Building On Reality

Let s go somewhere quiet, A Housemen Dave Couse and bassist Martin Healy had ventured. So we sauntered off to the National Gallery restaurant and found we had company. Barry Desmond, MEP, was parked in the far corner; in an opposite angle, a Gillian Bowler wannabe was cradling her cellophone.
I has rosehip tea, fragrant and fruity; Couse choose Indian tea, milk, one sugar, robust and warming; Healy opted for chicken cannelloni. That knocked the band's expenses back #10.50. Thereabouts, I canned the A House Table For Three routine. After all, they don t really suit the rock socialite intro.
So I thought I d try the art theory angle on A House as we left. But we bulleted through most of the gallery s rooms, stopping only at some of the collection s 16th century German and 17th century Spanish treasures. Couse professed impatience at classical portraiture; he wanted modern abstraction. So much for A(rt) House and suitably pretentious opening paragraphs. Now if A House were public schoolboys from London
Actually we re no philistines: I m just pointing out one difference between Irish bands like A House and their British equivalents who ll justify themselves by art theory at the switch of a tape-recorder button. The Irish art schools haven t yet produced any self-conscious Irish art rock or culture-critical pop. Instead most non-mainstream Irish acts like A House are self-taught, pragmatic and way of pretension.
Contrariwise, this can mean we re often closed to ideas from other disciplines. And often naive and found out. Now A House are releasing their second blanco y negro album, I Want Too Much, they re learning about the artifice behind the apparent artlessness in many image games.
Or so Dave Couse owns up: Image is all-important these days but we re not one of those strong image bands. You admire a lot of bands and you look up to them and act in the way you conceive they do. So you think a band like REM don t have an image, and don t dress up. But they do. They ve got their designers. They have a strategy for the press, TV and videos. And so we end up looking like just four blokes off the street whereas these are seriously designed people.
With A House, it s all upfront. They re scattershot naofs, primitive sculptors and unpredictable cartoonists who ll scribble out songs that are spare and splintered and then cut them to shreds in shows that must be among the least pompous among Irish acts. Or am I being glib?

A House have never really ridden on any Irish or British waves. Starting in 85 and gradually making their own Irish name through 86, A House weren t to be found closeted in the Pink Elephant, plotting with visiting A&R firemen. Neither the next U2 nor the next anything else, they were merely the first A House, a strange and less than smooth pebble washed up on Dollymount strand.
their songs cackled and chattered and promptly waved farewell without any prolonged melodrama. Their sets weren t supported by much scaffolding and sometimes both you and they could lose the spin of them, especially since these brisk and brusque buskers rarely applied any polish.
But as the black humour of their debut single, Kick Me Again Jesus , showed, A House weren t serious young men with tears and frowns. Then, lo and behold, didn t WEA s nursery label, blanco y negro, sign them and their first album, On Our Big Fat Merry-Go-Round was released in October 88.
Other bands get burdened by that Difficult Second Album. But A House have no qualms about I Want Too Much and I generally concur. Instead, Dave Couse contents, this band went adrift with their debut.
Recording the first album, the record company came up with our producers and we said, alright, fair enough It was all very technical, very precise. Moreover one comment cut at Couse s conscience when somebody referred to our first album as sounding a bit like Queen. Little comments like that you tend to laugh at initially but they tend to grate upon you after a while.
Martin Healy agrees: On the first album the guitars had a very polished sound. So we decided that the next time around, whatever we did, we wanted our guitars to be more grungy the first album sounded like five different bands playing on it. But on this album, we wanted it to sound like one band doing lots of different things. Or as Dave Couse insists: It s one of those albums that if you hear one track on the radio you know that s Dave Couse singing and A House playing.
One can visualise the A House foursome, all on their bended knees, petitioning the Good Lord and producer, Mike Hedges to give them the one thing they most devoutly required identity.
Every band that s successful in the whole world, you hear a few bars and you know who it is, observes Couse. REM come on the radio and you know it s REM even before your man starts singing A lot of bands suffer from lack of that. They don t have an identity. And that s what we decided we needed. Big time. Because obviously if we haven t got it this time we re just pissing in the wind.
A House, or rather Mike Hedges, also decided to disrupt the recording process. Proud owner of the original Abbey Road desk on which The Beatles and John Lennon had recorded, Hedges had already produced The Creatures in the South of France. He flew to Shannon, scoured the West of Ireland and finally decided to make Inishbofin their temporary headquarters.
Sun-drenched Provence made sense for The Creatures but surely the isolated grey granite island of Inishbofin must have been a galling prospect in November with the Atlantical gales spewing? Not according to Dave Couse:
The weather there was unbelievable. It s really maritime. It never gets cold there though when we originally arrived, there were Force 10 gales. We actually recorded Marry Me outdoors on the seafront. On the original version, there was even a Volkswagen driving by. We thought of leaving it in but then we took it out once it got a bit tiring after a while.
Obviously Hedges and A House hoped to cleanse the creative tubes. Though the bars might stay open as late as any Leeson St. nightclub, there were no other distractions. A House, Hedges and the mobile were lodged in a hotel closed during the tourist off-season, and they claim the only problems arose from electrical supplies. The whole thing was run off one socket and when the beer coolers were switched on in the pub, you d blow fuses, Martin Healy told David Bell in the first issue of the band s own fanzine, A Magazine .
In the same interview, Couse justified the Inishbofin move because, We got so much work done. Out there in Inishbofin, if you had done a couple of takes and it wasn t working for you, well, you could leave the studio, walk towards the sea, clear your head and come back afresh. Whereas if you are in Windmill, you can t really stroll around O Connell Street and get your head together.
Recording in Inishbofin was a brave move for a comparatively green band but the album, I Want Too Much, is itself reckless. I tell Couse I think it sounds like a demo and momentarily he thinks I m being critical. But really I should restore his balance and say A House really have found their basic blueprint for future projects.
While other bands may prefer to work in dreamy, curious and furious watercolorus and oils, A House are scriveners, a band who seem best at black-and-white, pencil or pen-and-ink abstract sketches. While other Irish bands keep layering and overdubbing as if they ve no confidence in the original ingredients of their songs, I Want Too Much is an exercise in subtraction as if A House are trying to sandblast their sound and reach back to the primitive, original impulse behind each song.
Couse points out one advantage in their approach: People try to make these really perfect records and then they play them live and they sound like crap. If people hear this record they pretty well know what we re going to be like live.
Many record companies would have recoiled from I Want Too Much. Fortunately for A House, Geoff Travis, who moonlights from Rough Trade to head blanco y negro, was always supportive. But blanco y negro s American arm was initially disorientated: one senior executive took three weeks to give the green light on I Want Too Much.
Martin Healy expands: When they got it first, they were very surprised. Because they expected part two of the first album. They were a bit lot about how to deal with it because in America they think who will we market this to? Is it commercial or alternative college radio?
Incontrovertibly the latter.

