DUB STARS

"Guinness stains my only shirt/I can't wear it into work" - 'The Shaky Man', Jubilee Allstars.

Meet the Jubilee Allstars: not so much the boys from the black stuff as the boys on the black stuff. Stout of heart and weak of liver, the Allstars' darkly humorous musings on this condition we call human situate the band, metaphorically speaking, mid-way between St. James's Gate and the Laughter Lounge.

That would leave them, at a rough estimate, on Capel St. Bridge. For the sake of convenience, however, I meet the band - the brothers Niall, Barry and Fergus McCormack and drummer Lee Casey - in the basement flat of bassist, Fergus, a few miles from Dublin's city centre, just before they rehearse for their (very) brief UK tour (er, three dates in all).

After a number of well-received singles and EPs, the Allstars have finally released their debut album, the very fine Sunday Miscellany. A sloshed and enchanted song cycle, there is such a swoosh of alcohol in its grooves the record should probably come with a breathalyser attached. Even when they throw in an instrumental, they call it 'The Drunken Cyclist' - maybe they were just too fluther'd to remember the lyrics.

"I like to imagine that every copy of the album has been soaked in a vat of stout before it's ready for sale," says Niall. "It's got that pleasantly numb sensation that you feel when you've had a couple of pints of Guinness. The mood, I suppose, is one of melancholy. Melancholy is a mood you get yourself into in order to feel good.

"The lyrics are very reflective: it's the kind of stuff that you think about when you've had a few drinks. They're not really full-scale drinking songs. That's what the Great Western Squares do - either 'whoah, more porter!' or 'Christ, too much porter' whereas we just do 'a little bit of porter'. We're Dubliners Lite!"

It's no surprise, then, to find that their previous sleeve artwork has contained loving, sepia-tinged photos of the band in the pub (all sleeves, incidentally, were designed by Niall, who until recently led a double life as part of the art department of this very organ). For the album, though, they've chosen a richly cinematic shot of night-time Dublin and there is also an old map of the city in the CD booklet. It is clear that the geographical and historical landscape of their hometown is very important to the brothers McCormack.

"I think we fit into the urban Irish song tradition," says Niall, "as in Dominic Behan songs which were collected over the years and sung by The Dubliners. What we're trying to do is to represent Dublin in music in the same way writers like Flann O'Brien and Sean O'Casey did. There's been so few bands that have done that - 'Widow's Walk' by the Stars Of Heaven is a great song about Dublin, and some of the Blades' stuff . . ."

". . . And maybe The Radiators," continues Fergus, "but most post-U2 Dublin bands could have come from just about anywhere. What we're trying to create is a sort of mythic Dublin - which the literary Dublin is anyway. At heart, I'm an incurable romantic and nostalgist."

"There's a lot of fantasy to what we're doing," adds Niall, "which a lot of people haven't really latched on to."

One song on the album in particular, 'The Dying Town', sums up the ambivalent attitude that these native sons have towards the capital city. A heavy-hearted Hammond organ reminiscent of the Bad Seeds at their spookiest lends an almost funereal air to Niall's despairing vocals on the malign effects of the modernisation

of our cities.

"The band started in my house when I lived in Phibsboro," explains Fergus, "which to me is one of the great areas of Dublin in that it's largely untouched by the Celtic Tiger. The recommended reading for the album would be Frank McDonald's 'The Destruction Of Dublin' where he documents all that. Having said that, I do feel Dublin is a better place now than it was ten years ago - for a start, there's different people coming to the city and there's more money around.

"But the point is that tourists will stop coming if we start to pander to them. If we try to second guess what it is they want, then you're gonna get rid of the very things that attracted them to the city in the first place."

Niall takes up the point. "It's the idea of just demolishing buildings which have a great heritage value just so they can build something that has short-term, monetary payback. There's endless stories of all these listed buildings which mysteriously get fire-damaged and have to get knocked down because they're not safe, when it's obvious that somebody in a position of influence has paid some bunch of head-the-balls to do a job on them."

