DIGGING THE NEW BREED

SCHTUM

THE CONTRIBUTION of the city of Derry to the glorious tapestry which is Irish rock ’n’ roll shouldn’t be underestimated. Not only did Dana represent the coming of age of contemporary Irish Pop by cooing her way to the top of the charts back in 1970 with ‘All Kinds Of Everything’ but before the decade was out there emerged from the city the band who have more than their fair share of acolytes willing to dub them the greatest band every to have emerged from this island: The Undertones. Throw a hat-trick of UK Number Ones into the pot – Feargal Sharkey, Briana Corrigan of The Beautiful South and Peter Cunnah of D:Ream – and hey, who needs Cork or Belfast!

“The city’s been pretty much a barren place for bands since The Undertones,” says Christian McNeill, lead singer with the latest Derry heirs Schtum. “Even though four-fifths of That Petrol Emotion were from here they still had to do everything in London and we really didn’t want to go down that particular road. Almost every other town or city has their own label or live scene going, we kinda felt ‘Well, why shouldn’t the same be true for Derry?’ and now that it’s happened I think that can only act as a spur for other local musicians.”

‘It’ is Big River Records, an offshoot of Big River Studios run by Paul McLoone and Billy Doherty, both ex of Carling/Hot Press Band Of The Year The Carrellines (the latter also thumped the tubs with some distinction in the aforementioned Undertones). The label’s first release is Schtum’s Digging Holes EP, a confident 4-song gambit which makes full use of guitarist Ivan Birthistle’s tendency towards sweeping post-MBV soundscapes while still retaining a fine sense of song structure. To these ears Schtum’s songs initially appear to be a hot ‘n’ heavy date between Whipping Boy and The Teardrop Explodes, although naturally Christian doesn’t quite hear it that way . . .

“To be honest with you I haven’t really heard that much of Whipping Boy and although I like Julian Cope I don’t think there’s that much of him in there really. The influences are quite diverse within the band, from Fatima Mansions through to ambient and all classic Pop from the year dot, and there’s definitely touches of Iggy in the live set . . . we haven’t consciously tried to define what our sources are to be honest with you.”

The subject of playing live raises a somewhat thorny point with Schtum, with basic geography proving a hindrance to their plan of campaign.

“To some extent we’re kinda stuck up here in the north-west of Ireland and largely forgotten about,” he says. “There isn’t a really suitable rock venue as such in Derry, they tend to be smaller, pub gigs which are fine and grand in themselves but to have a healthy scene you need to be able to bring in bands from all over and since Union Hall fell on its arse that hasn’t been possible. Apart from that we’ve found it difficult to get bookings down South.

“Hopefully things should improve now that we’ve got the EP out but I still can’t believe how many venues we’ve approached who insist we sell tickets beforehand. I mean, when you think about it we’re going to have to haul ourselves and gear wherever but there’s no way we can fill a coach with thirty of our mates for a round trip of three hundred-odd miles, it’s just not on these days.”

Digging Holes should certainly advance Schtum’s cause, with a low-budget video for the title track also emanating from the creative hive of Big River. But on to more serious matters, like just what is this fascination with the letters ‘s’, ‘c’ and ‘h’? In the past couple of months we’ve also had the debut EP from Mother signings Scheer . . . who happen to hail from County Derry. “I know, it’s bizarre,” laughs Christian. “Maybe we should get together as a touring package and confuse the hell out of everybody.”

Sponsored by Schweppes, perhaps? “Oh yeah, I drink nothing else!”

• Schtum’sDigging Holes EP is out now on Big River Records.

• George Byrne

ASH

Excuse me while I generalise wildly for a moment (usually I prefer to generalise quietly in a corner) but most lads their age have precious little interest in creating pristine pop music. They’re just sex mad. Sex sex sex, that’s all they think about. Sex in the morning, sex in the afternoon, sex at tea-time, sex in the commercial breaks between their favourite television programmes, not that it’s likely they’ll be able to stop thinking about sex long enough to reach over and switch the television on, I might add. Or maybe I’m confusing sex with football? That sounds more like it. Easy mistake to make. Anyway, you get the idea.

Ash are different. Despite their youth (Tim, the guitarist and vocalist is 17, drummer Rick is 18, and Mark is a tender 16, bless him) Ash have already released a single that is simply delicious. It’s short, it buzzes, and you know that you’re hearing something precious from the first listen. It makes every other record released on this island over the past few months sound limp and staid. It’s fun, and god knows there are few enough fun records around these days. Not deliberately fun ones, anyway.

