Charge Of The Light Brigade - Delorentos Interview

While The Minutes, Original Rudeboys and Le Galaxie will all one day be held accountable for crimes against shaving – it’s only a matter of time before the International Court of Justice in The Hague has its brief extended – in the ten months since we last sat down for a natter with them, none of Delorentos have sprouted hipster beards.

“We had studio beards for a while because we didn’t have time for anything other than recording, sleeping and very occasionally eating, but anyone actively cultivating one would have been asked to leave the band,” singer and guitarist Kieran McGuinness states. “One of the few good things about getting older is you really don’t care what’s fashionable anymore. You just do what you do and see where it takes you.”
I’m not a man given to senseless violence, but walking past my local house of hairy horrors, Beards & Barnets in Temple Bar, I’ve often thought how much of a better place Dublin would be if I tossed in a hand-grenade.
“I’d just like to point out, ‘Sad faces from Delorentos when Stuart mentions hand-grenade',” a horrified Kieran resumes. “Not that we’ve taken to wearing papier-mâché heads like in the film Frank and describing our facial expressions. That’d be an even worse affectation than a hipster beard.”
It turns out the Delos are big fans of Lenny Abrahamson’s fantastical telling of the Frank Sidebottom/Chris Sievey story.
“On one hand it’s completely mad and far-fetched – but if you’re in a band there is that thing of ‘searching for the perfect album',” takes-over Delorentos’ other singing/guitar-playing double-jobber, Ronan Yourell. “If you’re not, then in a way you have to ask yourself, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

The perfect album is something which, of course, can never be achieved, but Delorentos give it a darn good go on their fourth studio outing, Night Becomes Light. While not a concept record – “No using the C-word, Stuart, please!” says Kieran who seems to be spending most of this interview in horrified mode – its lyrical gaze is firmly focused on their hometown.
Some of the references are veiled, but the McGuinness-penned LP closer, ‘Dublin Love Song’, wears its heart on its sleeve with couplets like, “She’s half asleep down the streets that you won’t go/ The city breathes but doesn’t care who comes or goes.”
“I’ll be honest: there was a while there when we were doing so well in Spain that I thought, ‘Fuck Ireland, we’ll get four villas and make all the music we could ever want in the sunshine'. I was fed up with the economic and political shit, but you know what? That adversity has been the catalyst for one of the most amazingly creative periods here I’ve ever experienced. Damien Rice is back, you’ve got Hozier and Gavin James breaking through, new albums from Villagers, Bell X1 and all those kind of people who’ve kept their standards amazingly high. It’s because we had that shit time, when all you could do was sit in your room and write music. You had to strip it back to nothing and that’s where all the good stuff came from. The creative community should be really, really proud that when things were crap, they kept Dublin breathing.”
While now “really happy being in a place that properly feels like home”, Kieran is acutely aware of dear old Baile Átha Cliath’s faults.
“‘Dublin Love Song’ starts with the line, ‘She is two cities…’ which comes from walking around when we were writing the album and seeing people sat under ATMs with heroin needles sticking out of their arms,” he explains. “How as a society do we deal with that? At the moment it’s, ‘Let’s ignore them and hope they go away’ – which obviously they’re not going to, unless you actively do something. But what is that ‘something’? It can affect your head.”
“There’s other stuff that has to change, like young people who’ve been forced to emigrate losing the right to vote,” Ronan adds. “If we want them to come back one day, they have to remain stakeholders in the country. We’re definitely heading in the right direction with things like the upcoming gay marriage referendum, which would have been unthinkable 10 or 15-years ago.”
Of course, Delorentos aren’t the only four-piece whose new album is a meditation on Dublin. Have the lads listened to U2’s Songs Of Innocence?
“I have,” Kieran nods. “It’s a decent album; there are songs on it like ‘The Troubles’ which are brilliant, and other stuff I don’t like. As a musician I can see what they were going for, but it’s very hard to divorce the music from the insane commentary about it.”
People are entitled to dislike U2 as vehemently as they want to, but going on Twitter and saying “I feel like I’ve been raped” because an album’s just popped into your iTunes library is, I’d have thought, just a little bit of an overreaction.
“Because of how U2 operate, the package always overshadows the music at first; perhaps moreso than ever this time, with the Apple connection,” Ronan reflects. “You need the dust to settle to be able to come back and reflect on it.”
“Exactly,” agrees Kieran. “It’s actually a really clever idea. Jay-Z did something very similar and didn’t get shit for it because in the eyes of the world he’s a much cooler artist. We need to strip away all the bullshit and remember that music is music. I remember Chris Martin saying, ‘I’m looking forward to the new album but I need to lose weight before we release it. No one wants to see a fat rockstar'. The reality is that no one gives a shit about that. You can be the fattest rockstar in the world, but if your music’s brilliant people will want to hear it. You can be old, you can be weird looking, a woman, a man, something in-between... What matters is that you put everything you possibly can into that album and walk away feeling proud. That’s what I feel we’ve done with Night Becomes Light.”

