Bring on the sub

Seasoned stalwarts of the Dublin live scene, The Subtonics kick off a concerted effort to make their mark this winter. “Its getting enjoyable again,” frontman Stefan Murphy enthuses. “Hard Working Class Heroes was great for us. It was one of the first gigs in a long time where I could turn around afterwards and say that I was proud to be in the band and that we really gave a good account of ourselves.”

This renewed bout of activity and sense of purpose follows what Stef deems a relatively quiet period. “We haven’t been gigging much for the best part of a year,” he explains. “We just did some one offs with nothing else really scheduled. We’ve been a tiny bit more fussy about what gigs we’re doing now and the reasons why we are doing them. We’re not just going to gig for the sake of it. We’ve got a headliner in December and that will only be our second or third headliner of the whole year. We’re now about making it count quality wise as opposed to quantity. If you gig too much around Dublin it is hard to keep people going to all your gigs. People will get sick of you no matter how much they like you or how good you are.”
The buzz for their Music Centre date on December 5 is building a considerable head of steam. Thanks to participating in this year’s In The City event in Manchester, which also featured fellow Dubliners La Rocca and Life After Modelling, there has been an increasing amount of A+R interest in the band.
“Brian Carroll who has been helping us out management-wise and Mark our guitarist put themselves about and went to the conference centre and handed out press packs and CDs,” Stef explains saluting their hard work. “Anybody that they couldn’t get to come to the gig they gave a good blurb to. A couple of record companies have been coming back to us so it was good. We just had a magnificent weekend over there and it was something we were really glad that we did.”
The Subtonics have had the bones of an album (provisionally titled Half An Ounce of Decorum) in the can for some time now. Stef reveals that for the moment they are going to keep it under wraps and concentrate on writing more songs.
“Originally, we had recorded an album’s worth of songs and planned to release it ourselves with the help of SLR, the record company that was set up by Loop studios who we’ve been involved with for years and have always been a huge help to us,” Stef says. “With one thing and another and going from a recording studio to becoming a record label, there isn’t enough money to do it anytime soon. That encouraged us to rethink our gameplan because some of the recordings were well over a year old or even longer in some cases. We were beginning to get a bit sick of the sound of them and thought it would be good to use a different approach so we wrote new songs.
“At the moment, we regard the recordings that we have as well produced demos. We’re going to try and get some interest from other record companies and try and get signed the old-fashioned way by getting your stuff out there and trying to get people to come to gigs. We didn’t approach it that way from the start and we’ve always had a DIY thing going. Sometimes that pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.”
The Subs are beginning to see all the years of DIY work gradually paying off.
“There have been times where I’d say every individual member has had moments when they thought it was time to shut up shop,” Stef reflects. “But on the whole we’ve never all thought that at the same time. If one person was having doubts there’d be another there to bring them around. Its been a long process and sometime totally unrewarding. Now, the general feeling is that it has all been worth it because we’re genuinely beginning to catch people’s attention as opposed to just being a band that a handful of people know about, a handful of people like and a handful of people dislike.”