Beyond The Pale

What’s the time? It’s time to get ill. Time to get bacchanalia-eyed and check out this year’s models on the Heineken Rollercoaster tour – three acts that have little in common except for the fact that they all hail from outside the Pale.

So, to everything there is a season: Turn, Turn, Turn. Sandwiched by Cork’s Frank And Walters closing the show and Limerick’s Woodstar opening up, three-piece Kells band Turn’s case history is your standard band-meets-record-company, band-falls-in love-with-itself, band-loses-record-company, band-sets-up-its-own-label morality tale. Initially specialising in stadium rock for club-sized crowds, the band got sucked in and shat out the wrong end of the business in double time, signing to Infectious (home of Ash) at the turn of the decade and getting dropped almost as soon as their debut album Antisocial was released.

To Turn’s credit, they wasted no time regrouping and releasing an EP under their own steam (In Position) a year ago, followed by a single (‘Another Year Over’/‘Summer Song’, no. 28 in the Irish charts last autumn). They capped this comeback with a tour of Ireland in tandem with The Frames late last year, but just when things were looking rosy again, bass-player Gavin Fox split to join Scottish indie janglers Idlewild.

The remaining members, singer/guitarist Ollie Cole and drummer Ian Melady, found a replacement in the form of ex-Skindive bassman Alan Lee, and as we speak, have just finished their all-singing, all-dancing non-corporate second album Forward, due for release this March.

So how’s the new boy working out?

“He’s great,” enthuses Ollie. “It was brilliant; we went down to mix the album in Grouse Lodge in Monaghan, really nice – it has swimming pools and all sorts of posh things for rock stars to do when they’re not recording – and he’d just come on board, he was definitely in at the deep end. A band, as you probably know, is a weird bunch of friends, usually with a stupidly sick sense of humour, so he found himself right in the thick of it for a week.

“But he’d done all his homework. When we first set up to play, the thoughts of goin’ back and having to learn all the songs again . . . (groans). But we plugged in the first day and played right through everything and I was going, ‘Thank you, God!’ And he’s a really cool guy as well, he’s been a friend of mine for years.”

So, a lucky break. Ollie is wiser and more weathered for all the travails of the last two years, but then, as he admits, the band were as green as a summer snot when they began their all-too brief stint on Infectious.

“When Turn first got signed and got a manager we sort of sat around on our arses waiting for people to tell us what to do,” he remembers. “As a result of that, whenever we came home from doing tours in the UK we just ended up doing nothing. We were releasing singles and they were coming out in Ireland, but we weren’t doing any launches for them, we weren’t doing anything.”

This lack of a grass roots following in their home country told on the band when their record deal went down the plughole. Ollie clearly remembers the point where reality intruded on delusions of grandeur.

“We’d just come off a tour with Idlewild and we thought we were the kings of the world, we thought we were gonna be massive, and then… we weren’t. When things aren’t going well for you in this country it’s the smallest place in the world; you don’t want to even go out.

“With getting dropped there’s a certain amount of shame in your own head, ’cos all the people you’ve been out drinking with in Whelan’s, all the people you’ve been talking shite to, telling them everything’s going great – you have to go out and face them again. And after we got dropped we had no income for the band. We wanted to put out In Position, we had the songs but we’d no money to record it or anything, so we started to play Ireland and do a few gigs. I think we played Galway for the first time after being dropped!”

At which point Ollie realised that if he didn’t start acting a bit less like Syd Barrett and a bit more like Henry Rollins, he wasn’t going to have a band anymore.

“It was hard because I was writing all the songs and being stoned all the time and then I almost had to become this businessman,” he concedes. “I had to go and register the record company as a business and do VAT and all, stuff that I’d never done before in my life. The whole process was such a fuckin’ head-wrecker, it was killing me with stress; I was like an insomniac maniac at the time. But we got it done, and when In Position arrived back in February of last year, holding it in my hand was brilliant. I didn’t feel like that with the first record ’cos everyone did it for us.”

