Doing it for the kids

It’s been quite some 12 months for The Coronas.
Since this time last year, they’ve done encouragingly successful tours of South-East Asia and Australia, numerous sold-out Irish shows, and secured some all-important US and Japanese distribution deals. No wonder they’re feeling chuffed. But tired.

“It’s been pretty much non-stop this year,” lead singer and resident hunk Danny O’Reilly says, somewhat ruefully. “We haven’t really been able to take much time off. I suppose that’s a good complaint.”
It certainly is. There may not have been any spectacular goals, banged in from 45 yards, but the team has been playing good football. Their decade-long slow build is continuing at a steady pace. After two hit studio albums (2007’s Heroes or Ghosts and 2009’s Tony Was An Ex-Con), countless live performances and a hell of a lot of air-miles, the Dublin indie rockers are now internationally, well, almost famous. Which is fitting, given that the band named themselves after the brand of typewriter used by the budding music scribe in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie Almost Famous.
Still, when Hot Press asks Danny O’Reilly what’s been his biggest moment of 2010, the 25-year-old singer doesn’t have to stop and think about it.
“I suppose supporting Macca is just something that you’ll never forget,” he says. “It doesn’t really have that big a bearing on our career as such, but as a Beatles fan just getting to meet him and being able to say our band supported him is amazing.”
Having previously supported McCartney’s son, James, at some London shows, The Coronas landed that prestigious support slot in the RDS last June through their UK agents.
“We have the same agents in the UK, Martial Arts, and that’s how we originally got that gig. James was really nice and we met him and he was cool and then apparently Martial Arts mentioned something to Paul about the RDS gig and he was like, ‘yeah cool’… and it was great.”
Did you get to chat to him for long?
“He came to meet us backstage. We didn’t know what to expect, but he made the effort to come down and we chatted. He told us not to break up, he told us keep doing what we’re doing. We were playing a gig with him the next day too, in the Isle of Wight, so we were talking about getting up for the early flight. He was lovely, though. He didn’t have to make the effort. That he did meant a lot to us.”
We’re meeting over a pot of tea in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel in Dublin, on a cold November afternoon. Black-bearded, woolen-hatted and dressed more like a scruffy student than a heartthrob singer, Danny is relaxed and pleasant. He’s likeably modest and self-deprecating too. When I put it to him that, as the as the son of internationally renowned folk singer Mary Black, he must have met his fair share of celebrities over the years, he shrugs and laughs.
“Not too many, really, to be honest. Paul Brady and The Corrs and... you know, not anyone really unbelievable.” He immediately corrects himself: “Actually, Paul Brady’s a legend, but… I don’t know. Maybe Sinead O’Connor? It was cool, but I was more into Oasis and Radiohead at the time, so it didn’t really make too much of a difference to me. It probably would have been different if my mum was a rock star (laughs).”
Danny’s immediate family are all intimately familiar with the machinations and madness of the music business. Danny’s father Joe O’Reilly is heavily involved with Dara Records, and has managed Mary Black’s career at various stages. Did that give Danny and the band an edge coming into the business?
“I think I probably had a better sense of it than a lot of people my age," he says, "but my mom’s genre is so different, with her being folk. And also, from when she was in her heyday, the industry has changed a lot. She was the first to admit when we started the band that she didn’t really know how to go about making things happen.
“We were like, ‘what should we do, should we record demos?’ and she was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know how to get radio play, I don’t know how to do things'. She was just like the other mums in the band: she was very supportive, and when we told them we wanted to go for it full time they said, ‘fair enough’.”
Needless to say, being typical Irish mammies, they insisted that their sons had something to fall back on first.
“We all finished our degrees in university and I think that helped a lot, cause things started to go well in our final year. Dave and I were out in UCD and we talked about possibly dropping out. The band was starting to take off, and of course the parents weren’t too happy about that. So we finished out the year.”
What was your own degree?
