In the eye of the storm

Suffering mental fatigue, brought on by a litany of setbacks in the studio during the recording of Domino Effect, the singer was convinced the LP was jinxed. When he wasn’t taking his frustration out on the walls, the normally affable singer had to be restrained, as studio disagreements boiled over into a series of stand-offs with veteran producer Michael Beinhorn (of Soundgarden, Hole and Marilyn Manson fame).
So fraught were the recording sessions that Breslin, who goes by the moniker of Brezzie, seriously considered calling it a day.
“I was very close to just saying, ‘Fuck it! Fuck everything! Fuck the contract! Fuck the band!’" he admits. "It really did get that bad. But that showed me how much The Blizzards mean to me.”
From day one, everything seemed to go horribly wrong for the Mullingar group as they set out to record the follow-up to their top ten debut album ,i>A Public Display of Affection.
The Blizzards had booked themselves into Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios, but after four days Beinhorn declared that he wasn’t satisfied with the drum sound. The band’s manager Moff, a carpenter by trade, volunteered to build a makeshift 'studio-within-a-studio' in Windmill Lane to create the desired ambience. But still to no avail...
“We eventually carried 28 cavity blocks up three flights of stairs to put on the studio floor to see if we could get a more solid drum sound, but no matter what the fuck we did, Michael couldn’t get the sound he was after,” Breslin resumes, with a shake of the head. “Then we went to a couple of other places. We were basically walking around Dublin with a fucking bass drum and pedal, going into the studio, hitting the drum and leaving when Michael decided, ‘No, it’s not going to work in here either.’”
They eventually ended up at Grouse Lodge, the residential studio in Westmeath, whose client list includes Michael Jackson, Bloc Party, Snow Patrol, Editors and Manic Street Preachers.
“After about two minutes there, Michael was going, ‘This is the room where we’re going to do the drums and bass’.”
But there were still problems.
“We got great drum and bass, but we couldn’t get a fucking guitar sound," Breslin says. "For 14 days we tried to get a guitar sound. At this stage, I was just going, ‘Is this guy demented?’ – because I couldn’t hear anything wrong with the sound that we had.”
Eventually Breslin snapped.
“I recorded my guitars – from start to finish – four fucking times," he recalls. "On the fourth time, he went ‘No’ and that’s when I went right (clicks fingers), ‘Fuck this’, I flipped. I remember Justin our manager was in the room. He knew by looking at me, ‘Oh, Brezzie’s gone! He’s going to lose it'. So, he stood up and got between us to pull us apart when we went to punch each other. The two of us were close to tears. It was so frustrating.”
It was at that point Breslin had a crucial realisation:
“I was looking at Michael, thinking, ‘If it means that much to him, if he’s getting that emotional as well, then he must really care about me and the band.'"
To aggravate matters, Beinhorn was under pressure to return to the US and begin work on Courtney Love’s new album.
“I thought, ‘Hold on a second, Brezzie. This guy is turning his back on probably the biggest record he’ll do in the next five years. He’s turning his back on a lot of money. He’s got two kids in fucking LA and he hasn’t seen them for two months.’ He was sacrificing a hell of a lot more than I was, so I kind of stepped back and went, ‘Fuck! Stop being a lead singer! Shut your face.’”
A truce was called. Initially, both Brezzie and Beinhorn had opted to abstain from drinking for the duration of the recording, but they decided to temporarily lift the ban to help ease the tension that night. Besides, it was St. Patrick’s Day.
“We looked at each other and went, ‘Man, we’re getting fucked.’ He had me off the booze because of my vocals; he said, ‘You’re not fucking drinking when you record. Simple as that.’ I hadn’t been on the piss for three months and neither had Michael who went, ‘I won’t drink if you won’t drink’. It was Paddy’s Day when this happened in Grouse Lodge. We went into Finn's in Mullingar. We got absolutely pissed and then ended up crying and hugging each other. That night we walked home with tears in our eyes.”

The Blizzards might have gone to hell and back along the way, but their sacrifices have paid dividends: Domino Effect is a superb pop album. More importantly, it manages to achieve what their first album largely failed to, which is capture the spirit of their energetic live performances. And with a little bit of luck, this record will break them not only in Ireland but also in the UK, where it’s due to be released in 2009.
“This album is very poppy," Brezzie reflects. "I tried to borrow the templates from The Beach Boys. My brother, who is a music producer, says it’s very, very hard to write a good pop song – it’s easy to write an indie song. But to write a really good pop song that never gets old is very difficult.”