Jubilee Allstars began life as Jubilee, a three-piece - and they admit themselves, a very ragged three-piece - who had been known to jokingly announce themselves at gigs as the Australian Stars Of Heaven. In fact, they sounded more like the Hibernian early Beatles. But since an enforced name-change and the arrival of Barry, at 22 the youngest of the three siblings, they have matured into something else entirely.

"When we started the band," Niall recalls, "it was more for the sake of being in a band than the music - which is the English disease. It was so we could show off our new shoes and snort cheap coke. But now it's the other way 'round. Now we see being in a band as an opportunity to say something, as a vehicle to get our ideas across."

Which they've been doing with increasing success. They were nominated in the Best New Band category at this year's Hot Press awards in Belfast. Strong singles like the bittersweet 'Which Kind' and the stoned 'Keep On Chewing' picked up plenty of radio airplay thanks to the likes of John Kelly and Donal Dineen - yet neither appear on the album.

Sunday Miscellany is a downbeat but never deadbeat record that casts a poetic, yet somewhat ironic eye on life, on love, on what it's like waking up in the morning with an Orange Parade marching through your stomach. In the Jubilee Allstars' world, the last bus always pulls out just before you reach the stop and then it starts to rain just as you join the 100-mile queue for the taxi.

The song titles alone are worth the price of admission: 'The Poet Priest', 'Night's Candles Are Burnt Out', 'Sunset And Evening Star'. Musically, it's a subdued, understated affair, though the scratchy, insistent guitars of 'Tonight (I'm Gone)' could be a Velvet Underground out-take while the lyrical 'The Many Roads Home' a-jingle jangles with the best of them, showing its country rock heart on its sleeve.

Recorded in just two weeks, the warm and unfussy feel of the album is down to producer, Stan Erraught, the Allstars's mentor who is something of a living legend down my street.

"It was nothing to do with the fact that he had been in the Stars Of Heaven," protests Fergus. "We got him because we knew that musically he was coming from the same place as us. We didn't want to get in so-called 'name' producers from England or America because then it inevitably ends up being their record."

"Irish people have this inferiority complex," observes Niall. "When we hear a foreign accent, we always think they must know what they're talking about. Yet they usually don't have a clue what the band are about. So it was important to get someone from Dublin. And Stan genuinely understands what we're trying to do."

Barry, whose involvement with the band has increased on an almost daily basis - he sings, writes and plays guitar - is even more emphatic.

"Making the album was one of the best things I've done in my whole life - probably the best. Making the album is like conception. Releasing the album is like giving birth - you're emotionally drained and it's a lot of hard work."

"But bands are more like the father," Fergus responds, "all they do is smoke cigars and talk about it."

Sunday Miscellany has received mixed reviews. The main gripe seems to be with the quality of the vocal performances.

Fergus: "Niall's voice has been slagged off a lot recently. But when we played with Come in Dublin and Belfast, they came up to us and said they really thought his singing was amazing. You either get it or you don't."

Niall: "Stan and Edel (the engineer) had a real laugh about the fact that my singing on 'The Shaky Man' was done in one take on a microphone that isn't normally used to do vocals! They thought it was so funny because it's so offensive to the ears of people who want perfectly-produced records from a 48-track studio.

"It's not that we threw out the rulebook. It's that we didn't have one in the first place. A lot of people, I'd say, find us a bit obnoxious or arrogant, the fact that we'd dare to make a record that is out of tune."

But either way, Jubilee Allstars say they're oblivious to the ire of their detractors.

Niall: "The attitude of a lot of people of our parents' generation - of the older Ireland - would be that we're a bunch of wasters: 'why would you want to be in a band, you're getting nowhere'. But if our career went ballistic in the morning, their attitude would be 'Hey, look at what the young people are doing. Let's open a rock school with them teaching in it and get their wax figures erected on Grafton St'."

I'll drink to that. n

• Sunday Miscellany is out now on Lakota Records.