Angling For Success

Guitarist John Duignan and drummer Conall O’Breachain, more commonly known as the primary school teachers by day, quirk rockers by night that make up Choice Prize-nominated pop outfit We Cut Corners, are no strangers to festivals. In fact, they’ve even worked out a formula for the blasted things.

“Just play all your loudest, fastest songs,” O’Breachain advises. “When you’re playing festivals, sometimes the quieter moments are just not appropriate!”
As full-time teachers, Duignan and O’Breachain don’t quite run the We Cut Corners ship all by themselves, which is precisely why they’ve joined forces with a handful of creative types to help them promote their spectacularly-titled debut album Today I Realised I Could Go Home Backwards. From artwork to music videos to live visuals, the boys have barely stepped a foot wrong, but O’Breachain assures me that it’s all down to luck.
He remembers, “When we were in the recording studio with Jimmy (Eadie, producer), he kind of said to us, ‘Lads, you need to have a video for every song,’ and we were like, ‘Fuck.’ John is great at trawling around the internet for stuff, so he went on Vimeo and while we were at the mixing desk, he was literally looking up filmmakers. Anything that he saw that he liked he’d send it to me, we’d have a look at it and then we’d email them he’d say, ‘We love what you’re doing, we’re making an album at the moment, we’d love if you would be interested in a joint artistic venture where we give you our song and you make a film for it,’ and we were just so fucking lucky with the people that came back to us! The video for ‘A Pirate’s Life’ was done by Kijek/Adamski, a Polish couple and it took them four months! They made it with felt tip markers, frame by frame, 2,000 pictures. In our Dropbox one morning there was a video that just blew our fucking minds and we couldn’t believe how lucky we’d been!”
Another chance encounter saw them team up with visual wizards LeTissier for a couple of live shows around Ireland.
“They’ve done it for (instrumental rockers) Alarmist in the past, and we were thinking, ‘We don’t play music like that at all!’, so we weren’t sure if it would work. But they assured us that they felt that they could make it work for us, so we recorded the whole set for them and they went away and literally made a visual piece for each song. They built kind of a set that they could project it all onto and it was just incredible, it just looked amazing.”
The marriage of music and visuals worked a treat in Whelan’s; is this something we’ll be seeing at all We Cut Corners shows from
now on?
“Funnily enough, I don’t think so,” he says. “I think we’ll try and do something slightly different next time, just so people have something different to look at every time they come and see us. Although now that I’ve said it, I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do?’”
They could take cues from a certain Cork band who invited a pole dancing champion up on stage with them to throw a few shapes. How about it?
“Well, we’ll certainly consider that,” he laughs. “I’ll put it to John.”
In the meantime, there’s a second record to be made. On the last album, Duignan and O’Breachain mostly indulged in twentysomething problems, namely, growing up, getting older and freaking out about same. What can we expect when We Cut Corners head back into the studio in July?
“Pretty much just freaking out about getting older actually, to be honest!” he laughs. “We just kind of write about frivolous stuff that we happen to be going through. I think if we tried anything else, it might seem a little bit contrived, you know? We wouldn’t be amazing at taking a political stance and writing about that. We just kind of write about shit we’re feeling and, as frivolous as that is, that just seems to be what works.”