GONE FISHIN'

DAYS LATER, when the only sign that the weekend ever happened is an inexplicable bruise on my leg and an empty bank account, Gerard Whelan will comment that he loves when people go on the road with them, because he enjoys watching them fall apart.
Forty-eight hours after arrival in Cork, somewhere on the road from Leap back to Cobh, when my stomach screams for mercy and Aidan is faced with the choice of pulling over or having to re-upholster his car, I finally accept that my position in the realms of rock and roll will always be that of an observer. The rocking bit I can handle. It's the rolling afterwards that proves difficult.
The What's On Where guide to Cobh is a jewel among free leaflets. Scattered among the For Sale ads (acoustic guitar, excellent condition) and heartwarming messages (Happy Birthday to Eileen Derwin) are snippets of priceless information to liven up the conversation at parties.
For instance, did you know that there are half a million saunas in Finland? That a duck is six times more efficient at converting its fuel into motion than a ship? That an alsation's sense of smell is a million times better than a person's? That An Emotional fish are playing the Jack Doyle Room in the Commodore Hotel tonight?
The duck bit is fascinating, but it's the fish we're here for. Their second album, "Junk Puppets" is waiting in the wings, and meanwhile they're back on the road, which, says Gerard, "has been a priority on the list for a while. I think it's been frustrating for us in the studio. The album took so long, but then we wanted to make a certain kind of album. Fuck it, certain fans would miss what we're doing but they'd sooner hear that we had spent our time making a great record than that we're back with an average one."
Cobh is a beautiful and peculiar town. Streets slope down at forty-five degree angles towards the harbour, Spike Island lurks in the distance, and St. Colman's Cathedral hovers graciously over the whole. By the time I get there it's late in the evening and too dark to look round, so the only sensible thing to do seems to be to join Gerard and manager Aidan in one of the excellent hostelries.
Gerard carries a hard-back copy of James Stephens' "Crock Of Gold" bought earlier in the day. "A lot of what I'm reading now, kids were taught in school, except that it was shoved down their throats. I grew up in Brixton. I'm not like Liam O'Maonlai from the Hothouse flowers, fortunately or unfortunately. I haven't had that experience with the Irish language.
"It's all new to me and it's a discovery that I want to make myself, instead of having it forced on me. I grew up with the history of the monarchy in England. I'd rather deal with the fairies, I think.
"I hadn't seen Ireland till we went on The Tour With No Name with The Dixons and Real Wild West years ago. I'd stayed in Dublin and travelled to Europe. I think I'm discovering Ireland still. I think of Ireland as home, although I do think Irish people have that spirit of travellers, because there's been so much upheaval. Genuine Irish people would have no problem in getting up and leaving tomorrow, especially the youth, who are brought up thinking that they'll more than likely have to do just that."
He wants to try another pub a few minutes away, and it's decided that, what with those unforgiving hills all around, a taxi might be a good idea. One arrives, and the sign on the dashboard appears to read 'Love Cabs', pleasing him no end. The taxi driver points out that it actually says 'Cove Cabs'.
"Ah, but 'Love Cabs' is a much better name," argues Gerard. "You could paint them all red, couldn't you?"
Back in the Commodore Hotel later that night, one of three girls who came out to Cobh from Cork city and tried unsuccessfully to get on the guest list, grills me as to why exactly I was able to get in for free when she wasn't. I tell her it's because I'm here to interview the band and she gives me a withering look that turns my Bulmers flat, sniffing "Yeah, sure you are".
It's not the most atmospheric of venues, but the band sound forceful throughout, with Gerard jumping off the stage to wander amongst the audience whenever the mood takes him. Somebody at the front offers him cigarettes. A girl down the back wants the gig to be stopped for a minute so that she can talk to Martin, An Emotional Fish's drummer and pin-up in residence. That doesn't happen.
