Hot Press meets The Strypes

What a difference a year makes. My first encounter with Cavan quartet The Strypes came about in September 2012, in a Stradbally field. Drafted in at the last moment to interview the lads in the Hot Press Chatroom, and unfamiliar with their oeuvre at the time, I was given some well-intentioned pointers by a friend and fan beforehand – “They’re like a miniature Beatles! Ask them about that!”

Smash cut to me, in front of a sizeable audience, bringing up the Merseyside legends and eliciting derisory snorts and sighs from Ross Farrelly, Josh McClorey, Pete O’Hanlon and Evan Walsh. The suited and booted teens then proceeded to sarcastically “compliment” me on my polo shirt, before effortlessly banging out a few R&B covers to massive cheers. They were cocky, but correct.
A year later and their stock has skyrocketed. On the rolodex of celeb fans? Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller, Roger Daltrey, Dave Grohl and Elton John (he even signed them to his management company) to name but a few. The teens stormed Jools Holland, rocked the John Peel tent at Glastonbury, supported Blur in Kilmainham and are heading out on the road with the Arctic Monkeys. But when I meet them, for the third time, on a humid Dublin day in the Burlington Hotel, they are all smiles and hugs.
Cheery and eager to talk, they’re slightly bothered at the prospect of yet another photoshoot. “We always just sorta stand in a line,” confesses bassist and old soul Pete O’Hanlon once the snapping is done and dusted. “But there’s always a row about who gets to stand at the back!”
His band mates, for the first time but not the last, laugh uproariously and start chiming in. Once the conversation starts flowing, their words spill over each other, each next member finishing the others’ sentence. “It’s like, ‘I want to hide this time!’”

Right now, there’s absolutely no hiding place for The Strypes. As much as you might envy the buzz and whistle at the impressive position they are in – all the moreso considering they’re all around the 17 mark – you can’t help but feel for them. Initially coming to people’s attention as a “young band that play old songs”, they’re doing their growing up – in effect learning their trade – right out there in full glare of the spotlight. Most garage bands can iron out their mistakes in the garage. The Strypes are earning their spurs on the biggest stages around.
What’s encouraging is that they are well up to it. Their musicianship is superb. The band’s genuine love of the blues and rock’n’roll is matched by their collective self-confidence. They knew what they wanted from their debut. They didn’t want to compromise. They didn’t want to mess it up either.
We got our way to a large extent,” drummer Evan Walsh laughs.
“We’re all really happy with it,” O’Hanlon continues. “We’re happy with the finished product. You have to be proud of it. I mean, it’d be a shame to make a balls of your first. Squeeze did – that album bombed! But it turned out alright.”
It might seem like an odd reference, except that Squeeze’s Chris Difford is part of the Rocket Management team and manages and mentors the lads. It was he who ‘fessed up.
“He knew what we didn’t want to happen – because it had actually happened to him! So he was fighting our corner when we said, ‘we want it to be like this’. We’ve got a lot of family around us, too. Family and Squeeze! They’re quite stubborn.”
Singer Ross Farrelly pipes up. “It’s a real family thing, it’s not just all business or whatever. There’s no chance of anyone going behind each other’s back. We’ve actually fallen into a pretty perfect sort of surrounding of people…”
A rock and roll mafia of sorts....
“Rock And Roll Mafia!” roars O’Hanlon. “That’s what the album should’ve been called. We should at least write a song and call it that!”
Signed to Mercury, they seem extremely pleased with their choice of label. There were a lot of deals on the table but, as they often seem to do, The Strypes went with their gut.
“When people first came along and said ‘we love you’ and all that sort of stuff,” explains guitarist Josh McClorey, “They followed that with, ‘how can we absolutely, completely turn this around and make it not what you want at all?’”
O’Hanlon nods. “People went in from totally the wrong angle. Certain labels would’ve gone for ‘Oh, we can get a guy that can write songs for you’. They didn’t want to leave us to it.”
“When we read about bands and watched documentaries about the likes of The Stones,” says baby-faced drummer Evan Walsh, “They seemed to be doing exactly what they wanted to do. And we just thought ‘well they did what they wanted to do so let’s not allow anybody to try and change us’. If you go down that road it’s never gonna be good. It’s never gonna be ballsy, never gonna be genuine.”

Confident they may be, but they’ve been putting in the hours to ensure they can back the bluster up. As well as admiring authenticity, they know the importance of having a strong work ethic. Chris Thomas twiddled the knobs on their debut, and they were intrigued to learn from the man who did the same on Never Mind The Bollocks... that The Sex Pistols were of a similar mindset.
“They were a really hardworking band,” nods Pete.
“There’s the Steve Jones quote from the time where they supported Eddie And The Hot Rods,” Evan adds. “They were just getting going and they completely destroyed gear. Afterwards, Jones said to the NME, ‘we’re not about music, we’re about chaos’. But Chris said that that couldn’t have been less the case in the studio. Paul Cook and Steve Jones would’ve shared a flat together and they just jammed all the time, so they were really tight. Of course, Sid Vicious was legitimately all over the place but he barely played on the record!”
“He’s actually credited with inventing the pogo,” says Pete solemnly, giving poor old Sid his dues.
McClorey, who has been the most eager to get the band working on original material, returns to the matter at hand.
“When we went to London first and the industry buzz started around September last year, all the labels descended en masse to a lot of the gigs. Everyone was ‘oh we really love what you’re doing’ and then had a list of the things they’d like to change about it.”
The hottest industry property around, nevertheless, The Strypes felt misunderstood. It didn’t help that everyone had them pegged as nothing more than a cute covers band.
“The press will say, ‘the one problem with these lads is they need to start writing songs’ – but over half of our set is original stuff,” sighs Walsh.
Inspired by the likes of Alex Turner, it is McClorey who has penned most of the originals that are now pushing the vintage ‘60s covers out of their sets.
“We never really thought about writing tunes,” he ventures, almost bashfully. “But the Arctic Monkeys and Last Shadow Puppets were the first bands I really got into and I just thought… You know, I never had any intention of writing songs but when I heard Alex Turner’s stuff I thought ‘Ah man I’d love to be able to do that’. I tried to write like that for ages and couldn’t. But because we were doing rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, it had a lot of simplicity and nothing was too cryptic. It was so straightforward that I thought ‘Let’s try and write some stuff like that’. Then I got the bug for it.”