Dave Couse believes the album s theme is greed but apart from the title track, I Want Too Much, circles less around political and financial avarice as emotional greed, all those corrosive lusts for power and attention that masquerade as love . Plus all the attendant self-deceit. Or as Couse says: Those situations where someone says it s not that I drink too much, it s just that you don t drink enough .
Couse is shrewd about the Irish macho mentality. Manstrong gets the victim s view of rape and its gradually seeping terror right. Bring Down The Beast is about lager louts, the sort of guys you never want to be beside in a pub because they re always throwing their weight around. But then he gets one smile from his girl-friend and he subsides.
But the closing track, Small Talk is the curio that works as Couse s lyrics run rampant through the rhyming dictionary with over sixty synonyms making up the three verses. I tell Couse I won t be the last journalist who ll link it to Bono s own ation rant on Bad but actually, I already know his intentions are different.
It was almost a mathematically written song from the rhyming dictionary, he explains. It s about all the insincere chat-up lines guys use. So they ll tell a woman she s attractive, assertive, seductive, evocative, sensual, sexual, ideal, surreal and so on when all they want to do is get into bed with her. But in the third and last verse, the women get to answer back and tell the guys they re obnoxious, obvious, nauseous, lecherous, hideous, insidious. In one way it was a technical song almost like a theorem and I can bashfully say I was quite pleased how it worked out.
Then there s the opening track, 13 Wonderful Love Songs . At one point, Couse predicted he d now prefer to write simple love songs with no opinions on it , and this song must be his future model, his rite of purification that he spent ages working over.
But let s not be too precious since with typical A House unpredictability, the track actually sports a banjo as if a refugee from a ballad group had secretly overdubbed a Lou Reed song. Couse explains that his grandfather had a banjo. He s dead now and I got it as an heirloom when I was 13. And because it was a lovely song, I thought it would be good to use it.
Simple, really. As I said before, if some British band had accidentally fallen on the idea, they would have blitzed and dazzled their interviewer with science, theorising how The Velvet Underground missed their chance by not recording a country album in Nashville. But not A House. After all, they re a band of whom Couse confesses: People don t know how to categorise us. We don t even know how to categorise us.