“I studied Commerce. We finished UCD when we were about 21 and went straight into the studio to do Heroes Or Ghosts. Dave was literally doing his thesis in studio. It was on something like Why Turkey Should Not Be In The EU or something like that, and he’s there trying to do a guitar take and research all this crazy politics. At that stage we hadn’t even done any extensive touring outside Dublin. We’d done college gigs. After Heroes Or Ghosts came out we started doing the circuit, doing it from the ground up, and I think it was good having an album there to promote from an early stage. The album sells the gig and the gigs sell the album.”

The Coronas are signed to 3Ú Records, which is run by Danny’s father. However, he laughs at any suggestion of nepotism. “Yeah my dad’s involved in the record label, and he’s been my mom’s manager for long periods of her career. It’s good to have him there as well. It’s funny, I used to shy away from it at the start, saying that we were signed to 3Ú, because I didn’t want people to think that they had just signed us because of the family connection. I’m sure it was part of it, but it was sort of a nice thing after Heroes Or Ghosts came out when the majors came knocking and started looking for us and we were able to say, ‘No sorry, we actually have our own label’. So that was a nice moment for him, to be relieved that he'd made a good investment in us. And there are other obvious advantages. Even down to things like picking singles, everything is in our own hands. It’s great to have that control as well.”
Mary must have been away touring a lot when you were a youngster?
“She was, yeah,” he affirms. “She always seemed to be away around my birthday, always doing tours around March – I suppose doing Paddy’s Day in America – so I used to make her feel guilty for missing my birthday. So she'd come back and get me a good present! She’d never go away for too long. She’d work it so that she was only gone for a month or six weeks at most, if a tour of Australia or America came up. She’d often bring us over for a couple of gigs as well so we got to see her that way.”
So you got to see quite a bit of the world when you were growing up…
“A little bit, yeah. I was over to America a couple of times and England once or twice. I didn’t really appreciate how good she was until we went back to see a gig of hers recently. When you’re growing up and going to the gigs, I was more impressed with Bill Shanley, her guitar player, and didn't really pay much attention to her or give her much credit. But then going back recently you can sort of say, ‘Jesus she is great: she’s a real legend’.”
Did you and your siblings ever feel resentful towards her for disappearing on you?
“Well, she said we used to be really mean to her when she’d come back after a tour,” he laughs. “After she came back we’d be all great and nice, and then after a few hours we’d be mean. It was obviously a defense mechanism or whatever. I’m sure there’s some Freudian reason. My dad used to have to try and sort that out, and my mum said that made her want to tour less. But as I said, she was never gone for too long.”
Of course, Danny and his Corona cohorts (drummer Conor Egan, bassist Graham Knox, and guitarist Dave McPhilips) are spending a lot of time on the road themselves nowadays.
“It's been pretty much nonstop between February, when we did a big college tour around Ireland, then in May we were in Australia for a month, we did the festival circuit in the summer which was pretty nonstop. We did a couple of gigs in September and then we had pencilled September in for recording and writing. I had a bit of a problem with my vocal chords. So we had a little bit of time off the road in September waiting for the voice to get better. Now we’re back into it and it’s looking like next year is going to be even crazier. But yeah, we love being on the road.”
Although McPhilips joined a little later, the band formed in Terenure back in 2000 when they were all just 15-year-old schoolmates. Danny maintains that their friendships remain as strong as ever.
“We talk to other bands and they’re literally shocked that we hang out when we’re not gigging together,” he smiles. “And we do. We go away on holidays together, and I’ll ring up the lads – we have other friends, mind, it’s nice to get away from each other as well! – but we do hang out together. Like Knox has been my best friend my whole life, since we were babies. I think it’s really good: we’ve gotten to the stage now that we’re really comfortable writing with each other – which is really underestimated.”
How do you mean?