Tim is at home today. He was feeling poorly, so decided it would be best if he missed school. That’s right - school. Not only are Ash young and talented, but they are at school, and sensible about it. “It would be silly to leave now. There’s no point,” states Tim, sensibly (See?). “We’re going to stay on and do our exams - well, I intend to stay on and do my A-levels anyway. Rick has exams coming up soon.”

The band apparently had to turn down support slots with the likes of the late Daisy Chainsaw and The Frank & Walters due to school commitments, but otherwise Tim doesn’t see any real difficulties with combining study and being an aspiring pop star. “It’s actually quite good because you have a lot of time off and holidays when you can practice. There’s probably more free time than there would be if we were working.”

Their press release mentions The Undertones and The Buzzcocks as reference points, and listening to ‘Jack Names The Planets’ the comparisons are immediately understandable, but Ash’s youth effectively rules out such influences. While others were manning the barricades during the punk wars, Ash were occupying the play pen and struggling with their first solid foodstuffs. When ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ was rollicking up the charts Ash had an average age of about eighteen months.

“The Undertones comparison is really strange,” says Tim. “I’m the only one of the three who’s even heard any of their records and I’ve only heard a couple of their songs once. I suppose it’s something to do with the fact that we’re both from Northern Ireland so people assume there’s a connection, but Derry is a long way from Co. Down.”

A mutual love of music brought Tim and bassist Mark together at the age of thirteen. The drummer, Rick, joined about a year ago.

Their first demo was sent around but received little response, but a second demo and tentative approaches to Bad Moon, the P.R. company who also deal with the likes of Nirvana, Carter, and The Senseless Things proved more fruitful, with the band eventually getting to release their debut single on the newly formed London-based La La Land label. And while the single does exhibit all the best qualities of punkpop, Tim admits that their other material runs the gamut from hardcore to “more jazzy stuff. Even disco,” he laughs. “Anything goes.”

With Bad Moon behind them, their wonderful debut (7-inch vinyl only, to keep the purists happy) just released, and the probability that the ubiquitous Andy Cairns may be lined up to produce future singles, they’re likely to be very busy over the coming months, although Tim explains that they’ll have to wait until the school holidays before touring. There’s the possibility of a piece about them appearing in NME soon. Tim gushes enthusiastically at how brilliant this would be, adding “I’ve always wanted to be a musician, ever since I was twelve.”

But you are a musician, I say.

“Nah, not really,” he replies modestly. “I’ve got a long way to go yet.

That’s a very mature outlook, young man.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s quite ironic really. . .”

• Ash’s ‘Jack Names The Planets’/‘Don’t Know’ double A-sider is out now on La La Land.

•Lorraine Freeney

JOYRIDER

1993 – the year punk rock broke. If it took until 1991 for the DIY ethic that was punk to come to the fore in America, then it took another two years for we here in Ireland to realise that, after Power Of Dreams, A House, Something Happens and so on, the majors really weren’t doing us any favours, and to see attention being diverted to those bands kicking up a racket on the many small labels around the country.

Therapy? featured prominently in this transformation: although they have been roundly condemned for, ahem, snigger, selling out, guffaw guffaw, the Big Black/Big Star noise they make (and how much finer do influences get? None more finer) seems to have inspired a new, about-time-too generation of bands – Pet Lamb, Flexihead, Wheel – who are not prepared to sit back and let Mr Multinational squeeze them until the juice runs down their legs, if I may be inappropriately lascivious.

One such band is Joyrider, from Portadown, formed two years ago and soon to release their debut single, ‘Dweeb King’ on one of Ireland’s newest and hippest labels, Blunt (although there is no release date as yet). The Undertones have been mentioned as an influence, but not by singer/guitarist Phil Woolsey, who names the Jam, the Beatles and Anthrax as the heroes of himself, drummer ‘Buc’ Hamill, guitarist Mitch and bass player Simon Haddock.

Therapy? are another obvious inspiration, both in musical and career terms, which is maybe why Phil is quite pleased that Andy Cairns not only discovered them and signed them to Blunt but has produced the single.

“Andy saw us play last year in Belfast, and later on I heard him somewhere saying that he really liked us. So I went to Reading and, I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but there’s this tent where you can go and meet the bands, so I thought, I’ll go and give him a Joyrider t-shirt or something, and there was a queue three-quarters of a mile long for Therapy? so instead, I broke in over a security barrier and I saw him walking around and he remembered us! And I chanced my arm and asked him would he produce some stuff and he said yeah.”