Turn followed that EP with a single, toured hard, and generally set about making up for lost time at home. Then Gavin left, which is where we came in.

“I’m still trying to get my head around that,” Ollie admits. “It was a bit depressing ’cos we’d fought so hard to come back after being dropped. We’d just finished recording the album and hadn’t mixed it yet – the best album we’ll ever make. And Gavin was there with me and Ian in that rehearsal room the whole way up, writing and recording and making that record. And for this to happen and him to go when he did was a blow to morale.

“I don’t really understand why he did it, I personally think he didn’t do the right thing, but I’m a little bit older than him and what I want is different than what he wants. The music and the friendship are more important to me than any sort of success. I probably wasn’t like that when I was much younger, but I am now. But with Gavin I think it just sort of seemed like a quick path to something, they were going on tour here, there or wherever, it seemed like a shortcut.”

Nevertheless, Ollie seems to prefer working at the coalface of rock ‘n’ roll, being able to control his band’s trajectory rather than leaving it to the MD and accounting department.
“As you go on it becomes harder and harder to do,” he says, “but it also becomes harder and harder to stop. If I don’t get to play music for a week or two I start to go a bit mad. I wish I really cared about the music when I was younger ’cos I’d be better; I wish it didn’t take me so long to get to this point.

“It’s stupid but I’m starting to become a proper artist or something, I can’t sleep thinking about bloody songs, I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is pick up the guitar, light a fag and play the whole day long. This album that we’ve just made I think is amazing. If we stayed with Infectious we wouldn’t have made this record, we would’ve made some stupid, bombastic, pullin’ shapes on the telly record. And I’m more proud of this one.”

So proud he’s drooling at the prospect of taking it out on the forthcoming tour. But does Ollie think rock ‘n’ roll bands can strike a deal with beer companies and still hold their heads high?

“I don’t even really think about it,” he says. “I know so many people who are righteous about that, and I must admit I’ve never really felt like that. It’s the Heineken Rollercoaster tour – what else would you call it? To me, we need to get out there now and play all these new songs live, and they’re paying us and bringing us around the place and giving us free drink. It’s a fuckin’ beautiful present – usually when we go on a tour of Ireland it takes about a hundred phone calls and a load of hassle. This is a breeze.”

The Frank & Walters are not like other bands. For a start, singer/bassist Paul Linehan isn’t at home when HP calls, he’s down the road changing a light bulb for a neighbour. On his return, it transpires that the singer got roped into installing the light fixtures as well.

“I nearly got electrocuted!” Paul laughs. “There’s great neighbours here in Wicklow, y’know? Before I came up here I lived in a flat in Kinsale in Cork, it was a very kind of a snobby area, and I much prefer working class people to what I was puttin’ up with. It’s a very materialistic place down there, it’s all big cars, big women, sort of thing!”

It’s hardly surprising that community would rank high on the singer’s list of priorities. Despite being one of the few Irish acts to achieve any kind of British chart success in the early to mid-’90s with singles like ‘After All’ and ‘Fashion Crisis Hits New York’, most listeners would regard the band as being synonymous with the south, the original dorks of Cork, with a whole catalogue of songs commemorating the characters and quarehawks of the city – they were named after two local tramps. But that was a long time ago, and post-Best Of, the perception of The Frank And Walters as the quintessential Cork band is something Paul seems keen to play down.

“The majority of the song ‘Colours’ was written in London, so was ‘This Is Not A Song’,” he points out. “They’re not really tied to a place. I was just on my holidays and I actually had a dream and woke up and remembered a bit of the song and wrote it down. By knowing the words I was able to remember what the melody was. The song on our Glass album and Best Of, ‘New York’, that came to me in a dream as well.”

So, Linehan is Jung at heart, reckoning that the songs come from some inner twilight zone rather than a particular geographical location.

