Ain't Life Grand

“We’re a very frantic bunch,” notes Grand Pocket Orchestra front mentaller Patrick Hanna. “We’re like an ADD convention. We really don’t focus at all on how we want to sound or what we want to do...The chemistry of it is just tailor-made to produce this sort of mad-sounding stuff!”

Those familiar with the off-beat sound of the Dublin fivesome will know exactly what Hanna is referring to. The rest of you may be interested to learn that their debut album crams 18 songs into 35.8 minutes and is graced with melodica, toy keyboards, mandolin, banjo, scissors and basically, “anything that makes noise.”
But before you cry “try-hard alt. pop wankers!”, hear them out.
“There was a thing in the Metro last week,” explains guitarist Mark Chester, “and they were talking about loads of bands in Ireland trying to be crazy with a capital K and I got really angry with it. It mentioned us, Adebisi Shank and (GPO’s tour buddies) Fight Like Apes. I don’t think any of us are actually intentionally going out there to be wacky. It’s really patronising.”
From here, I refer any remaining haters to the astounding The Ice Cream, which was recorded over 12 months ago, but only got released last month.
“We had promises made by record labels that were broken,” Hanna laments, “so after waiting for ages we thought we’d just release it ourselves. The thing about doing it independently is you don’t break promises to yourself.”
The pair proudly announce that the LP was produced by the band themselves; “We just had to completely bluff it,” Chester laughs. “We had a 10-year-old Mac and a house in Cork and we mixed it in a rehearsal space with a metal band in the next room playing the same song over and over again!
Hanna takes over; “It goes (breaks into underwhelming song) dun dun dun dun dun dun and they could never come up with a new part for it! One day we started playing along and threw on a real Busted-esque chorus - they came round to the room and accused us of stealing their song!
‘We might as well have been walking on a tightrope. On top of the fact that we’re not experts at such things, we had these constant, droning noises from next door!”
Ah, perhaps that explains The Ice Cream’s manic, agitated underbelly...
“A lot of our favourite albums have a shit loads of songs,” he stresses, namedropping Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs and The Clash’s London Calling, “they have some really nice posh moments and then some 20-second really obviously spontaneous songs, so we knew exactly the type of album we wanted to make. We planned to have, lets say, 12 songs worked out to a tee and then leave room for about seven songs that were really, really rough. There’s one song ‘Violence Is Cool’ that was just done in two hours.”
While we’re dealing in extremes, what’s this about Chester putting himself on a strict musical diet a few years back?
“I stopped listening to music for three years,” he nods. “It was around the time I first got an iPod. I’d play music, I was in bands, but I just couldn’t listen to it. It destroyed the magic of listening to music to me. I love albums as albums and that’s why the segues (on The Ice Cream) are important.”
‘We just tried to make the most stupid noises possible,” he continues. “We did vocals with the mikes inside and all the windows open and us standing outside on the lawn!”
“We recorded wherever we wanted,” Hanna interjects. “Put a mike in a drawer; record a whole song on a 4-track; record outside; we thought we were Muse doing all this shit!”
However they set about capturing it on wax, the result, it has to be said, contains some rather unconventional emissions of the throat; “I’m still trying to find out how my voice should sound,” Hanna muses. “I think as we record more I will settle into a certain kind of vocal but for now I’m happy just screaming.”
The Ice Cream sees Hanna purring ‘You are the sunshine of my life’ alongside surreal bellows of ‘Don’t ever want to see Jesus Christ/Holding me ransom with a chopping knife.’ With such a diverse range of lyrical fodder on display, I have to ask where these wonderful words come from.
“The old noodle I suppose,” Hanna shrugs. “In some cases they’re just off the top of the head. I’m very shy about talking about lyrics. ‘Cause you talk about lyrics you talk about emotions and that’s when stuff gets deep. We don’t want that, like!”
It suddenly strikes me that, as whimsical and haphazard as GPO’s music is, you can’t write any band off as purely a thing of fun.
“It’s not that I don’t care about the lyrics,” Hanna continues, “but again I like the idea of putting effort in at one point and then being completely spontaneous at another. People can take whatever they want from the lyrics. Take what you will and if it gives you a boner, I’m a happy man!”

The Ice Cream is out now. GPO play Dolan’s, Limerick on October 7 and the Hard Working Class Heroes festival on
October 9.