City Slicker

James Byrne is the founder of Any Other City, the label behind New Amusement, Hired Hands, Tender Trap, Feed the Bears, and, most famously, the pre-Domino-era Villagers (for whom he also plays drums). A late-night Phantom DJ and a onetime musician with his own bands Deputy Fuzz and Life after Modelling (and, for full disclosure, my former label-mate on Catchy Go Go Records in the early part of this century) it’s not really surprising that a label established by Byrne would be a quality mark for a new decade of Dublin music-making. How does someone go from fan to musician to impresario?

“I was always interested in small labels,” he says. “They were what I ended up obsessing over. When I was in bands, I was always interested in the logistics the business. It interested me how bands started, how the mechanics of the industry start to grind and how some musicians make it. That turned into an interest in the impresarios who make it work, people like Geoff Travis, Alan McGee and Ian McKaye.”
Apart from these towering figures, most of Byrne’s heroes were local. “I never idolised Bon Jovi or people that were otherworldly figures,” he says. “It was usually local bands. Then when I got to know them, I realised they were just normal people. So bands stopped being a far away mystical thing and became something that were very much on my doorstep. At the time the ethos was, do it yourself, start a label, play gigs, start a community. And the bands I liked were influenced by that punk rock side of things.”
He lists a whole host of Irish bands he admired. They include The Dudley Corporation, Dot Creek, Jubilee Allstars, Bobby Pulls a Wilson, and Mexican Pets. “They were all there, in my face: amazingly talented and all in Dublin. It just seemed like this really cool city and that energy stayed with me.”
He always wanted to run a label. However, it wasn’t until encountering New Amusement in 2007 that he found the band that could get things rolling. “Then it just clicked,” he says. “They were a great band with loads of potential and endlessly good ideas. They were a bit raw. There was something magical about them.”
He is similarly effusive about his other musical finds. What unites these seemingly diverse combos? “I have hooky ears,” says Byrne. “I’m the only A&R guy at the label and I love poppy music with charm and honest heart. I need to believe it. That’s how I hear music.”
Alan from The Tender Trap (soon to have their name changed to Hello Moon for obvious reasons), says that they may have been destined for obscurity without Byrne’s intervention.
“There are a lot of bands out there putting stuff out but they have no one to promote them,” he says. “And it’s nice being connected to other bands that are like-minded. It’s a label run by a guy who loves music and who has his own ideas about music. We were barely playing gigs but he really liked us. We weren’t ‘faces’. And I think the label is specifically for the really hooky sounds that aren’t that prevalent in Dublin right now.”
Any Other City is also marked by a love of old fashioned ‘product’. “I know more about the physical side of things than digital,” says Byrne. “I’ve found a way of doing things digitally through a site in America. However, I prefer physical releases. I don’t own an iPod. I don’t like how they sound. It’s kind of luddite thinking, but I like a physical CD, I like 7 inches, I like listening to vinyl, so those are the things I want to make. Obviously, it’s 15 million times more expensive than recording a song and putting it on a website. For me, everything around the music is nearly as important. I love the stress that goes into thinking about different types of paper; will different ink work on that card? It’s all part of the fun... a sick part of the fun, but it’s important to me.”
And after all that care, energy and money, he’s not afraid to let bands go on to bigger things. Villagers are now on Domino Records. The band's frontman Conor O’Brien says Any Other City offers a network of connections and knowledge built on Byrne’s sociable personality.
As for Byrne himself, what does he hope for the label? “I want to get to a point where people see the logo on the back of a record and trust it, like Domino, like Dischord. I think Dublin is still an inspiring place to live, the greatest place in the world. And it’s not going to run out of bands.”