Hot To Trot

Guitarist and vocalist Darren Craig doesn’t hesitate when I ask what’s his favourite thing about being in a band.

“Playing live is the fun part,” he confesses, and I believe him… at least until he describes what happens when Jogging are actually on stage.
“You’re going hoarse, sweat is dripping into your eyes, your eyes are stinging, you can’t really talk properly, you’re shaking…” he lists.
Granted, it’s not my idea of a good time, but without the tenacious live show, this charging rock trio wouldn’t be where they are today. Which is to say, on the lips of every self-respecting underground rock fan on the island.
“It’s tough,” Craig acknowledges, “particularly when we’re doing a few gigs in a row, but I don’t really see the point of playing in a band if you’re not going to give it 110%.”
Having released their debut LP to modest fanfare in 2010, the relentless rockers hit a minor speed bump in June of this year, when their beloved Richter Collective announced it was shutting its doors. Thankfully, Limerick indie label Out On A Limb offered to pick up where Richter left off, leaving Jogging finally able to unleash their forceful follow-up, Take Courage.
Not that this band have taken the conventional route to success. Craig and fellow vocalist Ronan Jackson only started singing as a “last resort” when auditions failed to yield a suitable new member, and their Stateside-sounding post-punk trademark appears to have come about quite by accident.
“We’ve never really aimed to go for a certain sound or anything,” Craig admits, “it just kind of happened. It just seems to be what the three of us do best together and with the equipment that we have. I’d say if we were in a different room with different equipment it would have been completely different, how the sound turned out.
‘We write in a small practice shed with no soundproofing or anything so it kind of ends up being loud and gritty and aggressive. We all slightly battle each other, not in a bad way, but just kind of trying to push each other for the best we can.”
The words that Craig and Jackson bark out on album number two are even more striking than what we heard before, a welcome result of the band’s bar-raising.
“It’s just about rewriting and thinking, ‘Is this good enough?’ and does it make you cringe, are you going to be able to sing it for the next four years? It’s a tough process and we’re still learning the lyric-writing part of it. It’s not something we’ve done for years, only since we decided we were going to be singers two and a half years ago.”
Still, as the title suggests, Take Courage is just as ferocious in message as in sound.
“A lot of lyrics are reflecting on our own selves, and then, despair a lot of the time,” he admits. “There’s not too many love songs on there!”
Enter ‘Stand Still’, a thrashing, melodic number that opens with the lines, ‘We won’t survive, we won’t succeed...’
“My part of it is all about the end of the world,” he explains, “and about nature being more powerful than the humans that are living within it. I do believe that man is killing its own planet and that it [the end of the world] is going to happen at some point.”
For their second record, Jogging enlisted the help of producer Chris Common, former drummer with Seattle post-hardcore fivesome These Arms Are Snakes. It’s a decision that Craig admits was a no-brainer.
“We love These Arms Are Snakes,” he says, “and we love some of the bands that he worked with, Minus The Bear and Native, and we thought they sounded similar enough to what we sound like. We knew he’d be able to get the big drum sounds and the heavy guitars and all that.”
Perfectly befitting of all those dueling guitars and charging drums is the album’s artwork, which features a rather dangerous-looking creature that almost defies explanation.
Craig gives it a shot; “It’s kind of a lion battling a kind of a catfish type thing. It was done by Eleanor McCaughey, who also did the artwork for our first album. We wanted to stick with Eleanor. We love her stuff. They’re only her doodles, the stuff she does for fun — her other art is totally amazing. Basically we just went to her and said, ‘We’d love you to do this. Nothing too cutesy.’”
Mission accomplished, I reckon.
Meanwhile, Jogging are going straight back to doing what they like best; getting very sweaty and straining their voices. As they head out on an Irish tour, are they worried about how audiences will react to Take Courage?
“There’s always a bit of nerves that you’re going backwards instead of forwards,” Craig says, “but it’s all turned out positively. We’re our own biggest critics as well, especially because we have songs for a while and we rebuild them all the time. I think we’re onto a winner.”

Take Courage is out now on Out On A Limb Records. Jogging head out on an Irish tour in September, taking in dates in the Roisin Dubh, Galway (14); Triskel, Cork (15); Bourke’s, Limerick (20) and the Stiff Kitten, Belfast (21).