Das Ist Ein Groovy Beat, Ja?

pICTURE THIS, if you will. The five members of Dublin pop combo Picture House Dave Browne, Duncan Maitland, Geoff Woods, Aonghus Ralston and Aidan Pierce stroll into a McDonalds restaurant in the centre of D|sseldorf, shortly before midnight. They ve just driven the couple of kilometres from the Philipshalle Arena D|sseldorf s equivalent of The Point, where they d played before 6,500 people as special guests of Scottish supergroup Runrig.
As they approach the counter, they are suddenly besieged by a dozen or so blonde-haired, blue-eyed frauleins clutching Picture House CDs and demanding autographs. Our five heroes graciously accede to this request, while the Deutscher girls average age 17 giggle and shriek at their good fortune in stumbling upon their idols.
Now, you could be forgiven for thinking the above paragraph was written under some form of duress, with perhaps hallucinogenic assistance, or following the handing over of a large wad of cash. But it s all true. Not a word of a lie.
It s been like this ever since we started the current tour, explains lead vocalist Dave Browne, over a pint of Guinness in Fatty s Bar on D|sseldorf s late night strip. That s why we dragged someone over from Hot Press to see it for themselves. We could bullshit for ever about being big in Germany but seeing is believing.
Indeed it is. And for your humble Euro-travelling hack, crossing the Rhine has been something of a revelation. Prior to this I d reckoned Picture House to be yet another solid, hard-working Irish outfit, caught between the rock of a dwindling touring circuit and the hard place of an indifferent music press. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.
We re even bigger in Scotland than we are in Germany, offers drummer Aidan Pierce. We can sell out the club circuit over there no problem. There was one gig we did at the Caird Hall in Dundee before 3,500 people. After the show, Dave went out for a wander and joined a queue for the beer stand. He d been standing in line for a while when this guy comes up to him and says. Shouldn t you be at the other end?. We re queuing up to buy your CD and waiting for you to sign it! . We sold 350 CDs that night.
As luck would have it, they couldn t have picked a better moment to court the home press. Tonight s gig has been the most successful to date the band s largest ever indoor audience, right in the heartland of industrial Germany, which is one of the most important markets for Irish music. And even though they were the support band, it was clear that a large section of the audience had come along to see Picture House alone. By the time the merchandising stalls had shut for business, they d shifted over 700 CDs double the normal amount, while T-shirt sales, another important source of income for any touring band, were equally brisk.
The funny thing is, laughs Browne, they think we re huge in Ireland!
On the face of it, it s not too difficult to see why Picture House are so popular with European audiences. A knack for creating engagingly melodic, instantly accessible tunes of the calibre of Heavenly Day , Somebody Somewhere , I Know Better Now and the current Irish hit The World And His Dog , combined with a proficient live capability, has given them a head start on the road to Euro-fame. Add to that the fact that they re not restricted by musical fashions or fads, nor are they, like so many other hopefuls, on a mission to convert the masses to their particular worldview.
With Picture House what you see and hear is what you get. They don t have any agenda other than to entertain. We just write normal songs with melodies and lyrics, offers Browne. We didn t set out to be a mainstream band. We re pegged as kind of mainstream in Ireland but in Europe we re seen as being a bit cooler than that. Radio-friendly, perhaps, but hip to be into.
That alone would not adequately explain Picture House s apparent meteoric rise in continental Europe. A licensing deal with Koch International, a mainly classical label with a well-established distribution and marketing network, has also undoubtedly helped their recent progress. Equally significant could be the fact that their management is London-based unusual for an Irish band. Finally, the band s own trojan efforts at winning fans and holding onto them cannot be underestimated, as I discovered.
Every fan we meet, Browne explains, we give them a card, they fill out their name and address, we stick it on our database and we let them know when we ll be touring in their area. Nine times out of ten they ll turn up at the gig, so it works.
We re in the entertainment business, he insists. It might be uncool for a band to market themselves in the way that we do, but in some ways Ireland has turned into a spoilt place for a lot of bands. The amount of bands actually out there gigging is minimal. Most of them are working on a project, man or rehearsing down in Temple Bar. Our first EP was funded by eight months of solid gigging in Ireland. We re probably much more aware of what s happening out there from the amount of touring we ve done.
Picture House have been together in one form or another since 1989. In 1991 they signed the proverbial major deal with London Records. It was a move they would live to regret and one that took them three years to recover from.
It was an absolute nightmare, Browne confirms. Not one single release and hardly any gigs came out of it. They signed us because of our potential, not because of who we were at the time. We d come up with tunes and they d say could you make it a little bit more this, or a little bit more that they were never happy with what we came up with.
It s funny because a major record deal is everybody s notion of success for a band. But we ve had the big deal and it was crap. It didn t do anything for us.
Finally liberated from London, they went into Sun Studios in Dublin in October 95 and recorded four tracks which subsequently appeared on their first ever release, the Probably EP which they put out on their own Wacca Wacca label. Heavy airplay ensued, winning them some high-profile support slots with Alison Moyet, Big Country, Mary Coughlan and an appearance with Bon Jovi at the RDS showgrounds. A five-week UK tour with the Saw Doctors in early 96 gave them their first taste of gigging outside of Ireland and, crucially, resulted in their current record deal with Koch.
Dave Brown takes up the story: The head of Koch International, Herbert Bosin, who looks a bit like a German Robbie Coltrane, saw us in the Shepherds Bush Empire with The Sawdoctors and he was impressed. There was actually three record companies there that night. Two of them said call us next week . But he said call me tomorrow . It sounded like a better bet so we did!
We didn t sign for a huge amount of money. There s just no point. We got a decent enough amount to help us make our album, Shine Box which we ve already paid back so we re in the black so to speak. We re approaching it territory by territory. Selling CDs pays for the touring and the fact that we don t have a huge advance allows us to demand certain things, like a half-page ad here or there. We stay in fairly basic hotels, and we re doing the driving ourselves at the moment. But the next time we go out we ll get someone to drive us. It s a gradual step-by-step thing. We like to be in a position to see that we re making progress.
Back home, progress may have been a tad slower for the band, but last week s headliner at the Olympia went a long way towards putting that to right. Radio play is, if anything, stronger than ever with The World And His Dog one of the most consistently aired tracks on Radio Ireland s daytime playlist.
Meanwhile, back in Fatty s Bar, a small celebration is in order. Tomorrow, they re back on the autobahn as they head to Cologne for yet another date on the never-ending Euro circuit. A fresh supply of CDs and T-shirts has been ordered as Picture House continue to win friends, influence people and, er, expand their database. n