Sadly, Andy had to fly off to America on his God-given mission to fuck with the mind of Uncle Sam but when he got back, Phil rang his parents’ house, he, by chance, answered the phone and before you could say ‘shortsharpshock’ – actually, that takes quite a while – before you could say “Jaysus, we’ve got a Top Ten Pop Star on our side!!” they decamped to a studio in Newtownards and laid down the raucous, rowdy, ridiculously tuneful three tracks which will appear on Blunt 003 and will probably, given the quality of the songs and the not unhelpful Cairns Connection, see them feted from here to eternity and beyond in the all-hallowed inkies.

Ambition is not a-lacking either: they want it all, and their way, says Paul. “We want to be in a position where we make some great records and stay in control and then have eight or nine labels after us, like (again) Therapy? I’ll suck the corporate cock, but only if it sucks mine first.” Cocksucker blues? Not likely.

• Joyrider’s debut Dweeb King EP is due for imminent release on the Blunt label.

• Niall Crumlish

COMPULSION

NO, I’M sorry. There are limits. After a long and chequered career – much of which has been spent on only vague nodding acquaintance with gainful employment – I’ve done many things I’m not overly proud of.

However, as often as I’ve lied, cheated, swindled and generally behaved like a journalist, I draw the line at calling a grown man with bulging biceps and Desperate Dan stubble Joesephmary!

“Fuck off,” replies the Compulsion lead singer sweetly, “that’s my real name! It’s not very common nowadays but 20 or 30 years ago a lot of Irish kids got given male/female names on account of the religious association. It’s something I kept quiet about when I first went to England – all the lads down the pub knew me as ‘Joey’ – but now I quite like it because of the ambiguity and reaction it provokes.”

Normally such ignorance would be rewarded by a swift martial-arts kick to the kidneys but if at this juncture you’re going, “who the bleedin’ hell are Compulsion?”, we’re for once willing to forgo the GBH and help unfurrow those brows by imparting that in a previous life Joesephmary Barry, Garret Lee, Jan Willemalkema and Sligo Sex God Sid Rainey were known as Thee Amazing Colossal Men. Garret was the only one with a peroxide barnet in those days but through a deft piece of re-invention, Compulsion now find themselves at the forefront of what has rather unfortunately been christened ‘The New Wave Of New Wave’. So, Joey, what’s with this punk rock lark?

“The quote I keep trotting out – and the one which I think explains our philosophy best – is that if punk is a bunch of drunken lager louts shouting ‘Oi!’ and flirting with racist imagery then, no, we’re not a punk rock band. If, however, it’s a case of people who normally find themselves muzzled and downtrodden by society having a say, then we’re happy to wear the label.

“We’re not punk revivalists, though,” he stresses. “The energy level and the degree of commitment might be the same but we’re aware that this is 1994 and you won’t find us prancing round in ‘Sid & Nancy’ t-shirts or covering ‘Anarchy In The UK’. That belongs to twenty years ago, it’s gone.”

If I may be permitted to don my ‘Mr. Cynical’ hat for a moment, this militant stick-it-to-’em attitude is decidedly at odds with the power-chord and stadium rock pretensions of the Colossals.

“It was everything to me at the time,” Joesephmary reflects, “but in retrospect, I realise that Thee Amazing Colossal Men were crap. I can’t listen to Totale anymore because it makes me cringe. Basically, it was quite a good album by the producer but there wasn’t very much of us on it. Which, actually, has been a great help to Compulsion because we’ll never again let anyone take us in a direction we don’t want to go. We released our first two EPs on our own Fabulon label and now we’ve got a deal with One Little Indian where we give them the master tape and they stick it out.”

The Colossals eventually admitted defeat after returning from recording their second album in Los Angeles and discovering that nobody in Virgin’s newly restructured London office had a clue who they were. With the benefit of hindsight, Joey’s delighted that the follow-up to Totale never saw the light of day but still feels bitter about the year spent in limbo while the contractual red tape was unravelled.

“We were treated very shoddily,” he rues, “but, as I say, being fucked around can have a positive side and we emerged from that whole nightmare more determined than ever to make things work.

“The big difference between now and then is that in the 1980s, we weren’t aware or didn’t care what was going on around us. Today, though, there are issues such as the erosion of people’s rights and the rise of fascism that can’t be ignored. If Compulsion have any sort of mission, it’s to cut through the unbelievable apathy which allows all of that to happen and say, ‘get your fucking act together before it’s too late.’”

Spoken like a true renaissance punk rocker!

• Compulsion’s Safety EP is available now on One Little Indian.

• Stuart Clark