"One song on the album is accepted as just a kind of three-minute pop song, 'Hole In My Heaven,' but at the gigs it's gone down brilliantly," Gerard comments later. "It's possibly a single now. That's where you get true feedback, to me. Playing a gig is like being a fly on the wall, watching people listen to the album."
I retire, knackered, straight after the gig, leaving everyone else to indulge in quiet conversation till dawn. Stories circulating next day suggest that one of The Mary Janes, who are supporting on this tour, got involved in an altercation with a maths teacher, and another individual who was proving slightly difficult, luckily misheard the term "sheep-shagger" as "shrewd fucker" and took it as a compliment. There were many more, probably far more exciting, anecdotes that no-one would reveal in full. Damn.
Day two will take us to Leap, but meanwhile there's plenty of time to explore the wonders of Cobh, to marvel at the cathedral and saunter through the colourful side streets. Or the colourful #1 shops, that seemed to exert an irresistible hold over Martin, Aidan, and Gerard.
Enda, Dave, The Mary Janes and the rest of the crew have already bundled into the van and begun the journey to Connolly's of Leap, but meanwhile Aidan searches for a water-pistol more elaborate and intimidating than the one he's been using all morning on small animals, nervous children, and infirm elderly people.
Martin hovers worryingly around the plastic gun section, but eventually settles for a water bomb kit. Gerard toys with the idea of buying a kite, before opting for a deluxe double-pack of playing cards and a mini chess set.
Aidan proves himself to be an impressive driver, displaying an innovative approach to navigation that at one point involves driving repeatedly around a minuscule roundabout until nausea prompts someone to choose a likely-looking road out of complete desperation.
Connolly's of Leap, when we finally reach it, is a wondrous little venue, with its tiny main floor flanked on all sides by an over-sized balcony, and every scrap of wall and ceiling covered by posters, photographs, and hand-written notices of varying literary merit. Near the stage, a band can take comfort in the encouraging words "Heads down, knobs to the right, and I'll see youse at the end". Over by the bar hangs the legend "If silence is golden, why is heavy metal so popular?"
It's early afternoon, everyone's arrived safely, and Gerard's idea to drive to the little harbour town of Glandore two miles away seems like an excellent one. His insistence on visiting the stone circle nearby meets with cooler reception from Aidan and Martin, who toddle behind making derisory comments while Gerard enthuses about the vibrations. Finally he stretches out on what he decides must have been an ancient sacrificial stone, and smokes a cigarette while the sun beats down.
Despite this burst of ancestral communion, the portrait of Gerard Whelan as mystic that's occasionally been put forward seems to lack foundation. There's an element of child-like eagerness about him, but mostly he's an exceptionally affable self-appointed spokesperson for An Emotional Fish, and, as he says himself, "fairly down to earth. I maybe have a gift of distancing myself, maybe because of my upbringing, travelling around. My family always moved around, and when you're a kid you're always making one group of friends and then moving on and making another."
And the other band members?
"Enda's still very much like a guru, definitely a mentor for me. He encouraged me to write. Enda was there when I wrote my first lyric. Probably looking back it wasn't much at all, but he made me feel like a genius, y'know? Enda is very well read, and he doesn't banter words, whereas I'm more of a chatterbox. I like talking to people and I love talking about myself," he laughs.
"Enda's just a very encouraging individual, and very straight, and I think we all admire that in him. Whereas Martin's a slut," he grins. "I think Martin is just . . . gorgeous. I have no other description for Martin. David and I, we're like niggly sisters. It's good because David and Enda stabilise us a bit more.
"David is very cynical, whereas I'm probably a bit more optimistic. We need that. Maybe I should step back and look at things sometimes, instead of just going 'yeah, yeah, let's do that!"
"We've known this from the offset, that it's a family. You've to live together, we spend all our time together. In a way we've been lucky, with the people we've met, the crew and all. A band is not just the four people on stage, it's everybody else involved, and everybody brings their own little bit of magic. I've actually only discovered that I'm in a band of late, when you meet other bands, and realise that the crew is separate; the crew is probably slagging the band, the band think the crew are a bunch of assholes, and I think fuck, why not sack them all and get your mates to work for you, you know?