“I think they do actually, the good songs seem to come when you’re in a relaxed state of mind, and that’s when you can tap into your subconscious more, and that’s the same place where dreams come from. I was lucky enough to get a couple of songs like that.”

Does he think that’s why so many musicians use drugs, as a shortcut to the subconscious?

“Yeah. I myself never really got into drugs. I smoked hash once or twice but it never really agreed with me. All I got was paranoid and really weird; it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. And then I did try magic mushrooms once and that was the worst experience of my whole life multiplied by about a million. This is my guess, I think if you’re in any way a sensitive person, that if you take drugs, it’s too much. Drugs are only for people who are very stable! And if you were stable you wouldn’t take them!”

So much for the old drugs as a gateway to the gods riff. Instead, Paul espouses the methodology espoused by everyone from CS Lewis to Stephen King: if you show up for work enough times, the muse will keep her side of the bargain.

“The way I look at it, writing songs is energy,” he reckons. “It’s a big open energy and you compress it down into a song. It’s like transferring it from one form into another, like compressing a load of thoughts into one and capturing exactly what you want to say very concisely. It will come if you put the work in. But the most important thing is getting the energy up and going. It’s like starting an engine, and once you’re fired up it’ll happen.”

So, bearing in mind the upcoming Rollercoaster tour, how does he approach live performances?

“I try and enjoy myself and I try and get the crowd to enjoy it as well. Sometimes it can be hard if you’re not in the best of form going up to do a gig, but somehow I think if you can get really immersed in the music and follow what the songs are and really throw yourself into it, it seems to pull itself along – you’re entertaining and you don’t even know it.

“We have a new song called ‘Change My Way Of Thinking’, it’s a very positive and uplifting song, and I’ve noticed when I sing that song now it puts me in a great frame of mind to be able to sing the other songs. If I’m playing live I want to create music that’ll make me happy when I sing it. We have songs that I won’t play live ’cos they’re too intense, they’re too much. One song ‘Restraint’, it’s on one of the EPs, I couldn’t sing it anymore ’cos you’d be totally drained and depressed after.

“I love listening to Bob Marley, he makes me happy, so I want to be doing stuff like that. That’s what I’ve been thinking about in the last year or two – I only want to write happy music, I’ll only use it if it’s positive from now on, ’cos I don’t want to depress anyone. You can overcome anything when you have the right frame of mind.”

Something the late Bill Graham maintained long before the home recording revolution of the 90s – watch out for the guys with the four and eight-tracks: they usually forge their own skewed sound and vision away from the diktats of commercial studios and off-the-rack engineers.

Limerick band Woodstar are the end product of this line of thinking, a visually anonymous but extremely promising ensemble who’ve spent the last couple of years honing their sound in a studio they built in Mungret, Co. Limerick.

“That’s fairly visionary out of Bill, in fairness,” says Woodstar mainman Fin Chambers. “It meant that people really didn’t want a producer coming in and wrecking things. It was easier for us ’cos you can get the equipment less expensively these days, but the whole idea was to have control and layer this thing.”

The band’s debut EP for the Regal label Time To Bleed reflected this ethic, earning comparisons with other autocratic hermits like Grandaddy, Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, The Flaming Lips and Neil Young – creaky, creepy, space-aged rustic stuff, not so much ghetto as backwoods fabulous.

“Bar the stuff we did with Stephen (Street) for the new album it’s all done at the end of a field, as far down into remoteness as we could get in Limerick,” Fin says. “We had done flashy recordings, going in for a weekend here and there, and it didn’t suit what we were trying to do, ’cos we’re not your straightforward rock-it-out band.

“We wanted to take time with arrangements and harmonies, and I don’t think you can create something over a weekend as such, so we kind of tipped away at eight or nine songs over a three or four month period, so everybody could come in at any hour of the morning. We’d never have been able to do that ten years ago because the way studios worked.”