While the emphasis elsewhere seems to be on re-inventing the rock ’n’ roll wheel by coming up with new business models and methods, with this album, Delorentos have gone the traditional route of signing a worldwide deal with Universal Music.
“For us it’s actually the most untraditional thing we could have done because up till now we’ve always handled everything ourselves,” Ronan proffers. “Personally, in the beginning, I’d have very much been, ‘Guard yourself against outsiders...’ I think that happens in all walks of life and relationships as well; you close yourself off in order not to get hurt. We’ve gained confidence from surviving in this crazy, crazy industry ten years – and want to reach out now to likeminded people.”
“I know it sounds corny, but we’ve had to go through all these different stages to get to where we are now,” Kieran ventures. “We had to play the tiniest gigs in the country with one shitty pedal and bring our gear home on the train. You have to do your Battle of the Bands and college gigs and get your mum to drop you in. In our case, we also had to break-up while making our second album and realise that we'd made a mistake; we did want to keep playing music together. It's a long story, but basically we're the only band I know of who announced at their farewell gig that they were getting back together!
“As regards the Universal hook-up, it’s as simple as them coming along and saying, ‘We think we can do something good together’ and us no longer having this shutters-down thing of having to be self-sufficient.”
Gary Lightbody told me he’s glad it took Snow Patrol six years to have a hit, because if it had happened when they were fresh out of college he’d have drink and drugged his way to oblivion.
“It would have been the lunatic asylum for the four of us if In Love With Detail had gone platinum all over the world rather than just going top 10 in Ireland,” Kieran says referring to their 2007 debut album. “It looks like that’s going to happen to Andrew Hozier-Byrne, but at 24 he’s that little bit older and has really good people around him.”
“Starting out, you definitely think the main point of being in a band is drinking as much as you can, which it turns out it isn’t,” Ronan reflects. “The curse of being any way successful as a musician is that there will be drink, there will be drugs, there will be women wanting to go out with you. Selling five million records when you’re still in your teens – I can see how that could be problematical. We had our fair share of alcohol-related fuck-ups early on, but worked out reasonably quickly that you need to step away from that side of things a little bit if you don’t want to end up a car crash.”
“Can I just say the biggest mistake Delorentos ever made was letting me wear eyeliner to the 2007 Meteor Awards,” Kieran complains. “They should have saved me from myself.”
“You needed to learn the hard way,” is Ronan’s unrepentant view of Kohlgate.
The eyeliner was left at home that year when they opened for Arctic Monkeys in Malahide Castle.
"That was interesting because we were being hailed by certain people in the Irish media as 'the next big thing' and they really were the next big huge thing," Kieran says. "They were actually very grounded and had their mums and dads there, who stood next to our mums and dads watching the gig. They were playing football backstage and we were going through a big GAA phase at the time, so we showed them the basics. Supergrass were the main support, which must have been odd for them, seeing as they'd been around for 13 or 14 years longer than the Monkeys, and they were sort of holding court. They were perfectly pleasant, but probably thinking, 'Who are these Irish kids?'"
Delorentos profess to being a democracy but are some members more equal than others?
“It just depends on how forceful people are that particular day,” Mr. Y resumes. “Generally, we work hard to come to a consensus. When I was over in Florida for a week, we’d have these ‘quick 30-minute’ Skype group meetings that would last two to three hours. Again it sounds corny, but we’ve that real brother thing going on.”
Which as we know from the Gallaghers, the Davies, the Reids, the Wilsons, the Everlys and indeed the Clarks often leads to fist-fights. Any blows traded during the making of Night Becomes Light?
“That stays in the vaults and if we open the vault it could be a world of pain for everyone,” Kieran deadpans.
“There wasn’t violence but there was extreme childishness,” confesses his bandmate. “If there was a song of yours you really wanted on the album you’d get one of the crew, like our tour manager, onside, so you could say to the others, ‘Well, Adrian really likes it!’ That element of competition evaporates though and, as in this case, you pick the 11 songs that work best together as an album regardless of whose they are or how big the aggrieved parties’ tantrums may be.”