Not that he’s a fan of what currently passes for ‘pop’: “I listen a lot to the radio at the moment and the one thing that’s killing me is the shit we’re being served, production-wise. Kids growing up are going to start believing that R ‘n’ B singers have robot voices because of all these stupid effects on songs. I blame Cher to be honest. Were the ‘70s and ‘80s any better? Yes, they were. I just think... there’s some songs that come on the radio and I nearly think it’s a physiological experiment to see how much they can actually get away with, without someone going, ‘What the fuck is this?'”
Listening to him speak, it’s obvious that Breslin wears his heart on his sleeve. The singer is sitting down with Hot Press in the band’s rehearsal studio, above the popular Danny Byrne’s venue in Mullingar. The proprietor, Christy May, and his manager, Paul McNulty, formerly of Whelan’s, have allowed The Blizzards to practise here, rent free.
“It’s been a fucking saviour," Breslin says. "I wrote the album up here. However, our rehearsal room is haunted. It was a jail out the back and they used to conduct hangings there. Fucking crazy things have happened up here. Our bass-player was practising one day and he suddenly put down his guitar and just walked out without saying a word. I said, ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ He wouldn’t answer his phone to us for two days. When we finally got him, he said, ‘Man, somebody walked straight through me’. He froze and said, ‘My whole body went numb.’”
Breslin is proud of The Blizzards’ new album. For him, the band’s sweat and blood is evident in each of the tracks. Does he have a favourite song?
“‘Postcards’ is probably the most special song we’ve written,” he avers. “I never thought I’d be able to sing about a topic like that without sounding moany because we’re not a moany band. It’s essentially about not getting to say goodbye to people. We had lost a lot of friends. You know, when you’re going through a period of time when you’re like, 'Jesus, so many fucking people are dying.' Especially being from a town where you know most people. A couple of mates lost their mum in a car crash and they never got to say goodbye to her. I found that really upsetting and I wrote a song almost like a metaphor about getting a postcard from the person who died. A postcard from heaven just to say they’re OK and stuff. We gave it to a few people who had lost a loved one and they said it really meant something to them.”
Another track that Breslin is passionate about is ‘The Reason’, which features Republic Of Loose’s backing singers, Emily Amber and Orla Breslin, and is mooted as a possible single. For the record, Ms. Breslin is no blood relative, even though they both have family hailing from the same region of Donegal.
“‘The Reason’ is about snobby bitches in nightclubs," Niall says. "It all stemmed from a certain ‘turn-down’ that I got. We were in Scotland with a group of mates. We were all trying to chat this girl up and she wasn’t having any of it. I went up to her and 10 minutes into it the lads were saying, ‘He’s actually getting somewhere.’ But she waited for the music to stop – the bitch! – and said, ‘Feel free to go back and talk to your friends.’ It was a real angry song, but a fun song to do.”
Seducing women (or failing to do so) is a recurring theme on Domino Effect. The first single ‘Trust Me, I’m a Doctor’ – which hit number one in the iTunes charts on release – is also about attempting to entice a woman bedwards. Or, as Breslin puts it, with admirable subtlety, “It’s about trying to get fucked. But it’s a pop song, so it comes across all dainty and quirky. It’s about lying to chicks so you can get laid on holidays.”
So, is it permissible, in Dr Breslin’s opinion, to lie in order to get a woman into bed?
“Well, on holiday!” he laughs. “You’re never going to see her again. When we were 18 or 19, I used to go on holidays with the lads and you’d be going, ‘If anybody asks, I’m studying to be a doctor.’ You could be working in an abattoir shoveling shit or something, but if anybody asks on holiday you’d have your own stories, like ‘I’m a professional soccer player,’ or ‘I’m a musician.’ That’s kind of what we used to do. And it worked! At the end of the day, she goes away happy, thinking that she shagged a doctor.”
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Brezzie (mis)spent his youth conjuring up one-liners for the benefit of gullible teenage girls.
“I wish! I played rugby and I had a scholarship, so I was basically under lock and key for fucking most of my life,” he sighs, before adding: “Until I joined The Blizzards...”

The 27-year-old grew up in Mullingar and went to St Mary’s school in the town with the rest of the band. In fact, Breslin’s mum has a photograph of the group all dressed up in their Communion suits.
“Any type of talent I showed as a kid was with music, sitting in front of a piano,” he explains. “My mum’s a music teacher and my brother’s a music producer. I was even in choirs as a kid – I was only doing it because I got off school to go to practice. I got into music and sport from an early age, but I was lucky because – back then – there was fuck all else to do.”