Whatever thing the band has, it’s fragile. One wrong twist of the knob and you lose the luminosity. To Mr Street’s credit, the band’s second EP The Last Sad Verse Of A Dumb Punk Song, released last October, sounded like a more concise, honed version of the debut’s blurry beauty than the producer’s patented biscuit tin snare and jangly guitar Sundays/Smiths sound.

Fin: “It’s a feel that the music has, that it can go very easily wrong. We’re doing a song here with Stephen at the moment and we’ve three versions and now the problem is picking which one. We recently mixed the other album tracks with Richard Rainey (U2, Alfie, Mansun), and one of the things I said to him was to keep the fragile thing in the mix.

“Stephen picked up on our record through Ben Hillier who produced Time To Bleed and he got onto the office ’cos he liked what we were doing. Strangeways Here We Come is one of my favourite albums of all time, so while I know we’re not necessarily like The Smiths or The Sundays or a lot of what Stephen has done, for me, it was like, ‘Okay, the guy who made Strangeways wants to do some stuff’ – it was all positive. And we can be quite vocal ourselves about a direction.

“The way Stephen works is you sit down and talk a lot about where you want to go, so you get what he has to offer plus what you do – it’s not a big mad compromise. Of course when you’re doing the vocal for ‘Dumb Punk Song’ and Stephen Street is directing you, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ but he’s a fan as well so that’s why it’s working.”

Bearing in mind the nocturnal emissions of the country’s DIY post-everything fraternity – The Frames, The Jimmy Cake, The Tycho Brahe, David Kitt et al – Woodstar find themselves in a far more hospitable climate for experimental pop than at any time in Ireland since the mid 80s. They fit now; they wouldn’t have a decade ago.

“Well to be honest, I gave up, it was as simple as that,” admits Fin. “I was doing this with the same songwriter, Alan, that I worked with since we were in school. We were doing these soft gentle type songs, not as experimental as now, but I knew they were good songs. I was going out around ’94, ’95, looking at bands and I knew we didn’t fit to the point where we’d probably be laughed at. There wasn’t a place for it. I was listening to Tindersticks, a lot of the 4AD type bands and a lot of that San Francisco sound, Red House Painters, American Music Club, people actually writing songs where lyrics meant things, but there was no way you could start a band like that in Limerick and think about going up to Dublin.”

“So I went off to the Middle East, did the usual India thing and just travelled. I was constantly on e-mail to Alan, sending over stuff, and he just said, ‘Come on and we’ll give it a go again’ so I said, ‘Find the band’. And when I was away, something changed. I didn’t think we’d get a band in Limerick with the same type of influences; fairly accomplished musicians but also ones that wouldn’t play too much, and Alan found Kieran and Ronan and Doug who were playing with another band, and I came home and took a look and that was it. And the first thing that we did when I came home was to build the studio. It was a conscious decision to take it seriously. Basically we wanted the security of having it outside the town from the point of view of equipment and everything, so we built it down at the end of a field, horses and all. The joke is, ‘Lovely band, but a terrible smell of horseshit off them!’.”

Ollie Cole – Turn

Favourite album: Either/Or – Elliot Smith
Favourite book: The World According To Garp – John Irving
Favourite movie: Delicatessen
Favourite TV programme: Never watch television
Favourite sex symbol: Milla Jovovich

Fin Chambers– Woodstar
Favourite album: Blood On The Tracks – Bob Dylan
Favourite book: Perfume – Patrick Süskind
Favourite movie: The Ladykillers
Favourite TV programme: Frazier
Favourite sex symbol: Faye Dunaway

Paul Linehan – The Frank And Walters

Favourite album: Private Collection – Nina Simone.
Favourite book: The Power Of Positive Thinking – Norman Vincent Peale
Favourite movie: Se7en
Favourite TV programme: The Waltons
Favourite sex symbol: Shelley Long