Generation X-mas

Forget advent calendars and double issues of the RTE Guide, the surest sign that Christmas is on the way is when the year’s musical heavyweights gather for the HP Summit.
It’s the same as the ones Blair, Bush and Berlusconi attend, only with more booze, less diplomacy and Podge & Rodge making lewd comments in the background. Yup, the nation’s favourite pervs have traveled up from Ballydung for the photo-shoot that’s accompanying today’s pow-wow. They’re in good company with Tommy Tiernan, Alex Kapranos and Kele Okereke also giving us their best cheesy grins.
Snaps out of the way it’s time to dispense with the pleasantries and give 2005 the CSI treatment. Sat around the HP-8 conference table are:
Stuart Clark: Hot Press’ bargain basement Jeremy Paxman needs no introduction, so we won’t give him one.
Paul Noonan: Lead singer with BellX1 whose Flock album topped the Irish chart in October, going platinum in the process. Following an Olympia sell-out, they play their biggest headlining show to date on January 31 in the RDS Main Hall.
Cormac Battle: As well as keeping the nation’s airwaves safe for rock ‘n’ roll, the 2FM DJ and producer is back treading the boards this Christmas with the mighty Kerbdog.
Dave Allen: The pure pop genius behind Hal whose self-titled debut has just been hailed as one of the Albums of the Year by Uncut. There were also champagne corks popped in April when the Dubs dented the UK top 30 with 'Play The Hits'.
Kieran McGuinness: Singer and lead guitarist with Delorentos whose winning of the 2005 Lee Cooper National Student Music Awards has thrust them into the A&R spotlight. A recent full house at Whelan’s suggests the hype has substance.
Rob Malone: Bass-player with the David Gray band who joins us via-video conference call from London where Later With Jools Holland awaits. Knows all about the vagaries of the Irish rock scene having previously plied his trade with Lir, Hothouse Flowers and The Sofas.
Paula “Pee Pee” Cullen & Caoimhe “Pony” Derwin: The Chalets’ visual and vocal tour de force who are just ever so slightly hungover after opening for The Frames last night in The Point. Holland-bound in January for the prestigious Eurosonic showcase, their videos have been all over MTV2 this year like a rash.
STUART: Ladies, it looks like you’re in pain.
PAULA: It was 11 o’clock this morning when I left the pub, so yes, I’m in serious pain.
CAOIMHE: It was worth it though because the gig went really, really well. Paul and me were just saying it’s actually less scary on a big stage than it is in a small venue where you’ve got people staring up your nose.
ROB: After all the slogging they’ve had to do, The Frames selling The Point out is a big milestone. The best you could hope for a few years ago if you didn’t have a UK hit was Whelan’s, but now you’ve Paddy Casey and BellX1 playing the RDS. It’s brilliant.
CORMAC: That thing of looking across the Irish Sea or the Atlantic for validation has gone.
PAUL: At the same time, The Frames have very much tried to lose the “We’re big in Ireland and nowhere else” tag. Being able to go pretty much anywhere in the world and pull a thousand people, I’d say they’ve succeeded.
STUART: Talking of sell-outs, any of you at Croke Park for U2?
DAVE: I went on Friday and wasn’t impressed.
CORMAC: I went on Saturday when they’d sorted the sound and was knocked sideways. I hadn’t been to a gig like that for years.
ROB: I wasn’t around for Croker, but I did see them early on in the tour at Madison Square Gardens, which was great. Bono didn’t run around as much as he used to, but otherwise it was a masterclass in stadium rock. I met The Edge when I was in a Dublin band called The Sofas, and he was really friendly and helpful.
STUART CLARK: I’m assuming that nobody here would turn down a U2 support.
PAUL: I remember seeing Ash play with them on PopMart, and looking really disheartened because they were confined to this tiny little triangle in front of U2’s gear. I guess the important thing was them having their name on the bill.
CAOIMHE: There’s no way we’d turn them down…Bono!
PAUL: What would be great is U2 coming on every night to one of your songs, as happened this year with Arcade Fire who’ve sold thousands of albums on the back of them taking a liking to ‘Wake Up’.
KIERAN: If they want to use any of our songs, we’ll waive the copyright! No, it’s cool that they’re interested enough in new bands to do that.
STUART: What are the best support tours you’ve done?
CAOIMHE: The Subways was great because we got to play bigger venues, and had loads of people posting onto our messageboard afterwards saying they really liked us.