“Well, just with how hard it can be to put yourself out there and say, ‘what do you think of this?’ and for the other person to say, ‘well, actually I don’t like that’. When you get comfortable enough where you can say that, and it’s not about ego – we’ve gotten to that stage now and I think the new stuff is all the better for it.”
Many bands seem to crash and burn after two successful albums. Do you get nervous looking at the career trajectory of acts like The Thrills?
“It’s something we don’t really think about,” he shrugs. “We just don’t take anything for granted. We know that it could all end. Our drummer is a big fan of The Thrills and he said that their third album’s amazing, but it didn’t sell many copies at all.”
Actually, I thought that Teenager was probably their best album.
“They went back to Tony Hoffer and it just didn’t really work. I don’t know what happened with it, but sometimes the bubble can burst and no one really wants to know you anymore. You have to be ready for that. To a certain extent it was out of our hands for the first two albums anyway. When Heroes Or Ghosts was going down, I didn’t know if we were going to be a band for a year and then get real jobs. Even with Tony Is An Ex-Con. There was a little bit of pressure as to whether we could build on what we'd started or whether we were going to be a pigeonholed as that ‘San Diego Song’ student band.”
Even so, do you feel some impending third album pressure?
“There is pressure with a third album, but it’s only the pressure that we put ourselves under. I was talking about things going well in overseas countries and the deal in America, and all that stuff is great and hopefully something might happen. All we can do is write the best music we can. The way I look at it is, if our third album is good enough, no one will be able to ignore it. The rest of it is out of your hands. If people like it, they do.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’ve got Ireland sewn up now so you should start looking further afield’ – but we don’t think like that. You have to keep working, keep improving and evolving, or people will see right through it. So, we’re always focused on the new stuff and on getting better.”
What kind of songs are you writing at the moment?
“It’s different. We’re surprised. We never set out to try and write an album. We always let the songs flow – whatever we have. We definitely don’t consider ourselves musicians. We consider ourselves songwriters. And, as I’m sure you’re well aware, we don’t try and reinvent the wheel with our music. We try and make good songs of the type that we love we love: pop songs like The Beatles or Fleetwood Mac.”

When The Coronas made a triumphant appearance at The Music Show at the beginning of October, there was a ratio of about one bemused guy for every ten screaming female fan in the audience. There’s obviously something about Danny… but he blushes behind his beard when it’s mentioned. “Erm…”
Are you in a relationship?
“It can be hard. I’ve found it hard personally,” he sighs. “I think moreso because of the focus on the band: if a relationship is struggling, it’s hard to put the necessary effort into it, to make it work. Where we are at the moment, the band is – to me anyway – the be-all and end all. I suppose girls will never come between that at the moment. The lads are great. I don’t want to talk about anyone in particular, but a couple of the lads have long-term girlfriends and they’ve found it absolutely fine. It can be hard – but everyone has their own way of dealing
with it.”
As a single man, you must have a lot of opportunities for casual sex on the road.
“Well, I don’t know... It’s funny. You say we have a female fanbase, and I’m not disagreeing with you, but a lot of the time they can be a bit younger than we are. It’s not really something we embrace, to be honest. It’s a bit strange.”
Even so, you must have women your own age throwing themselves at you after shows?
“That’s what I’m saying – no, for the most part we don’t,” he insists, barely able to suppress a grin (though, in fairness, it’s probably more of an embarrassed one). “I don’t know, you can call me a liar if you want. But for the most part we prefer to have our own little crew of people. We go out and have a good time and it’s great meeting new people and all… but no.” He stifles a laugh. “If you’re trying to get me to mention groupies or something, I’m not going to do it!”
You’ve written songs about binge-drinking. Do you party hard when you’re touring?