Did he always want to be famous?
“Of course I did. Fucking everybody did. But when you’re a kid you don’t know what comes with it. You just think it’s money and sex and drugs – and then you realise your private life becomes public life, and that’s when you see the bad sides. But I wouldn’t for a minute see us as famous, and I think fame in Ireland is a myth anyway.”
Breslin was just 13 years old when his family moved to Israel for six months in order to be near his military father, who’d been deployed to Lebanon during an intensely violent period of the Middle East conflict. It was a move that transformed his life.
“My dad had been away a lot – he was in Kuwait and Sarajevo – and this time he wanted to bring his family. Israel affected me in so many ways. I had a very hard time in Israel. To go into a country like that was surreal. I remember when we first arrived, it coincided with the first real conflict there after a seven-year period when it had been kind of peaceful. The first day I was there we had to get into a bomb shelter at fucking five am. I remember the walls of the fucking house shaking.
“That opened my eyes to the fact that there’s more to life than Mullingar,” he continues. “My first time out of Mullingar was to fucking Israel. Right on the border with the Lebanon as well, so there was full-on Hezbollah firing missiles and Israel going in and bombing the shite out of Lebanon.”
The move to Israel also coincided with Breslin’s sexual awakening.
“Israel has some of the most beautiful women in the world. The time it took me to get from Heathrow to Israel, five or six hours, my interest in women happened! Six hours later – bang – I saw my first Israeli girl. But sadly, Israeli women had absolutely no interest in a pasty, white Irish fucker.”
So, he didn’t get lucky?
“Not even close! I got lucky with a couple of Irish girls. I was reading in Hot Press that Amanda Brunker said that her friends were having sex at 11 or 12 but she ‘waited’! I don’t know what she was fucking at, man (roars laughing)! I don’t know how things worked up in Dublin, but you didn’t get laid at 11 or 12! I was about 12 or 13 before I got my first snog. I couldn’t even say the word ‘sex’ at that stage. The other thing was that everybody knew everybody in Mullingar, so it was like a Coronation Street episode if you touched anybody! For fuck’s sake! My first serious girlfriend was when I went to college. I was 18 when I lost my virginity. It’s easy as pie in college to get your...”
And what was that experience like?
“Nerves didn’t come into it. I was shit-faced! I woke up the next morning going, ‘What happened?!’ The only way I could actually know if it happened was by going and asking the girl! I wouldn’t have definitely known otherwise!”
At UCD, Breslin studied economics. After graduating with his BA, he contemplated a post-graduate course, but he’d been offered an irresistible opportunity: a professional rugby contract with Leinster. Breslin, who’d played for the Ireland U-21s, was put straight into the first team squad. This was hardly a surprise. At 6’ 6”, he was built for the sport. If he’d continued with rugby, it’s conceivable that he’d have made the cut for the senior national side.
“I trained fucking every day to become a professional rugby player and then – within six months of joining Leinster – I realised I’d made a big mistake. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to play music. My dad found it difficult because he’s a huge rugby fan, but he told me to give it up when I explained I wasn’t happy.”
Leinster contract jettisoned, he returned to Mullingar and, after hooking up with his former schoolmates, started The Blizzards. Within a year they’d released their independently produced EP, First Girl To Leave Town, and signed a five album deal with Universal Music Ireland. Twelve months later, their debut album charted at number four.

This might sound like an overnight success story but the truth is very different. The Blizzards have had a long, hard slog. During the last three years, they’ve toured the length and the breadth of the country, playing every possible venue in an effort to build up their fan-base. They now even refuse to drink the night before any of their gigs to ensure that they always give their best performance. In fact, it was a negative live review in Hot Press that prompted them to ban alcohol prior to any future performances.
“We’d done about eight or nine gigs – all rocking, fucking gigs – but we got shitfaced the night before the second last gig and we didn’t go to bed and drove straight to the next show, not knowing that it was being reviewed. And we were brutal and the review was brutal. But we deserved it. From then on, we were like, ‘Right, lads...’ If we fuck up, there are thousands of bands waiting to get into our boots.”
Indeed, he instituted a no-drink, no-drugs policy worthy of Louis Walsh.
“We’ve no intention of fucking up because some prick in the band has a drink problem. Or some guy in the band takes too many drugs. If anybody touches drugs in The Blizzards, I’ll personally fuck them out. That’s the stance we have. We don’t like drugs. They don’t make anybody a better person. It’s not the ‘70s anymore, you know? Cocaine makes everyone a bollocks.”