By this stage, they all seem to have the rock’n’roll fever. They’re at an age where music is a religion. It’s heartwarming to watch them chat, wide-eyed, about everything they’re currently listening to. Playing the John Peel Stage at the same Glastonbury their beloved Stones headlined must have knocked them for six.
“We were kind of shocked by the size of the crowd that came to the gig,” says O’Hanlon. “We had the tent packed out. There was quite an amount of people outside as well. The action and the coverage we got from that and from doing the BBC was amazing.”
They didn’t catch Mick, Keef and co – but they did leave the site to the strains of a classic.
“We were driving off to the tune of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash!” says Josh. “They sat us in this teepee beside the BBC studio and said ‘there’s a telly, so you can watch The Stones if you want’. We thought, ‘great!’ but there was no sound!”
“So we just watched the Stones mime!”
As ever with The Strypes, there were plenty of celebrity cameos (slightly surreal and ‘90s-tinged this time – Keith Allen, Billie Piper, Angus Deayton and... Howard Marks?) and a ringing endorsement from Roscommon comic actor-turned Hollywood heart-throb Chris O’Dowd.
“’The Rolling Stones were a solid 8,” the Bridesmaids star tweeted. “But The Strypes turned it up to 11!”
“He’s a funny fucker,” smiles Evan.
“He was well on when we met him! But he’s great,” laughs Pete.
Josh McClorey frowns. “He thought our accents were weird but... he’s from Roscommon!”
I put it to the band that teenagers going gaga over The Stones in 2013 is akin to youngsters back in the Swinging ‘60s losing their minds to World War I-era musicians. Why has that particular brand of rock not become stale? How can 17-year-olds still relate to it?
“Because it was the first recorded music,” posits singer Ross Farrelly. “Everything comes from rock and roll.”
O’Hanlon nods. “Yeah, I suppose you can trace everything back to turn-of-the-century blues, which lead on to rock and roll. Like... everybody loves ‘Hound Dog’. Everybody loves those kind of songs that are just timeless. People are always gonna jive to it, or rave or... whatever the vernacular is now!”
“There’s no decision,” says Josh, once the laughter has died down. “It’s just a natural response.”
And so it’s natural that these teens would want to make that kind of racket. Regardless of the hype, or the detractors, they seem to simply be doing what they love. They’re wary of the press, and with good reason.
“There’s a lot of interviews where it’s just about how much we hate boy bands and all that,” says Josh. They cite Jake Bugg’s purported moan about One Direction as an example of a musician being taken out of context.
“The problem is, he could’ve done a really long interview and talked about Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and been really positive. But the One Direction thing becomes a headline. Or it’s: ‘Mumford & Sons – just posh farmers with banjos!’ We did a thing for RTÉ and it was a really good interview but it turned into a One Direction-hating story and ended up as the number one news story on Teletext!”
The most shocking thing about that is probably the fact that Teletext still exists.
“That’s my mam’s Internet!” laughs O’Hanlon.

Let’s be honest, if we were going down the sensational news story route, we’d probably take this opportunity to ask if they’ve been enjoying all the female attention on tour.
“We don’t really hang around after gigs. We just move on to the next show, or go to bed.”
Josh nods.
“See, we don’t look at the whole ‘rock band’ thing in that way. Taking advantage of stuff like that would be a fairly dickhead move. And we get as much male attention to be honest.”
A genuinely admirable outlook. As for the attention, one early accusation levelled at The Strypes was that, rather than turning a new generation on to primal rock ‘n’ roll, they were simply reminding middle-aged men of their youth. That, of course, has proven to be bullshit.
“While we’ve been gigging around the UK, we’ve noticed over the last few months that there’s been a huge increase in young people. It’s a really good mix now,” enthuses Evan. “People from our age to maybe mid-’20s have become the primary audience. People have gotten a lot wilder as well. The older lot stand at the back drinking their pints. There was even a fella dressed up as a Native American paddling in an inflatable dinghy across the audience recently! So we are turning them on to rhythm and blues...
“I think they enjoy something that isn’t shoegazing,” Josh adds. “Where the band are like statues. Music definitely needs that, the whole industry needs that. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll’s all about, a load of kids going absolutely batshit crazy. At the end of the day that’s what it is: a night out for people.”
For the last time, but not the first time, bassist Pete O’Hanlon starts beaming. “You want them going, ‘I broke my leg but fuck me, that was fun!’”
And with that kind of attitude, it seems The Strypes’ story is going to run and run.

The Strypes’ debut album, Snapshot, is out now. For video interviews, accoustic session and photo galleries, check out hotpress.com