Dance The Devil

‘Baby, baby, baby, ooh’ works just fine for Justin Bieber, but Dublin songwriter Ronan O’Donovan found himself drawn to an ever-so-slightly darker place with Tarantella Fall’s eerie debut album. Spanning three decades and at least two continents, Abandoned Road recounts the saga of John Wilmore, a blood-hungry criminal with a serious chip on his shoulder.

“The story happened by accident,” O’Donovan tells me. “I was always very heavily influenced by Tom Waits, Tim Burton… that very edgy, dark side of life and I think the songwriting always came from that well.”
O’Donovan composed all 13 tracks on Abandoned Road when three quarters of Tarantella Falls were performing with alt rock outfit The Kerbs. But it took a new singer, gravel-voiced Chris Kinsella, to spot the story running through the songs.
“Chris was really trying to delve into the material. He started to notice a character, or a couple of characters, threading through. He actually put them all out on his kitchen floor and stood up on a chair and began seeing it. He rang me all excited and said, ‘I think there’s more to this than you or I realised’.”
‘Chris coming along and being able to have that vision and make that link gave a whole different perspective to these bunch of songs. The artwork and everything that goes along with it came from that idea.”
We know O’Donovan’s subconscious muse is a bit of a tough guy, but would the songwriter care to sum up the Story of John Wilmore?
“It started with a car crash with himself and his parents,” O’Donovan begins. “He was messing in the back seat distracting his Dad, the car crashed and his parents died. His elder sister Laura Ann never forgave him for that and mentally abused him until he was in his early twenties. He began to realise that this girl had to be dealt with and for him, dealing with her was to murder her. That gave him the confidence to go on a killing spree with a cohort, Jack, who he meets along the way…”
At the risk of veering into spoiler territory, I have to ask how a story based in 1960s America came to a dramatic head in Spanish Point on Ireland’s rugged west coast.
“He meets a social worker who thinks that she can save him,” O’Donovan spins, “and they fall in love and get married and have a daughter. Pretty soon, she realises that this guy is bad news and that for the safety of her own daughter, she has to do something about it, so she convinces him to come back to her birthplace, which is Spanish Point in Co Clare…”
It’s undoubtedly heavy stuff, but all these sombre REM-brand melodies and winding Waitsian lyrics have left me intrigued. Is John Wilmore really bad news, or just a renegade spirit who wandered down the wrong path?
O’Donovan thinks for a moment before answering. “There is one song in there called ‘Last Chance’,” he muses, “John’s in a prison cell for some petty crime he’s done, and things are going very well with his daughter Jessica. He keeps looking up at names of other people scratched into the wall, dates and years and things. He realises, ‘I have a choice here, I can either go down this road with these guys or I can live out the time that I’ve got with my daughter.’ This is when his daughter gets abducted. The choice was made for him there. He’s kind of a victim of accident, I suppose.”
Once O’Donovan and Kinsella had got bassist Graham Keogh and drummer Neville Foster up to speed on the gruesome subject matter, the band had just a couple of months to get Abandoned Road ready to put down on wax.
“We had a big job ahead of us,” O’Donovan remembers. “We knew that by August we were due to go in and start recording, it meant that we had only a few months to be happy with the arrangements, but it just clicked. Things just seemed to go right and I can’t explain why. There were very few rehearsals that didn’t add value to the songs. That meant by the time August came along, we were busy and it was rushed but we were ready for it.”
‘There were times of frustration definitely, but there should be frustration because that means that you’re being challenged. We all had at least one song that broke us!”
Tarantella Fall’s hectic recording schedule hasn’t left much time for touring, but Abandoned Road finally gets a full live airing on March 25 in Dublin’s Workman’s Club. I, for one, am hoping their inspiration will be there to see the band breathe life into the tale.
“He’ll be there amongst us,” O’Donovan says of the unsinkable Mr Wilmore. “Watch who you’re rubbing elbows with in the crowd.”

Tarantella Fall launch their debut album Abandoned Road with a gig in Dublin’s Workman’s Club on March 25. You can listen to 'Wasteland' now on hotpress.com.