ROB: My dream gig actually happened when I was with Hothouse Flowers and we opened up for the Stones in Europe. You think that other tours are big and then you see them with their backstage village…each! The opening night was at the Olympic Stadium in Munich, which, as a football fan, was a double “wow!” We were summonsed by Mick who kept us waiting, but was then very sweet for the 15 minutes or so we got to talk to him.
PAULA: I’d love to tour with The Strokes. Not for any musical reasons, but because they’re so damn cute.
CAOIMHE: They would not be able to wander the corridors unmolested.
KIERAN: The worst person we’ve played with was this diva songstress whose four-page rider specified that her dressing-room carpet must be white.
DAVE: You hear horror stories about big bands treating their supports like shit, but Doves were almost too nice to us.
STUART: Hal also opened for The Magic Numbers who refused to play Top Of The Pops this year after a crack was made in rehearsal about their weight. Would you do the same if someone called you too fat, too hairy or too smelly?
KIERAN: I’d definitely walk if they called me all three!
PAULA: There are so many things you could say back to Richard Bacon. It was a bit of a lost opportunity on their part.
CAOIMHE: What a wanker, there was no need for it.
CORMAC: From a purely cynical point of view, it paid back in spades for them to storm off that programme. Whatever the opposite of backfired is, that was it.
PAUL: That's how it worked out, but I'm sure it wasn't the intention.
ROB: Fair fucking play to them! I’m sure management and the record company thought, “That’s it, game over”, but it’s actually helped them because people realise they’re passionate about their music.
STUART: Another of the summer’s live highlights was the Electric Picnic, which was as notable for its fine wines as it was its music. Do you think it eclipsed Oxegen?
PAULA: Definitely. The line-up was brilliant, and you didn’t have to queue an hour for a botulism burger. You can’t fault the bands they have at Oxegen, but sometimes it’s too much like a survival course.
CAOIMHE: The security was completely reasonable. One guy, having been asked, “Can I go through there?” by me said: “No, but if I turn round and you sneak past…”
PAUL: The cattle-herding factor was a lot less and the bill, for me personally, more interesting. The first thing I saw was Wayne Coyne in the Hot Press tent, which set the tone for the weekend.
CORMAC: Oxegen is 15-year-olds from the country with GAA jerseys on. They don’t give a shit what temperature the Chardonnay is as long as the Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party are playing. Which they were this year.
KIERAN: Oxegen is definitely the better of the two festivals for new bands. They're Reading while the Electric Picnic's got more of a Glastonbury thing going on.
STUART: Were any of you part of the mob that wanted to lynch James Blunt for covering ‘Where Is My Mind’ in Laois?
CAOIMHE: I don’t get why people hate him so much. I wouldn’t listen to his music but…
PAULA: (Laughs) You’re in love with him!
STUART: Yes, my lady friends tell me that he’s quite hunky.
CAOIMHE: Bleurrrrrgh! No, is it because he’s sold so many records or, as Enda in The Chalets says, that he makes the most boring music in the world?
CORMAC: ‘You’re Beautiful’ is a reasonably pleasant song, but anything that gets played 400,000 times on the radio is going to get on your tits.
PAUL: He actually realised that and had the single version deleted.
ROB: David put ‘Babylon’ on the subs bench for a while because he felt it had got a bit tired and jaded. It came off the subs bench for the recent American tour, and will be in the starting line-up for The Point shows this month.
STUART: It's amazing that James Blunt started the year playing Doyle’s of College Green, and ended it as Ireland’s best-selling artist.
PAUL: It’s like The Arctic Monkeys having a number one single six weeks after playing Whelan’s.
KIERAN: The hype about them is that there’s no hype!
CORMAC: Record companies love bands like The Arctic Monkeys who’ve got everything – songs, look, website, artwork, videos etc. – in place. The only things they really have to pay for are the recording and promotion.
CAOIMHE: That’s definitely one of the things that appealed to our label, Setanta, about The Chalets.
PAULA: Yes, they’re cheap and don’t like doing any work!
CORMAC: When I was in Wilt, Infectious spent megabucks on a video of us going up the Hudson on a barge. A promotional masterstroke had it not been for them dropping us before it could be screened. Since then record companies have copped on a bit.
DAVE: Fair play to The Arctic Monkeys for having their shit together, but it’d be a shame if we lost that thing of record companies nurturing bands completely. Part of what appealed to us about Rough Trade was that they weren’t looking for an instant hit.
STUART: I don’t know why, but I’ve always had this mental image of Rough Trade being the record company equivalent of a sweet shop, with Geoff Travis cranking up the stereo and The Strokes frolicking in the company hot-tub.
CAOIMHE: I wanna go there!