“Yeah, I sort of go through phases. Like, recently I haven’t been boozing as much because I’ve been trying to get fit for this upcoming tour. In Australia we hit it hard, and I think that’s what did the damage to my voice. I came back after that and it was a bit wrecked. When we’re on the road we do enjoy drinking – luckily we don’t get into anything more…illegal… but it’s grand, having a few drinks. And like I say, we’re all mates so it’s easy to say, ‘hey, you’ve had too many before a gig’. It never becomes an issue. Usually we’ll have one drink before a gig and then, afterwards, some people like to go home to their girlfriends and some people like to go out on the piss.”
Would your mother ever have warned you about music business casualties? After all, there’s probably more drug addicts and alcoholics in the folk and trad world than there are in rock ‘n’ roll.
“Yeah big time! Just like other mothers she would be, ‘don’t be drinking too much'. One thing she did warn us of was, as we were saying, not to take things for granted. There are so many amazingly talented people and it doesn’t happen for them, for whatever reason. That was one piece of advice that she gave us – that you have to work really hard and get lucky. I think we’ve had a lot of luck along the way.
“Even the likes of ‘San Diego Song’ – say what you like about it, but it really put us on the map and gave us a foot in the door in terms of radio play. And radio play is the thing that helped us out, touring and being a live band in Ireland, and being able to make a living, doing what we do – which is amazing. That’s because of radio play, and that was all started by ‘San Diego Song’.”
Does it bother you the way the music industry’s been decimated by illegal downloading in the last few years?
“We’re new enough that we don’t really remember what it was like before (laughs). It’s not really like, ‘Oh, back in the heyday, our first record sold millions’. I’ve watched television online illegally, so I would never begrudge anyone for downloading music illegally. It’s not really something that we pay too much attention to. We kind of market ourselves as a live touring band and that’s where we’re at.
“The radio play is probably the thing… at the same time we always put so much effort into having a nice album and a good package and as long as there’s even a few people who want to buy an album we’ll always put that effort in. We do it all ourselves, everything right down to the sleeve. We spend ages on it.”
Although The Coronas could never be considered controversial, the video for their latest single ‘Won’t Leave You Alone’ features some rather politically incorrect images of a pretty girl doing her make-up using a silver Zippo as a mirror before sparking up a cigarette.
“Simon Eustace (of The Chapters – OT) is our director. He directed all the videos for the second album. He’s brilliant, so we sort of give him free reign. He did the first video for ‘Listen Dear’ and since then he's done them all. And he had an idea for this video where it was a bit darker, a bit more intense and we said ‘why not?’ It’s something different for us. When we first watched it we were like, ‘Jesus is this gonna end up on Joe Duffy or something?’ But it’s not that bad. I’m sure you can find much worse.”
Well, it’s not exactly ‘Smack My Bitch Up’...
“Exactly!” he laughs. “It’s not quite at that level. But maybe for The Coronas, it’s The Coronas’ version of ‘Smack My Bitch Up.’”

There's some subjects that are impossible to avoid. I ask Danny what's his take on what’s happening to Ireland economically at the moment? It clearly not something he's given a lot of intense thought to.
“I don’t really have an opinion,” he says, shrugging.
Well, I’m sure a lot of your friends are losing their jobs...
“Yeah it’s tough going, and it makes me feel really lucky that we get to do what we do. I look at my mates and they’ve got degrees and – I talked to one of them yesterday, he’s coming out of Smurfit’s [business school] with a Master’s and people used to be headhunted out of there, and now they have to apply for jobs in England cause there’s nothing here. It can be disheartening. For the country as a whole I don’t know, you’d have to ask Dave – he’s got the politics background.”
Do you have any sense of anger about it?
“Personally, I don’t. Again, I think Dave could be the man to talk to… politics really isn’t my thing.”
Are you the happy-go-lucky type?
“I think so… to a certain extent.”
Do you have a darker side?
“I’m sure I do.”
Do you have a temper?
“Definitely, but I think everyone does at some stage.”
What sets you off?
“I don’t know, the usual stuff,” he shrugs. “We fight with each other in the band, we annoy each other, but we’re mates so it’s easy to get over it. When you’re good mates, you can just tell them 'fuck off, you’re a bollocks', and then it’s all forgiven a few minutes later.”