"We're very fortunate in that we all basically bumped into each other and got on with each other. Who knows what attracts you to other people? We're both blessed and cursed with the fact that we make music together. It's the one bond we have.
"The music is important but there's so much that isn't. You have to have duck feathers for it. It has to come off you like rain."
Sated with positive vibes, or something along those lines, we head back towards Glandore village for food. Gerard produces his new playing cards and my poker prowess reveals why folks from miles around refer to me affectionately as "easy target". A tendency to cry and beat the table whenever I get a bad hand, which is often, means that Martin, Gerard and Aidan all have to lend me money at regular intervals throughout the game.
Aidan wins far too often for everyone's liking, Martin keeps trying to raise the stakes, and Gerard gets cranky when no-one believes his version of the rules.
Back in Leap, post-soundcheck, David, Gerard, Martin and Enda gather round bowls of soup and pints; talk turns to that difficult first album, and some of the reactions it provoked.
"It just wasn't loud enough, that was all," shrugs Martin, smiling.
"I think it was other people's perceptions really, rather than the band themselves," states David. "Other people had it in for the band before it even started, because of all the so-called connections. I think we rose above all that, like" (laughing) "a phoenix from the ashes. I imagine a lot of it stemmed from the day that all the A...R guys went down to Cork for the Cork Rock weekend when we were playing there. It used to amaze us to a certain extent that we got so much attention."
"We'd never really directed ourselves to getting a record deal or anything like that," adds Gerard, "so it kind of took us by surprise. But then it just snowballed, and there were people parking their limousines outside the Baggot Inn and stuff like that, and Dublin's a small place. Definitely a lot of people got the hump about it."
If "An Emotional Fish" was recorded, as Gerard says, quite naively, "Junk Puppets" benefits from Alan Moulder's inspired production.
"Since day one when we went in with Alan to record 'Rain,' which was done first, that set it for the rest of the album," says David. "We knew what we wanted then, whereas with the first one it was all new to us and we did tend to get lost in exterior things going on. He keeps the moment creative all the time and you don't get bogged down in small details.
"You don't lose the essence of the songs, whereas the first one was a bit too methodical. Working with him was very beneficial, especially for me. He said none of his songs make hits anyway. That enamoured him to us as well."
"Junk Puppets", recorded over eight months in the Church Studio in London, was actually An Emotional Fish's second version of a second album. The first took shape in Ballyvourney near Cork in 1991.
Ballyvourney, a small but perfectly proportioned town that boasts two grocery shops and seven pubs, was intended to be a retreat from the mayhem of city life but offered its own distractions, including a bumper mushroom harvest: "We'd go in to do a bit of music and somebody would pop out to the shop to buy a pack of cigarettes and be missing for about six hours . . ."
Some of this "lost second album" was later re-worked with Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes, while the band waited for Alan Moulder to become free again.
Gerard: "I'm a big fan of the Femmes since the first album, and when we were in London, Martin and I went along to a gig they did in the Brixton Academy. It was amazing to see a band who had never had a hit record, and yet everybody in the audience was singing every lyric to every song. It was like being in church. It was just coincidental that the guy who produces some of Gordon's stuff had heard we were making an album and experimenting with different people. He got in touch with us.
"We thought we were going through the mill, whereas listening to Gordon's stories about how record companies have treated The Violent Femmes we felt a lot better. They've really been fucked around."
"Mick Ronson would have been great," David comments, when asked who else he would like to work with. "I was just thinking that when he died."
"I'd just like to meet Mohammed Ali really," says Gerard. "He's a real hero of mine. My father says that years ago boxing was the way out of the working class, a way to make loads of money without having much talent, just by being a hard-nosed fucker. There's a lot of people joining bands in Ireland now for that same reason," he adds as David collapses into laughter. "You get a lot of money and you don't need much talent . . ."