DAVE: It actually looks like the sort of place that sells shower curtain-rails. There are boxes stacked up in front of a window and nothing much going on there at all.
CORMAC: What, no Pete Doherty slumped over a settee?
DAVE: No, but me and Paul (Allen, Hal bassist) went to see them last year in London with some record company people who kept telling us how amazing it was going to be. Ten minutes in and we’re going, “This is the worst gig we’ve ever seen!” I’m sure it was fun if you were one of the people crawling all over the stage, but musically there was nothing going on.
ROB: We did ...Jools Holland back in the day with The Libertines, and I spent the whole time taking my jaw off the floor! They were so out of it. He was on it again last week with Babyshambles and, well, let’s just say that his lifestyle is more remarkable than his music.
PAUL: Normally I make a point of checking out whoever the buzz band of the moment is, but there’s nothing about Pete Doherty that even remotely interests me. It’s such a slow, painful and public death.
KIERAN: He went to Russia when he was 15 for a poetry festival, so there’s definitely a literary side to him.
PAULA: He’s just a big, fat baby who takes drugs and I’m bored of talking about him.
DAVE: Hasn’t Damon Albarn started a campaign to ‘Make Doherty History’?
CORMAC: I think Doherty’s going to ‘Make Doherty History’.
STUART: If Pete Doherty is the musical villain of 2005, who are the heroes?
CORMAC: In terms of Ireland, the new Pugwash album is an astonishing piece of work. They’ve no money, yet somehow managed to go over to Abbey Road to record strings.
PAUL: Another great record on the same label, 1969 Records, is the one by Dave Couse. It’s refreshing to see time and money being put into artists for no other reason than they write great songs. They're not trying to jump on the latest bandwagon.
ROB: Three albums I can’t stop playing at the moment are Leaders Of The Free World by Elbow, Funeral by Arcade Fire and Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, which was released in 2004 but only came on to my radar this year.
PAUL: I was going to say Arcade Fire as well, but was worried it’d make me sound like my Eyebrowy character.
KIERAN: It’s on TV now so we’re all in big shit!
STUART: Talking of Eyebrowy, what other forms of public humiliation have you had to endure?
CAOIMHE: The lowest point of my life was doing a photo-shoot for Budweiser. First Paula was late, so I had to suck my cheeks in and pretend to be a skinny model, and then they got us riding bikes in what was now the pissing rain with Mylo. The caption the next day in The Sun was: “Mylo having the ride of his life with Caoimhe Derwin and Paula Cullen of The Chalets.”
PAULA: There’s worse! When U magazine told us and some other young musicians and actors to pick costumes from a shop, we chose a Christmas cake and a Christmas pudding, which we then had to walk down Baggott Street in. Truly, we have no shame.
KIERAN: I don’t want to sound ungrateful because it was great exposure, but when we won the Lee Cooper National Student Music Awards we had to pose for pictures in matching denim jackets.
PAULA: Like B*Witched or something!
PAUL: There’s always pressure to remix singles for radio, which creates huge fucking rows within the band. I get very adamant about them not being used, and then cringe when they are. The worst was the one for ‘Eve, The Apple Of My Eye’ done by this old school LA producer, Tom Lord Algae, whose favourite instrument I imagine is the telephone. This guy earns his money by getting his programmer to cut songs down to precisely 3m 30s, and making them sound like everything else that’s on American FM radio.
STUART: Would you have been as eager to accept an MBE from the Queen as The Corrs were?
ROB: He’s not calling himself “Sir Jim” now, is he? We opened for The Corrs in Europe and they’re real sweethearts, but I wonder if they’ve given proper thought to how that’ll go down in Dundalk? Where I’m from and how I was brought up, an MBE’s the last thing I’d accept.
DAVE: It’d probably get you into Lillies and Renards a bit quicker.
CORMAC: But not a Wolfe Tones gig! The Corrs would accept an award for anything. I don’t think much thought goes into it, other than, “What a great photo op.”
KIERAN: If it was in recognition of all the charity work we’ve been doing…
PAUL: Coming from Dundalk and accepting an MBE, that’s brave!
STUART: Any of you in the posse that went up to Aras An Uachtarain the other day to meet Mary?
PAULA: What? I don’t think we were invited!
PAUL: I’m afraid we had to turn the President down because we were gigging.
CORMAC: Snow Patrol look like the gardeners who were brought in for a cup of tea. The only recognition from the state Kerbdog had was a tax problem.
STUART: As an Englishman I can be smug about it, but how many of you shed tears over Ireland not qualifying for Germany?