Do you ever come to blows?
“Rarely, but on the odd occasion maybe when we have something to drink and get wild, but it’s all part of it. Just laugh at it the next day, you know. That’s a good way to be.”
Are you emotional?
“Definitely, yeah.. I think if you’re a songwriter you’ve gotta be able to embrace your emotions and be in touch with them.”
There’s a bit of a love-hate reaction to the band if you go online. Do you read about yourself online?
“No, not all the time. It’s not something that bothers me, so I can read about it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I have to stay away from that because I don’t want to see what people are saying’. Of course when you release a song like ‘San Diego Song’ it’s gonna divide opinion – it divided opinion amongst us as well.”
How do you mean?
“Before we released it, Dave wanted me to change the lyrics. And I said ‘no way, that’s what the song is’. He wanted to make it a little bit deeper and a little bit less about boozing on a holiday. I was like ‘fuck that, no way, that’s what it’s about and that’s what I wrote it about’. You have to separate yourself from the songs and separate your pride from the songs and people will say, ‘Oh, it’s another love song, another ballad’ or whatever. But that’s the song: it’s not about me, it’s about the song. I think the lads have come around to that as well, and they know that sometimes you put yourself out there and you have to do it.”
Are you reticent about the idea of baring your soul in a song?
“No, not if it needs it. There’s a danger of overdoing it and making it sound forced, and maybe that’s what gets people annoyed or makes people not like us. I think it’s funny, there’s a certain amount of… I don’t want to use musical snobbery because I think that’s a terrible word… but I think that some people, whatever about not liking us, consider that we’re pulling the wool over the masses’ eyes, and people sort of look down on us and say, ‘no I know what they’re doing, that’s just ballads and its generic or whatever’. And I just think that’s unfair.”
Does it piss you off that some critics deride The Coronas as musical lightweights?
“I suppose that would make me a bit angry,” he admits. “That sounds a bit like 'All the masses are wrong and I’m right: that band is shit'. You know? That type of thing would piss me off. My attitude is: 'Whatever you think is fine, you're entitled to your opinion – but to say we’re trying to manipulate people or something with our brand of music is just wrong'. We let the songs themselves live. That’s the way we look at it.”
Do you have a working title for the new album?
“No, not at all,” he laughs. “We’re very much just ‘third album, question mark’ at the moment. As I say, it’s something we’re really excited about. We're really happy with how it’s going. We’re touring the States in February. We signed a management deal over there with Professional Records. I’m always quite cynical until these things happen, but we met them last week in San Francisco and they seemed really, really cool and into the music and they seem to have their shit together. They seem pretty confident that we can sign a deal after the tour we’re doing in February.
“So fingers crossed, depending on what happens with that, we might look at recording in America – depending on what kind of deal or what sort of producers and stuff we get. The rough plan is to do the US tour in February, we’ve got another tour in Australia in May again, and then do the album maybe in June and have it out for September. Hopefully.”
Before all of that, though, there’s the Christmas tour of Ireland. As he prepares to leave, Danny tells me that he’s particularly looking forward to their three night stint in The Olympia.
“They’re sold out, yeah. It’s amazing,” he says. “I think there might be a couple of tickets left for the third gig that we added. But it’s absolutely unbelievable to think… I mean, I remember going to The Frames four years ago and thinking, ‘man it would be great to play here’. And now we’ve got three nights there. It’s pretty crazy you know.”
Chances are, things could get even crazier for The Coronas in 2011. Watch this space.

The Coronas head out on an Irish tour through the month of December, including dates in Dublin’s Olympia(10,11,13), Dolan’s in Limerick(2,3), the Savoy, Cork (16) and The Black Box, Galway (19). For more dates, see www.thecoronas.net. You can watch the video for ‘Won’t Leave You Alone‘ on hotpress.com.