Staying on the theme of alcohol, what does Breslin make of the government’s recent decision to curtail off license hours to 10pm?
“That’s one thing that pisses me off,” he fumes. “I was listening to Newstalk recently and this guy was going that alcohol is so cheap... have you been to southern Spain? You can get a bottle of wine for a euro and you don’t see locals walking around puking. This country is being run by old men. Old, boring farts who need to cop the fuck on and stop closing off licences at 10pm and closing nightclubs early. The whole thing stinks. It’s turning us into Communists. They’re not even giving us a fucking choice about this – that’s the worst part about it. Don’t bloody lecture us on being bloody democratic and shit like this when you don’t give us any choice in it. And if we do protest, we get our arse kicked and thrown in jail. I don’t give a fuck about Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael or any of them – they’re all the same essentially – and, at the end of the day, they only give a shit about being in power. What they’re doing now is trying to take away any bit of fun we’re having."
That’s not to say he’s in favour of free booze for all.
“I do understand that there’s a huge problem with alcohol in Ireland, but I don’t think that’s the fucking way to go about fixing it. I certainly don’t have a drink problem, but I like my drink. I go through these periods of not boozing for four or five weeks and then I feel like I’ve earned the right to go and get shitfaced for a week. And I do, which is the worst way you can approach alcohol. I just like having a good time. I think I’m trying to make up for the fact that alcohol didn’t play a huge part in my college life because I was focusing on rugby. ”
Did he ever experiment with drugs himself?
“No. I’ve seen people close to me just become monsters and look like shit from doing drugs, so I didn’t need anyone to make up my mind about them. We wrote a song – it’s the B-side of our new single – called ‘Dublin Town’. It’s the only political song I’ve written. It’s about how it’s become socially unacceptable not take to drugs in Dublin. People look down on me because I don’t take drugs. Don’t come near me with that stuff – it drives me insane. So, that’s what ‘Dublin Town' is about; there’s a line in it that goes: 'A piece of my heart’s attached to this beautiful place/But it’s poisoned by envy and people with very bad taste',” he says. “My mates will ask me to meet them in certain nightclubs and pubs and I’ll say, ‘I’m not going there, man. I can’t go to these places anymore.’ You go into the jacks and see some guy snorting coke. Then you see some bloody 17-year-old, a doctor’s son, who’s on coke and ecstasy and went out and slashed two people!”
Surely he must have taken the odd blast off a joint?
“Anyone who went to UCD and didn’t get a whiff of a joint would be telling you a lie,” our Taoiseach Brian Cowen pointed out in Hot Press last year, when he famously admitted that “unlike Bill Clinton” he did inhale!
“I’d reckon they (politicians) all did it! Brian Cowen, I’d say, was a whore for it! I know lads who went to Roscrea (secondary school) with him and he was good craic. He was one of the boys. I’ll be honest with you, I have eaten it. I didn’t smoke it. It was probably a good thing – aversion therapy. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten marijuana, but it’d put you off it very quickly. I did it once and went, ‘No.’ You see, I don’t like losing control of myself.”
Why not?
“I’m 6’ 6” and if I lose control of myself, there’s no one who’s going to pick me up. I don’t have the luxury of getting put on the shoulder by some guy.”
Breslin has been going out with fashion designer Eva Maguire, a former model, for the past three years. Is it difficult combining a relationship with being in a successful band?
“Did you read that on Wikipedia about us breaking up? I don’t know where the fuck that came from! Eva said it to me, ‘You know you’re not going out with me anymore!’ For the record, we are still together. I’m incredibly lucky to be with her. It’s a very easy relationship to be in. I don’t have to see her week in, week out. I don’t have to fucking ring her and explain myself all the time. It’s a very secure relationship. She’s very special. She handles it very well, but I’m sure it’s pretty hard for her at times. But everybody in the band loves her, and if I did anything to in any way jeopardise that, they would kill me.”
Still, now he’s become a pin-up, he must get women coming onto him?
“It’s part of being in a band. The other thing as well is, you can’t go like, ‘Fuck off! I’m in a relationship!’ because they might go, ‘I wasn’t chatting you up!’ You’ve got to talk to people. These are fans of your band. At the end of the day, I’m a lead singer in a band and if I walk around treating people like shit then they’re going to start treating me like shit. I’ve been at gigs and seen Axl Rose spitting at fans and stuff – you can’t do shit like that anymore. And why would you want to do shit like that? We have a mentality with our fans that we approach them very much as equals. Our fans are very good to us. We’re fucked without them. That’s all there is to it.”