ROB: The ecstasy of being in Istanbul for Liverpool v AC Milan didn’t make the agony of crashing out to Switzerland any easier to cope with. In fact, the only thing that stopped me getting blind drunk in protest was the feeling that, ultimately, we didn’t deserve it.
PAUL: I was gutted at having to scrap the World Cup song I’d been working on.
STUART: Really?
PAUL: No, but it’d be nice one day to follow in Larry Mullen’s footsteps.
PAULA: The Chalets had one, the chorus of which was: “Football, we don’t like it/La la la/We wear high-heels!”
KIERAN: Every song we write is for Match Of The Day’s ‘Goal Of The Month’. Will this work with Frank Lampard hitting a screamer? No? Well, scrap it.
DAVE: We were on Match Of The Day a few times, and Hollyoaks.
STUART: Any advance on Hollyoaks?
CAIOMHE: Fair City had us playing on the radio in Malacahy’s Shelter.
CORMAC: The Caff in EastEnders loads of times.
PAUL: (Knowing he holds the trump card) The Bait-Shop in The OC.
PAULA: Have you met the cast?
PAUL: A lot of them came to The Viper Room when we were in LA last, although not being a regular watcher I had no idea who they were. It was like the Homerpalooza episode of The Simpsons: “Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins” – "Homer Simpson, Smiling Politely.” The two main girls, Mischa Barton and Rachel Bilson were there, so I should have been more star-struck than I was. It’s easy to be cynical about these things, but The OC has been a great calling card for BellX1 in the States.
STUART: It didn’t have the cataclysmic impact on lives that events in Newport Beach did, but a good few people tuned in to see Martin Scorsese’s Bobumentary, No Direction Home. Did it make you revise your opinion of Dylan?
CORMAC: A lot of Dylan fans think you’re a knobhead if you don’t like him, but there’s no particular reason for a 15 or 16-year-old in a band to listen to him. They’ve their own influences.
DAVE: Dylan from Freewheelin’ up to Blood On The Tracks was a genius, but then he kind of lost me.
PAUL: I’ve always found the snobbery surrounding Dylan off-putting and, anyway, I got all the musical grounding I needed from Talking Heads and Television.
ROB: I’m not a huge Dylan fan, but then again I’m a player rather than a singer-songwriter. David, on the other hand, regards him as God with Springsteen his deputy. What I didn’t appreciate until I read it recently was just how big an influence Liam Clancy was on Bob.
PAULA: Our silence says it all!
STUART: No Direction Home aside, what were the music films you watched this year?
KIERAN: I saw The Ramones one, and couldn’t believe how much they hated each other. How a band can get like that, I don’t know.
CORMAC: You’ll find out soon enough!
CAOIMHE: Metallica and their meeting about having a meeting was great.
PAULA: I liked their idea of having a psychologist on the payroll. If we had one it might've stopped Dylan trying to throw me out of the room in my pyjamas because I wouldn’t go drinking. I grabbed him by the neck in retaliation, and it went downhill from there.
DAVE: I’m on my third pair of glasses as a result of being punched in the face by various members of the band. The key is to just switch off. During the last tour we did, which was about 30 days, I spoke to the lads for a total of about five minutes. We were in Brussels recently and I realised it was the fourth morning in a row I’d been going down to breakfast as Paul climbed into bed. That’s how anti-social and boring I’ve become.
ROB: My un-rock ‘n’ roll way of coping with long tours is to eat healthily and go for a run every morning. Have a couple of pints when you come off stage, sure, but don’t cane it or otherwise every flu’ and cold bug floating round the bus is going to knock you for six. The other essential is a good book to read in your bunk when people are annoying you. I’ve never toured with anybody I haven’t at one point wanted to kill.
PAULA: Can I just say that I read the Da Vinci Code recently and it’s un-putdownable.
CAOIMHE: No, you can't.
STUART: Removing yourselves from the equation, who are the most dysfunctional bands you’ve come across?
ROB: Lir went out in the States with a group whose Hammond keyboard-player was a junkie. He’d be perfectly lucid one minute and totally smacked up the next, which is something I’d never encountered before in Dublin music circles. Pot, yeah, but not heroin.
KIERAN: Three members of a young band came up to us at a gig and said, “Can we ask your advice? Our drummer’s only prepared to rehearse once a month.” Half an hour after telling them, “That’s rubbish, sort it out”, they’re having a massive fist-fight and fucking yer’ man out!
CORMAC: We toured with The Wildhearts for three weeks, which was mega fucked-up. They didn’t have gear one night, so we lent them ours and they trashed it.
STUART: My favourite Wildhearts story is them forcing their bassist to snort a line of athlete’s foot that had been donated by their 65-year-old bus driver.
