familiar with.
“We stopped playing gigs for seven or eight months,” says guitarist Simon Eustace. “The last thing I remember was the last gig we played, we all sat down and watched The Last Waltz and all loved it. We started to get into The Band and that kind of sound. The songs just started coming out that way, it wasn’t forced at all.”
Drummer Ciaran Fortune agrees.
“The hard thing was that we had loads of quiet stuff that we were really into that came out nicely recorded and loud stuff that we couldn’t really reproduce that well. Playing the kind of gigs we were, you have to play the loud stuff, otherwise people talk over you. For that seven months we found a happy medium. The time off gave us a chance to be musicians in ourselves. We explored and exploited everything that we had and just became a better band. There was no pressure to rehearse for this or that gig, it was on its own buzz. We recorded loads and dumped loads. Whatever happened happened…and that stuff happened.”
The stuff that happened was a shift in the band’s sound to a more American slant, prompted by that discovery of The Band. The move is a subtle one, but suits them massively, instilling their music with a new found freedom and confidence. Not that they’re looking to pigeonhole themselves too much, as Simon explains.
“We wouldn’t like to peg ourrselves totally as the alt Americana thing. Ideally you should cross that with an ambient Pink Floyd type of vibe, a mish-mash of the two.”
Their latest publicity shots, though, definitely make some sort of statement.
“Those photos that we did which would mark us out were basically an attempt to do something that had a look, as opposed to a few guys in a room staring into the middle distance.”
He’s got a point. Whereas you might think standing out in an age when Hard Working Class Heroes can gather a hundred bands might be harder than ever, perhaps the uniformity of image and music that exists means just the opposite.
“That’s true of everywhere, not just Dublin,” says Ciaran. “It’s the chick with pink hair that everybody remembers from school. I suppose in a certain way we were wondering if the stuff we were playing before was really that original. It wasn’t conscious, we all liked it, but we never properly thought about what we were doing. Then we took time off and all this sort of happened. It’s hard to talk about it objectively.”
So far, with six or seven shows under their belts, the response to this new chapter has been positive (“People have been saying it’s cool what we’re doing and that it’s good we’re taking them with us, but that’s usually drunken mates at four in the morning”). Simon for one feels that they have returned in a much stronger position.
“We got this thing at the beginning of the year, one of the bands to watch, and we didn’t want to be seen that way too much. It’s a tag that can screw you up if you’re not careful. We could have put an EP out in March but I don’t know how long-term that would have been. We could have ended up being local heroes and that’s not what we’re really after. There’s nothing wrong with that but we want to do something big. It’s a big world out there and we want to get somewhere.”