Belfast Cowboys

After almost seven years of foraging in the rock ’n’ roll wilderness with acts like One Deaf Ear and Dubh Chapter, guitarist Sean Quinn formed The Vivid with fellow Belfast man and singer Peter Alexander back in 1993.

Basing themselves in Camden, the duo soon released a brace of self-financed EPs and began attracting scores of A&R scouts to their gigs. Battle-hardened by past failures, however, they refused to consider negotiating a major deal at that point on the grounds that they weren’t ready for it yet. Instead, they held out until they had an album’s worth of material prepared and then went ahead and recorded it themselves with former That Petrol Emotion frontman Steve Mack producing.

The fruit of their labours is Shiny, a polished collection of big, booming rock songs with an industrial edge. Two months after the record’s completion The Vivid were invited to tour Europe and Scandinavia with The Mission and most recently were asked to open the show for Killing Joke. This month Shiny gets its Irish release through Total/BMG records. As part of their press chores, the two affable Northerners met me for coffee on a drab Tuesday morning in the bar of Blooms Hotel. Firstly, I questioned Sean on the pros and cons of playing hard-to-get with the major labels:

“What we found was that people would expect you to fall down dead if they took any interest in you,” the guitarist reveals over the ever-present drone of the nearby TV. “In my past experience, if anyone offered an Irish band a deal, we always used to fall to pieces and grovel and do anything to get it. We’ve all been there, but once you’ve experienced a major deal and you’re still on eighty quid a week at the end of it, well . . .”

Sub-Goth bands like The Mission and Killing Joke are not the most seriously-regarded of people to be associated with. Did it ever occur to you that you’d be better off not fraternising with the whitefaces?

“Yeah, it did,” Peter admits. “I don’t even want to mention The Mission. For us it was about getting on a tour and having a laugh, it didn’t matter who it was with. And we ended up selling about ten thousand records out of it.”

“What you’ve got to understand is that it’s completely different on the continent,” explains Sean. “The average age of The Mission’s audience was between 19 and 23. We thought it’d be a lot of thirty-somethings.”

The inner sleeve of Shiny namechecks The Futurist Manifesto, Fritz Lang and the Marquis De Sade amongst its lengthy list of ‘Inspira-tions’. Aren’t you laying yourselves open to charges of attempted Cool By Association, or at the very least, pretentiousness here?

“No,” responds Peter sharply. “A lot of the time the inspiration for our music doesn’t actually come from another music. It’s from films or books or an airplane or a car or whatever. Sure, I think you could get slated for it but on the other hand I think it’s good to inform people. It’s just a little time-capsule. Perhaps people haven’t heard of the band and if they read the sleeve and liked it, they might gravitate toward the music as well.”

So what was it like working with Steve Mack?

“It was tense to say the least,” reveals Sean.

Really?

“Oh yeah. He’d just read in the NME that the Petrols were splitting up and he didn’t know about it!”

“And he was having trouble with his wife,” adds Peter. “He said he’d never work with anyone from Northern Ireland again ’cos we all have problems!”

Sean concurs: “He’d say, ‘You guys have got a chip on your shoulder the size of Manhattan!’. He did a brilliant job, though. I’d recommend him to anybody.”

I’m just about to wrap up the interview when Sean insists that Peter relate to me his recent exploits at the celebrity launch of London’s comedy Cafe. It seems that the Belfastman, jubilant after completing five weeks of work on the exterior of the building, arrived at the party rather more than half-cut and hell-bent on mixing it with such laughterati as Jo Brand, Harry Enfield and Jools Holland. Peter takes up the story:

“I started hounding Jools for his home number so I could send him the CD but he wouldn’t give it to me. I was being a pain in the arse I must admit. Things started to get a bit heated so I thought ‘Fuck this’ and I went to walk off. Then Jools’ friend stands in front of me. And I says ‘Are you getting out of my way or what?’ Then the guy thumps me! Now my rule of thumb is if you’re going to hit the deck, drag as many people as you can down with you so you don’t look bad. So I’m going down and I reach out and grab Jools and Jo Brand and the three of us end up on the floor and the friend is still going for me. And this waitress doing a promotion for beer in a giraffe catsuit comes up and says ‘Do you want a beer?!!’ And I’m like ‘Do I look like I want a beer?’. And as I’m being dragged out I’m shouting ‘Hey Jools, I’d make great TV!’”

The Vivid. Nice guys, but ye can’t bring ’em anywhere!