Gilla Band: “Humour is a way of coping to be honest. Grief is a big thing on the record. Sorry for bringing down the buzz!”

For a brief and glorious window, we were almost blessed with a stage musical about a former England international striker.

“Yeah, we started writing this show called Michael Owen The Musical,” says Gilla Band bassist Dan Fox. “MOTM, like Man of the Match. It’s pretty hilarious. We were thinking of getting Gary Lineker as this depraved, kind of weird character, and he’d have a gimp mask made out of Walker’s crisps!”

“It follows the Paradise Lost thing going on with the circles of Hell, and the seventh circle was going to be Stoke, like when Michael Owen ended up at Stoke.”

Sadly, no West End sugar daddy or arts grant has come through. Gilla Band have had to settle for making their roaring new album Pugnello instead.

Read a few articles or ask some local musicians about the four-piece, and you’ll get the impression of Gilla Band as a sort of Velvet Underground of the modern post-punk scene; a group whose influence reaches far further than the amount of records they’ve sold.

Most with a pedalboard and an anxious axe to grind, from Fontaines D.C. and Black Midi to Sprints and the rest, have been touched by the cathartic chaos of frontman Dara Kiely’s intense yelps, and the mad noise his bandmates have been creating since their 2011 formation. When I told a music-nut pal of mine I’d be interviewing the band, his jaw dropped as if I would be speaking to The Beatles. Or Michael Owen, for that matter.

Meet Dan, Dara, as well as drummer Adam Faulkner and guitarist Alan Duggan, and the mythology falls away. When they sit down around the circular table in our podcast studio, they don’t read much into the compliments and peer acclaim, and get more excited when asked what crisp the band would be (they settled on Meanies).

“I definitely wouldn’t think about it in those terms anyway,” Dan says of the VU comparison. “We’ve heard lots of people saying that they’re influenced by us. It’s really flattering. Coming from another musician, it’s pretty much the highest praise you can get.”

The four-year interim between now and their last album, Most Normal, has been spent working their day jobs and writing slowly.

“It’s good that we’re not reliant on [the band] for a job,” says Dan. “If you were doing that and you felt like you had to go in and do band stuff all the time, I think you’d begin to resent it. We all work in music. So it’s nice that we get to keep it all going on different avenues.”

Dara, who recently moved down to Cork City, has kept himself busy through painting. The abstract lines on the Pugnello cover are his own.

“It was decided that I’d give it a go for the album artwork,” he says. “It’s just a different type of outlet, really. For this record, I would put on the demos and then paint. I wanted to get what the sound looks like, that was the idea.”

And what does the sound look like to him?

“Like crap paintings, I think!”

Pugnello’s sound is in fact an amalgam of industrial techno and that jagged, abrasive post-punk on which they’ve built their careers.

“The techno influence, that’s always been there in the band,” Alan says. “It’s part of the DNA of the band, the same way that German psych-rock ‘70s stuff is, or the way no wave music is. Maybe it’s a bit more audible because we’re using drum machines on this record, whereas before we had always just used instruments.

“But it wasn’t like a thing of going into it being like, ‘We want to lean on this more’ or whatever. It was more like, ‘This is a cool sounding machine’. This drum machine that we got, Erica Synths Perkons, helped shape it. On each record, we’ve always had two or three key sounds or instruments.”

“With each synth or drum machine or a pedal,” Dan adds, “when you first get it, you can be like a kid and turn a load of stuff and see what happens, and it can be really intuitive.

“There’s a real golden period when you get a new piece of equipment. It’ll start spitting stuff at you. You’re not applying experience to it, you’re free to just follow your nose ‘cause you don’t know what you’re doing. We had tunes out of it pretty much straight away. It was a really good writing tool.”

Like the music, Gilla Band’s lyrics have never shied away from heaviness; subjects on the LP include mental health diagnoses and grief. Listen to Dara’s tirades though, and you’ll hear these themes wrapped in irreverent references to childhood cartoons like Teletubbies and Top Cat, obscure footballers, crisps, and listening to a dangerous amount of Coldplay.

“I didn’t mean to write about grief in that way, but when I started to really write the lyrics properly, all these childhood things came to mind,” he says. “It was escapism, the whole thing.

“Food and football seem to be the main things I think about straight away, so I should really get away from that. I don’t know. I do a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing. I really don’t know why it comes up. It’s just what’s going on at that time, and the meaning of it kind of comes a bit later.”

“On our first record, we did a track called ‘Pears For Lunch’, and I remember writing the lyrics for it and thinking they were really serious. One line was ‘I look crap with my top off’. I showed the lads, and they laughed. I was like, ‘Oh! That’s what a joke is! I forgot about humour.’

“Humour is a way of coping to be honest. Grief is a big thing on the record. Sorry for bringing down the buzz! It’s kind of like... if someone farts at a funeral or something, it’s hilarious. It diffuses the whole thing. I found that fascinating.

“My dad passed away three or four years ago. It was a very surreal experience. I was dealing with that by writing. Anything on a page is good for you if you’re going through something like that. I don’t know, I’ve just always loved silliness. I just think it’s really fun.”

Another thematic current is Dara’s schizophrenia diagnosis, something he says he spent years resisting.

“I’ve been well for like nine years. Which has been great. I never wanted to be diagnosed, ‘cause it’s a very permanent sounding thing. I thought I’d eventually just go back to having a relatively normal life.

“I was talking to someone who got diagnosed with something else. They said they were terrified to get it, but when they did, they were like, ‘Okay, now I know myself a bit better. I know what not to do, and what to do to help me stay well.’
“It was horrible for the first week or two when I found out. But I’m okay now. It’s quite a nuanced condition as well, so I don’t really have my head around it just yet.”

Schizophrenia, with no thanks to pop culture, is commonly misunderstood.

“I play with that in a couple of tracks, like ‘Both Of Us’,” Dara says. “There’s a misconception of a split personality. Everyone who has it is on a different type of spectrum, is what I can understand. It’s an interesting topic to write about.”
Dara also finds Bible references interesting, seeing as he cites them in the press notes as another one of Pugnello’s main themes. He is not the scripture expert in the room, however.

“I tried to read the Bible, and I kind of gave up pretty quickly! So, yeah. I’ve attempted it, I got as far as Exodus,” he says.

Adam got considerably further, having grown up inside it.

“My parents are in that more born-again, evangelical world,” he says. “So there was a lot of Sunday school, a lot of camps and stuff like that when I was a kid. I stepped away from it all when I was a teenager.”

The ceremonies resembled those high-production American-style set-ups. He mightn’t be into them as an adult, but appreciates that they provided his musical foundation.

“I’m a live sound engineer. I had my first go on a mixing console there, so I give it credit for giving me an opportunity in that regard. I was playing drums in front of 500-odd people every Sunday when I was 13, which definitely gave me an awful lot of help with stage confidence.”

• Pugnello is out now.