A House s intractability shows itself in an almost puritanically moral streak. From one angle, you could anticipate the A House team to be dismissive of the latest Manchester mob since (a) they ve all passed 25 and so belong to a later generation and (b) however much they damage and disrepair rock, A House follow all Irish bands in disclaiming dance music. But on the playback, what stands out is their anti-drug attitude.
After all, the standard Irish party line is to warn against heroin but take a more lenient view of the drugs at the softer end of the spectrum. But A House stand scornfully against what they obviously regard as neo-hippie brain-rot.
Couse launches his invective at the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays camp. It s back to the Sixties revival. I mean, it s now hip to take drugs. Happy Mondays actually state they take drugs whether they really do or not. They re just doing it for a quick stab at fame. For some unknown reason to me, people seem to be interested in drugs. And if they don t take it themselves, they re reading about other people destroying themselves through drugs. They re just sensationalising it.
Martin Healy suspects the calculations of publicists: The Eighties were so clean, so respectable but now it seems there s a total jump backwards, an attitude of let s do what we want, And it s a strange new kind of permissiveness because it s more structured and calculated. Bands like Happy Mondays come across as being fairly spontaneous souls but there are actually so many marketing people behind them and they re going this is a good angle for publicity and the press is fostering that.
Dave Couse recalls returning from a London gig, about two weeks ago, we were getting the boat the next morning so we stopped off at a motorway cafe, just outside London. And it was packed with young people at about four o clock in the morning. And with this whole fashion for acid and E, they were all stones out of their heads. It was like a drug shop.
He gets even more animated in his disbelief:
It was a Friday night and the orange juice machine was on the go with the Vitamin C to counteract the Ecstasy. Just millions of them taking orange juice and it was so blatant. And they were only 18, wearing the flares and the big shoes. Christ, this was like going back in time. I was asking myself, am I living over in Ireland, really out of date.
But, Couse concludes, England s getting really fucked up these days. It s going downhill fast, both politically and musically.
Later I phone Dave Couse for some follow-up clarifications. As bands go, you re unusually anti-drug?
Yes, Couse answers. I can t see any point in it. We re a very strong anti-drug band. None of us ever take any drugs. It s just a cop-out.
Both Couse and Healy are 27. That makes them 17 in 1980 as the drug degradation of Dublin began.

But perhaps I m painting a too sombre and certainly too sober picture of A House. On stage, they re a comic clatter as Couse gleefully disassembles audience expectations, good-naturedly slagging the front-stage moshers as he parodies rock star roles. A House dates have their own zany by-play. Couse smiles: You can see the glee in their faces and they love to talk to us. And I mean, you can t just ignore them all the time.
I saw A House at McGonagles and the contrast in that narrow venue between the melee at the front and the impassive student observers at the back couldn t have been greater or funnier. Couse just refused to bleed significance or carve any rock gospel tables of stones for those in the rear. Martin Healy interjects that They probably couldn t hear the people at the front. What Dave was saying was actually a coherent reply to someone.
Couse enjoys the conflict even if he s sometimes bemused. They re abusing you, shouting things like Dave Couse, get your fucking hair cut , and it s like as if we all know each other. They obviously like the music and know what we re on about and in that way can relate to us as people. And when they come to a gig and shout at you, you can shout back at them. It s amazing. They ll pay #4.50 and then start abusing you.
But are Dave Couse and A House divided among themselves? On stage, Couse admits he thrives on being an entertainer , and the band s music is like a manic, slapstick, Keystone Kops stab at rock as if the tapes have been speeded up like in the silent movies. Yet the topics of I Want Too Much are often grim, as if Couse has suddenly pulled off the clown s mask. And yes, I know Morrissey often got away with juggling such contradictions.
Couse admits as much when I say and not critically that I think A House are cartoonists.
No, he pleads, I think it s psychotic in a way. The lyrics are very hard, very down-in-the-mouth. But the music, even the vocals, are quite up. So, in that way, it s a conflict of opinion.
Psychotic: perhaps that s the integrating concept. Couse s vocals jabber, manically knocking into and over conventional verse-chorus structures; talking, talking, talking too much as if to disguise his intent; not so much whistling as looning past the graveyard: not so much A House as a hyperactive.
With its jagged Inishbofin edges and its lack of any lushness, I Want Too Much definitely gives A House the recording identity they ve craved. Even if it will definitely divide the sheep from the goats in their following as Dave Couse accepts without any prompting.
I think it will throw a lot of A House fans off, like the outside interest, the people who kinda like us, this will definitely get rid of them. People who liked Call Me Blue and don t really know much about us.
Or never mind the quantity. A House seek A Core following. American college radio programmers, please note.