DIY Another Day

Remove Brian Mooney, the man behind Beautiful Unit, and the Dublin independent music scene would collapse on itself like a boneless chicken in a vacuum.

He was there in the early days of Dublin’s DIY scene, doing sound at the legendary Attic venue (“I still meet people who say, ‘You did sound for us. You were useless. You were off your bat drunk.’ They’re still angry years later,” he deadpans), recording bands (“I was a tape man. I was displaced by digital recording. I was like... a cooper,” he notes sadly) and he was also a member of mid-‘90s hypnotic drone rockers The Idiots (“they were amazing,” David Kitt tells me later that day when I interview him). More recently Mooney’s been the man behind the Trust Me I’m A Thief record label (home to Jape, Redneck Manifesto, Somadrone, Dave O’Doherty, Si Schroeder, The Warlords Of Pez), as well as the live guitarist with Jape and Si Schroeder, and more often than not, he’s also the guy loading the van.
“Trust Me I’m A Thief was something I really wanted to do,” he says. “I was really impressed with labels like (‘90s Dublin indie imprint) Dead Elvis and I loved the fact that there were all these bands like Pet Lamb and Jubilee Allstars and Female Hercules operating independently, and that there was this whole decade of music being documented by a vibrant DIY scene. I was amazed by that and thought that I’d love to be involved in the next decade of it. The only thing was, and I suppose it was how independent music had to be done at the time, it was all done on a shoestring budget and the records were so fucking cheap – mixed in half a day and then put out. I know because I worked on some of them. I’d usually be screaming they weren’t finished, but before I was finished screaming they’d be off to the pressing plant. So with Trust Me I’m A Thief, I wanted to give the artist proper studio time and proper mastering and proper artwork. I thought I could substitute lack of money by personally fucking running around the place. I think it cost me a lot personally. Basically I ran around like a fucking idiot for a few years, and I’m sure that’s still many people’s idea of who I am – this mad stressed out character running from one side of town to the other.”
So Brian Mooney has more than earned the right to utter gnomic, almost Zen statements like ‘Only The Mediocre Survive’ and ‘The Cause Of Death Is Birth’ over the ramshackle yet beautiful kitchen-sink recordings of Beautiful Unit.
“It was purely a musical exercise,” he proffers of his new project. “Jimmy Eadie and I locked ourselves away for two weeks in Kilkenny in the summer time with recording equipment, a toy drum-kit and a collection of little found toy instruments. You can hear the little toy drum-kit on one of the tracks, although it’s helped out by some samples. It wasn’t about making an album. We didn’t feel any of those constraints. It was just about making some music.”
One of the tracks, ‘They Built A Road Through It’, was even culled from some old Idiots recordings.
“A friend got in touch to say he had a bunch of Idiots songs on A-Dat. It was a kind of incentive. I decided I’d put an Idiots track onto everything I release from now on. Also, it felt mad to be mastering something recorded in the 1990s on shitty old SM58 microphones in Abbey Road!”
Was mastering the album at Abbey Road worth it then?
“No, not really. I kept thinking ‘Jesus, this is costing a fortune!’.”
Indeed, years of running a label on a shoestring has given Brian Mooney realistic parameters for his dreams. Recently, for example, another of his projects (the creation of a human child) meant that he took up a non-musical day-job for a time. But he hated it.
“I was putting up signs. I wrote a song about it for the next record. The only lyrics are ‘from the AM to the PM this is BM... putting up signs.’ It’ll go on for 20 minutes to replicate the monotony of putting up fucking signs.”
So now he’s back to what he knows best, with future records from Si Schroeder and Somadrone in the pipeline, and a new live line up for Beautiful Unit featuring Jimmy Eadie and Bryan O’Connell: “After our first nine hour practice we had this twenty minute song with two chords... by the second practice it was down to one chord. But you could really feel what we could all do. It was brilliant.”
And those sparsely-worded mantra-ish sentiments? He has a simple explanation: “I just ran out of lyrics. But they’re deeply felt. There just wasn’t any more to be said. With ‘Only The Mediocre Survive’ there were two levels to it. On one level it contains some drug references. But mainly it’s about music; the blandness of popular music. How, if you water down your shit you’ll reach lowest common denominator crap and be really successful. I had James Blunt in mind at the time.”