Delighted – as you would be! – with how their last Choice Music Prize-winning album, Little Sparks, turned out, Delorentos retained the services of Rob Kirwan as producer. As it transpires, Kirwan could be about it to make it two Irish No.1s in a row, having also produced Hozier's platinum-selling debut.
“Rob’s obviously very technically proficient, but not obsessive,” Kieran resumes. “What it’s all about for him is capturing the moment. He gets us in the room, loosely sets things up and leaves the tape running while you play. Sometimes it’s terrible and sometimes these absolutely amazing things happen.”
“Rob’s good at going, ‘Lads, this isn’t working, let’s knock it on the head and go for a beer’,” Ronan says of their studio mentor. “He tries to get you to switch your brains off a little bit, and not be overwhelmed by the album-making process.”
Is there anything on Night Becomes Light that’s as intensely personal as ‘Petardu’, the Little Sparks song of Kieran’s about him being adopted?
“I wrote an extremely personal song, which ended up being left off the album; not because it was too raw but because it didn’t fit the overall mood,” he reflects. “I don’t want to get into it massively, but a friend of the family took his own life. It was a very rough experience, so I wrote a song to deal with it, which was a little bit too stark and unpalatable. So I went back and wrote another song about it, which kept all the feel but was less specific."
"Every summer on the third of June/ I woke to a birthday card from you/ They found your body on a beach in Wales/ It was floating in the sea four days," relates the track, which doesn't have a title yet but is likely to be made available at some point in the future.
“He was an older man," Kieran resumes. "My mum found out by reading it in the Irish Times. She went to the States to get away from everything because she couldn’t handle it. I dealt with the situation by putting it down in a song. It was incredibly complicated, but unlike in a lot of these situations, I know exactly what happened. The biggest impact was how it affected the family.
“You mentioned ‘Petardu’, which ended up being one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I wrote it before I knew who my birth parents might be. It went on the album and out into the world and that was kind of that. Then I did the search and found my birth parents and the first time they ever saw me in the flesh was when we played ‘Petardu’ on The Late Late Show. My half-sisters and brothers and birth family sat in a house watching that song, y’know?
"Can you imagine what was going on in my head just before we performed it? I was in turmoil. It came together in the maddest way. ‘Petardu’ only got released as a single because it was put in an AIB ad, and I had no idea how long it would take me to find my birth parents. All I knew was that my birth father was foreign and that they weren’t together.”
Just to make that Late Late Show performance even more memorable, it was the night Kieran told the rest of the band he was going to be a dad himself.
“Talk about piling on the emotion!” he laughs. “The first song on the album, ‘Home’, is about the day I found out I was going to be a father: ‘And just in one second, a new life for you and I and it felt like heaven'. I couldn’t tell the lads because of the whole three month thing so, yeah, the bombshell was dropped out at RTÉ.”
“We’ve never written a song that’s, ‘Let’s drink and get naked and party’,” Ronan notes. “It’s always come from an experience you have. Night Becomes Light is about growing up and becoming an adult. It’s reflective, whereas the songs on Little Sparks were quite questioning.”
When Delorentos have ventured out of the studio this past year, it’s to do “pinch me am I dreaming?” stuff like playing their first gigs in Russia – and entertaining Michael D. and Sabina in the Áras.
“Whether we'd be quite so keen on going there now I don't know, but when we went to Russia last year, we met like-minded artistic people who wanted to change things and were able to tell us what was really going on,” Kieran recalls. “We played a few songs on a show that was like a Russian TFI Friday. The comedians doing it had to put forward their jokes beforehand for official approval. As we said earlier, there’s a lot of things in Ireland that need changing but at least we have freedom of speech.
"Playing at the Presidential garden party was great on a number of levels, one of them being that it was something our parents could actually brag about to the neighbours. You can tell your mum and dad about playing in this wonderful gothic hall in Moscow, but they'll always be more impressed that you got to meet Michael D. or Pat Kenny! I just remember being lined-up to meet the President and finding it funny. Not because we weren't excited and honoured but because, well, how the hell had we ended up here? It was very surreal. Michael D.'s not just paying lip service; he gets music and every other area of the arts. It's great having someone like him in your corner."

Delorentos' Night Becomes Light is released by Universal on October 10. An extensive tour starts in Cyprus Avenue, Cork on October 24. See delorentos.net for full details.