Hot Press meets... Delorentos

Engineered, mixed and compiled by a group of second year students in the Sound Training Centre in Temple Bar, Behind Closed Doors sees The Corrs, Oliver Cole, David Geraghty, The Aftermath and Neosupervital lend their time and vocal chords to a very worthy cause. Along with, of course, four other rather successful rockers…

“We’re in the privileged position to be asked to do a lot of charity work,” guitarist Delorentos Kieran McGuinness says, “but this was something really creative. I’d much prefer to write a song or adapt a song than to go somewhere, go to a charity launch just to be there, so this project really appealed to us, for them to give us a little job and make it interesting for us as well.
“We were told what the album was and straight away we thought ‘Can we do this?’ and ‘Can we do it well?’ We sat down and went through the songs and we hadn’t done a version of ‘Hallucinations’ before so we said, ‘Why not?’ We brought in a ukulele and a Korg and didn’t put any electric on it to try and do things a little bit differently. We’ve been writing songs with the Korg a bit recently but the ukulele was totally new for us. We liked the idea of using an instrument to dictate the song as opposed to the normal channel. We just went in and thrashed it out for a day or two and it sounds really good on the CD.”
Continuing on from last year’s Sparks And Mind album, released in aid of Aware and featuring the likes of Bell X1, Lisa Hannigan and Damien Dempsey, Behind Closed Doors supports another of Ireland’s longest-established charities, The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC). When I speak to McGuinness, Delorentos are fresh from an acoustic set in Tower Records to promote the CD.
“We generally don’t do those kind of things, we’re not really an acoustic band,” he says, “but it was great to do something different. It worked out really well, we put it up on Twitter and Facebook so there was a big crowd there. I made a balls of one of the songs though!”
Oh, you paranoid pup, you. I’m sure nobody noticed.
“Oh yes they did! I stopped and went ‘Oh shit!’”
Now that the Dublin foursome have done their bit for charity, they’re straight back to brainstorming album number three, the as-yet-untitled follow-up to 2009’s You Can Make Sound.
“It’s going well,” McGuinness beams, “we’ve made enough mistakes to last a career and we’ve done enough good things to base a career on, so we’re in a good position to move forward and keep writing.
We’re trying to fill the songs a little bit better. We kind of did the poppy indie rock thing on the first two albums so hopefully we’re developing. We’ve already played three or four songs live and they’re very soulful – less reliant on guitar more reliant on the melody and pulling that side of things out. But who knows? You just write songs and choose the best ones at the end!”