PAULA: How did that work?
STUART: They scraped it off with a razor blade and chopped it up. Then they got him to rub a cream cracker under the rim of the portaloo and eat it.
CORMAC: Another terribly bad influence on us was Therapy? That definitely wasn’t going to bed at midnight with a Jane Austen novel.
PAUL: We met a band recently whose drummer boasted that he’d been down the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and got hand-relief for a fiver. Which I thought was tremendously good value.
CAOIMHE: There’s a street on the Reeperbahn that you can’t walk down as a woman unless you’re a prostitute. If you break the rule, the working girls chuck water at you from their balconies.
PAULA: I was like, “Get me there!” but Caoimhe was having none of it.
STUART: You’re all okay with your Ansbacher accounts, but do you fear for your less well-off contemporaries if the government goes ahead and scraps Artist Exemption?
ROB: Bertie was sitting four seats up from me recently on a plane and I very nearly went and had it out with him because it’s definitely going to effect gigging musicians who often are on as little as ten grand a year. Instead of saying that he won’t be leaving the country if it’s abolished, Bono should be highlighting the people in the business who aren’t multi-millionaires and rely on exemption to keep them afloat. It’s bloody Ireland again, taking as much money off the good people as possible.
PAUL: Where will Lisa Stansfield move next? I don’t see why we should be exempt from something that everyone else has to pay. It certainly doesn’t help who it should help.
CORMAC: If a musician or other artist is making a livable amount of money, they should pay tax. If they need a dig-out for a couple of years while they get established, give them some sort of means-tested grant.
KIERAN: Blanket exemption is ridiculous, but like the lads say, there should be government support for emerging artists. Otherwise we’ll all bugger off to another country and leave them red-faced with embarrassment when we sell ten million records!
*********************
Podge and Rodge
Rodge: What’s the story with Hot Press these days? Do they still have the dirty ads in the back? You’d want to buy it for those alone, wouldn’t you?
Podge: We met The Chalets during the HP shoot– lovely girls, they were. They’re a bit naughty. You can tell by the look of them.
R: Yeah, they’d be the type of girls who’d want to be sitting down the back of the bus.
P: Now, we didn’t get saucy with them, as they’re a bit young. Mary Black is more our type.
R: Are we fans of The Chalets? We wouldn’t give a shite about the music. We wouldn’t be into the j-pods and the 50 Cents and the Tamagootchis. They’re all for young folk.
I don’t think we could keep up.
P: Sure we only just discovered there are more than two channels, and we’re thinking of the Sky Package. We’ve been in Gussy Bollocken's, the pub down here, and they had Babecast on. My God almighty, the women are wiggling their arses while they’re chatting to men on the phone.
R: I’ve a quote to keep us in with the HotPress crowd. Listen – aren’t The Frames great? We don’t know many more of them. Do we know Paddy Casey? Is he the one-legged boy from down the road – Johnny Casey’s young lad? HotPress What are your plans for Christmas?
P: We don’t like Christmas, as it starts too early. By our calculations, in 2020, Christmas will start on August 1st. All the Christmas decorations are up in Penney's before Hallow’een, which we don’t like. It’s not as much fun for the kids anymore.
R: We will spend the day in separate rooms in the house because we never like the presents we get from each other. Last year, he gave me a bale of briquettes, and the worse thing is that he didn’t even bother to wrap them up.
HP: What about your own show, An Audience With Podge & Rodge, which is showing over Christmas?
R: Can you believe they’re putting us on the telly on St Stephen's Day? We’ll have a load of people on with us that night – Amanda Brunker, Ray D’Arcy, Gerry Ryan, Mary Black.
P: We got Gerry Ryan on the show and we think it’s the first time you can see all of his chins at the same time. I know we got at least five of them in anyway.
HP: Is there anyone else you’d love to get on the show?
R: We’d love to get our hands on Louis Walsh. One thing we know about him is he’s like the devil, ‘cos you sell your soul to him. We shouldn’t be telling you this, but Boyzone were a success, so we know that they sold him their souls. Westlife are famous all over the world, so they definitely sold their souls to him.
P: If you want to be a popstar in Ireland that’s what you have to do. Can you believe that they’re putting that face all over England on UTV now?
HP: Your own DVD of the third series of A Scare At Bedtime With Podge & Rodge is coming out now, too.
R: We were thinking up some marketing ideas and wanted to give away a free bale of briquettes with the DVD. But HMV and Xtravision weren’t into it as the bales would be plugging up all the doorways of the shops.
We’ll have to think of another tactic.