Hot Press meets Little Green Cars

The tousled head of Stevie Appleby, the front and centre of Dublin five-piece Little Green Cars, lifts from its default ‘crashed out on a table’ position as the fog clears and its owner recalls a moment of clarity from the very recent “juggernaut” tour of the States.

“I remember waking up backstage half-an-hour before playing a gig,” he croaks. “I was lying on the couch... I sat up and literally sank into the deepest mental void of my life. ‘Fuck this, like. What the fuck am I doing?’”
Sounds like the kind of existential quagmire more associated with warzones than music venue dressing-rooms.
“But then... you head on stage and everyone cheers.”
His eyes properly open now.
“As cheesy as it sounds, it’s an ‘oh yeah’ moment. This is why I like it. This is why I do what I do.”
From dreams and fantasy to mundane reality and then on to adulation. That about sums up the story thus far. For the rest of 2013 and on, as debut long-player Absolute Zero wins hearts with its disarmingly mature blend of folk, pop, alt. country and the rest, Little Green Cars will have to deal with ‘rising’ adjectives and ‘overnight success’ claims being spouted willy-nilly. As is often the way, this is a group that have been playing a long time together.
It’s all the quintet have ever wanted to do, but perhaps surprisngly given their young age, it seems as if there’s been a fair amount of grappling over the years. Guitarist and singer (though they all pipe up) Faye O’Rourke has known Stevie the longest, and nods across the table to him as he unloads. She’s in the same mind, though it’s less jet-lagged and frazzled.
“When you take the process from getting signed to doing the album,” the raven-haired O’Rourke begins, “before all that it was such an arduous, crappy time. Obviously it was meant to be because we developed a lot of our sound in that time. We were breaking our backs, just because we wanted a bigger platform to reach people.”
Adam O’Regan (guitars and voice, again, and noted complimenter of the natty coats of journalists) takes a ‘hardcore’ stance. They’re a purist band, their honest application shining through on their debut. “It’s earning your place. You have to do the time before you can reap the benefits.”
Appleby is on the same page.
“We’ve been really lucky with the opportunities we get so it’s nice to do all the gruelling, horrible work. You feel like it wasn’t just luck.”
They have their heads screwed on and, crucially, Little Green Cars is a democratic give-and-take. There’s no solo star.
“If there’s one thing about Little Green Cars, it’s that we’re all very driven, very creative people,” nods O’Rourke, who’s got a hint of the Cait O’Riordans about her. “As opposed to bands that might have a single driving force.”
This spirit was fostered in their schooldays. Here’s Adam with the back story...
“The first incarnation was when I was 13 and started a band with Donagh (Seaver O’Leary, bass). We went into secondary school with Stevie and Dylan (Lynch, drums) and I basically had to disband whatever I had going on and reform with those guys. Faye is a friend of Stevie’s. Initially we all just started writing songs together and recording demos. Not as a band, more as a bunch of friends.”
Faye picks it up.
“It wasn’t like we were auditioning each other. It was the only thing that we did. At that time and that age, it was like ‘come one, come all’. We were so comfortable in each other’s company that it became a tight-knit group in that way.”
A start that augured well. The intervening years have been gigging and more gigging, writing better songs – they admit to having plenty of embarrassing old attempts still in the vaults. It was the release last July of debut single ‘The John Wayne’, an anthemic, harmonious swooner of a thing, that finally propelled them into the limelight. A deal with Island arrived and they signed with Glassnote in the US. Home to Two Door Cinema Club and Mumford and Sons, Glassnote are the people you want to be in bed with if you’re an indie band with ambitions to crack America. So off they set, intermittently blazing a trail over there throughout the last six months or so.
In March, they made their US TV debut on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Post-show in Brooklyn on the night it was due to air, the story goes that it took them three attempts to find a bar willing to stick the telly on. Unsurprisingly, with the ID issue to contend with (being under 21), trying to convince a New York barman that they were Jimmy Fallon’s very special musical guests for the evening proved easier said than done. They remember more of that than playing on the set.
“Mother of god!” exclaims O’Rourke. “The whole thing was over before it began. We were all shitting our pants when we kicked off but then it seemed to be over in an instant. We were on autopilot and it turned out really well.”
Ask her for any specifics about their jaunt overseas and it’s all about music, man.
“People ask simple stuff like, ‘What was the weather like?’ No idea!”
Appleby enjoys the surreal, in-between times.
“It’s just nice to look out of the window and see unbelievably vast places. Some places you walk past and you can imagine the camera going across. You’ve seen that in every Western. Then you go to somewhere and it’s, ‘What the hell is that?!’”
Absolute Zero was recorded in a month (“it was only meant to take three weeks!” they wince) in slightly more mundane environs across the Irish Sea, with the not-mundane-at-all producer Markus Dravs. Long on their wishlist, the Grammy winner has produced Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons and Coldplay. He lends Little Green Cars’ sound some of that gravitas, if it wasn’t there already. The rest was all them. A bunch of 20-year-olds they may be, but the years together meant they knew exactly what they wanted when they entered the studio. The result is a more adventurous, widescreen sound than you’d imagine from the ‘folk’ and ‘country’ tags, with lyrics taking tips from great American literature.
“Recording the album was amazing,” recalls Adam. “As you said, we did know exactly what we wanted when we went in. So it was all very smooth.’
“Markus was just so on the same page,” Faye enthuses. “It was actually unbelievable. I can’t express how suited to each other we were. You’d expect it to be like a parent-child relationship, because he’s got the experience and you’re all ‘hail ye!’. He wasn’t like that. He said, ‘I don’t go in for that.’”
First LP in the bag, Little Green Cars are packed up and ready to hit the road again. REM’s Mike Mills stopped by a recent show. They see the now-defunct Athens band as a model of how things should be done.
“That night I asked Mike did he have any advice,” Adam confides. “The first thing he said was, ‘In REM, we never knew what we wanted to be, but we always knew what we didn’t want to be’. That’s something I can definitely relate to. Then I asked him for some touring advice, and he said, ‘you’re either in the hospital or you’re on stage! Enjoy every second...’ I don’t know how good that piece of advice was really!”
Their whole future ahead of them, what do Little Green Cars most definitely not want to be?
“Hyped probably,” Faye proffers.
They love getting their music out to the masses, but want to avoid the boom-bust cycle and retain their integrity.
“That was always one of our main things,” notes Adam. “If you’re going to say something, it may as well be true. Why would you lie?”
“We look ridiculous anyway,” Faye muses. “We look like The Breakfast Club. None of us dress the same way. We can’t fake it.”
Our conversation concluding, Appleby takes the opportunity to spring into life for a final time with something definitive.
“I just want to be able to sleep at night. To think when I’m an old man that what I did will seem worthwhile. That it’s worth all the shit we have to do. Being able to think that what I did had some sort of long-lasting effect. Whether it’s through one person or 100,000 people it doesn’t make a difference, because it will mean I wasn’t wasting the time I spent on this earth.”

Absolute Zero is out now. Little Green Cars play Vicar St., Dublin on May 11.