The gig later that night is even better than the preceding one, the audience more enthusiastic, and the impromptu dancing from a two-year-old called Eli down the front a surprise addition to the performance. The Mary Janes' support slot is unfortunately shortened due to a broken string, but they still sound refreshingly special.
"It's great to be playing with a band like that," says Gerard later. "There's so many bands who are formularised to get a record deal, playing music that record companies are supposedly looking for at the moment. After Nirvana, I went to see a few bands that were getting record company interest and they were all these grunge bands and I just thought, fuck it, is it going to be grunge for the rest of our lives? I think The Mary Janes have something quite unique."
"Celebrate" inevitably, gets the warmest reception but the current single "Rain" still sounds to me like the best song they've ever written.
" 'Celebrate' is a one-off and we don't want to get into that formula of writing songs around that all the time," states Gerard. "It has a life of its own now, and in time the songs on this album will have lives of their own. They take on their own identity and fly . . ."
Martin's preferred songs on the album are the ballad "Careless Child", "Sister Change" and "Harmony Central", "because there's great drums on it," he grins.
"If God Was A Girl", originally intended to be the title track, was written by Gerard during a "frustrated housewife period. I think it's probably written out of an adoration for women more than anything else, stemming from "Man's World" and songs like that that we've done before. We've done a cover of Helen Reddy's "I Am A Woman" as well that was quite interesting.
" 'Digging This Hole' came about because we were put into a studio to write a hit single and lyrically all I could think of was, why don't all these people do it, all these people involved in the industry who seem to know how to do it better? I suppose it's focused on a particular person within the music industry, but he represents everybody who's involved in putting it to you like it's so fucking easy.
"It isn't easy. It's like digging a hole, this whole glamour stardom shit. If you get too involved in that your life is over, but yet there are so many people who want to set you up to be that all the time. Even now, total strangers are having rows with me in pubs - 'You're a rock star' you know?
"I still don't take it too seriously. I think there are far greater disappointments to face in life. There was a girl in Tullamore, a fan of ours, who came to a lot of gigs, who died around Christmas, and her friends wrote to me to tell me, and her mother wrote to me then, when we played Tullamore. That somebody has expressed that our music has meant so much to their life, that's enough.
"If you're idolised, you're not idolised for ever, you're idolised for a moment in time. There's more important issues. Does anybody want another millionaire rock singer? I don't think so."
There are no rows with strangers this night, but there does seem to be an inordinate number of pints going down in my immediate vicinity. If my crapness at poker is matched by anything, it's a tendency towards hangovers of monstrous proportions. Couple this with recurring car-sickness, and understand why my condition on the last day of this little adventure is, frankly, so pathetic that I can't even stay in Aidan's car while Martin goes for a spin around the car park.
The drive to Tullamore seems an exceptionally long one given these circumstances, though the in-car music choice is first-rate, ranging from The Brady Bunch's neglected masterpiece "It's A Sunshine Day" to King Missile's thought-provoking "Detachable Penis".
Tullamore is shrouded by clouds of drizzle. Aidan is going to miss tonight's gig in The Harriers and drive us both back to Dublin instead. Nearing home, Tony Fenton's "Hotline" show plays "Rain" and the person who's requested it wins a prize. The winner turns out to be Christina Whelan, Ger's mother. She gets a Wrangler jacket.
"When the first single came out, my mother went into the shop and got the guy to play both sides," Gerard laughs down the telephone a couple of days later. "She's been hassling me for the past year. 'When are you getting this record out? People are going to forget about you.' I've had more pressure from my mother than I've had from the record company . . ."
An Emotional Fish's next Irish tour will probably take place around the time of Féile, "when people know who we are again," adds Gerard.
They haven't forgotten you.
"Thanks to my mother."