In The Palms Of His Hands

“I think I represent the spirit of survival,” declares Paul Butler, the charmingly enigmatic frontman of hotly-tipped new Waterford outfit Propeller Palms. “I have a way of living. I don’t believe in the past, but I learn from it. I always have to accept the now, but I’m always looking forward to the future with positivity. I rarely think negatively.”

When pressed on this, the 48 year-old shrugs and takes a sip of his pint before replying, “Of course I do get down, but I also know that I only have one shot at this. It’s the contract that I entered on March 2, 1963. And when that contract expires, it’ll all be over. That’ll have been my life. And I’m so grateful to have been here, and to be here right now. I’ve had an interesting life.”
Butler’s life to date hasn’t just been interesting; at various times it’s also been very rock ‘n’ roll. You just have to look at the lived-in lines on the singer’s face. He’s still movie-star handsome, but he’s no spring chicken. Having said that, he’s got a teenager’s enthusiasm for his new band, and is unashamedly excited about the release of Propeller Palms’ debut album, All In This Together.
We’re sitting in the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel and Butler is equally excited to be talking to Hot Press. It’s been quite a while since any journalist wanted to hear what he has to say.
“This is the first interview I’ve done with a national publication in about 15 years,” he admits. “And the last ones I did were all in Oz.”
Laughing, he tells me that the name Propeller Palms came to him when he drunkenly looked up at a palm tree on a white sandy beach in Thailand a couple of years ago, and said to his girlfriend, “C’mere, do you know what those fucking palm trees look like?”
The band is essentially Butler’s third shot at rock stardom. He’s really hoping it’ll be third time lucky. All things considered, luck hasn’t been a strong feature of his musical career to date...
Born and bred in Waterford, he first came to national attention more than 30 years ago as the talented lead guitarist with teenage garage band Neuro. Formed by Butler and three schoolmates in 1979, a well-received Fanning Session led to the band signing an international record deal with Warners in 1981.
“It was one of the first worldwide deals ever signed by an Irish band at the time,” he recalls proudly. “It was a WEA international deal – singles and albums. Probably not such a great deal, but it seemed so to us at the time.”
While Neuro scored a minor indie hit with ‘Nairobi’, their album was never released. On the plus side, it got them out of Waterford.
“We did shows like Anything Goes and Nonstop Pop with Gerry Ryan who always used to refer to us as ‘a Dublin band’. We pretty much did all of the radio and TV shows you could do in Ireland – which wasn’t that many at the time. You know, we’re talking 1981/82. We got to know Denis Desmond through our manager Eoin Ronayne – who wound up becoming the Irish national secretary of the NUJ – and we played a lot of shows for MCD. Denis was regularly promoting us, and we really started to build a profile. Our first big support slot in Dublin was Echo & The Bunnymen in McGonagle’s. And that’s where we met Phil. He came to see that show in McGonagle’s.”
He’s referring to the late Thin Lizzy legend, Phil Lynott.
“He came backstage and introduced himself, declared himself suitably impressed with what we were doing, and said he wanted to get us into the recording studio.”
Always generous to up-and-coming talent, Lynott helped produce some tracks for what was supposed to have been Neuro’s debut album.
“Phil brought us into Lombard Studios and we spent three days with him, recording some tracks. He was a colourful character at the height of his career. He always had a fantastic interest in Irish bands.
The material that we recorded with him was never released. I’m not 100% sure, but I’m reasonably certain that it was the last recording that he did with an Irish band. He actually played a small bit of guitar on one of the tracks – he was only showing me how to play it, but we left it on. He was a great influence and an absolute gentleman. Obviously he was sick at the time [with drug addiction] and he was fairly full-on sometimes. I’d often have a drink with him in The Bailey.
“He knew all of the band by name, but he took a bit of a shine to me. I was the one who wanted to hang out with the stars. I was the one who wanted to see what was going on. The rest of the band didn’t want to push it but, whenever I went backstage to the dressing-room, he was always welcoming. He was always, ‘Come in, come in!’”
Although the album was never released, Neuro got a small taste of the big time when Lynott offered them some support slots.
“We played with Thin Lizzy twice – at festival gigs in Castlebar and at Macroom. Subsequently he asked us to play support on the Solo In Soho tour so we toured around Ireland with him on that.”
Amidst the usual acrimony over musical differences, Neuro messily broke up in 1983.
“The album never got released. The personality problems within the band were just really shit and the band disintegrated.”
Disappointed but not yet disillusioned, Butler emigrated to Los Angeles but things didn’t work out in the States.
“I was probably too young to be in LA,” he muses. “I tried to get involved in music over there, but everybody was really into pop, which just wasn’t my thing.”
Returning to Europe, he then moved to London for a couple of years.
“I actually went to London with a couple of the guys from Neuro. We got close to doing something again. We were working with some of Killing Joke’s people, but then it all went bananas again.”
While living in London he met and fell madly in love with a New Zealander, who was moving to Sydney. In 1987, he flew down to Australia to be with her.
“I got a Yugoslavian Airlines flight that stopped in about 15 places en route to Sydney. There was no non-smoking area and they carried chickens and sheep at that time. I got off the plane with £100 sterling and a guitar.”
Fortunately, as a fully qualified electrician, he wasn’t reliant upon his instrument for financial survival.
“Thank god for the ANCO system, which is FÁS today. They trained me, and I never looked back. I absolutely fucking hated it, but it gave me the means to make a living and therefore the bucks to endeavour into the career I have never lacked lustre for. I’d never had money before, but in Australia I was able to work, save money and have money. Funny story, I bought my first Fender Stratocaster from a guy who’d been in a number one band called Sherbet. He’d been through the music business wringer and wound up working in a music store. But he took a shine to me, and sold me this very precious guitar for $2,000. I still play it every day.”
While he was making great money as a Sydney spark, he was still determined to follow his rock ‘n’ roll dream.
“I auditioned for lots of guitar places,” he recalls. “I didn’t get any of them, but what happened was when I kept meeting these same people at the auditions – a drummer and a bass-player and a keyboard-player – and one day we all looked at each other and said, ‘How about we start our own band?’ Then we auditioned singers and we couldn’t get one, so one day I produced a poem and said, ‘can I give it a go?’ So I did it and they all went, (strong Aussie accent) ‘Fuck it, you do it, mate!’”
They formed a band called ID (which stood for ‘Imperial Delusions’). It transpired that Butler was a very fine singer indeed.
“I never sang until I went to Australia. Basically I wasn’t used to Australians and the frontmen would really piss you off and bore you. Even though the rest of the band were supportive, I wasn’t that confident. Eventually I decided, ‘Fuck this, I’m gonna sing myself!’ Because I was always writing poetry, that was always my thing. I was always secretly writing poems.”
Success came relatively quickly for ID. Within a year, they’d built up a large fanbase in Sydney through regular gigging and relentless self-promotion. Initially unable to get any record companies interested, they independently released their debut single.
“One morning a guy called Doug Mulray on MMM Radio – he was the most famous DJ in Australia – tapped the mic and said, ‘If you’re just coming in from a party last night, Mr. Record Company, or if you’re having an early-morning drink, here’s one for you – an unsigned band that we’re gonna promote the shit out of’. And they did!”
Mr. Record Company was obviously listening and ID were soon signed to cash-rich Mushroom Records (“we used to joke that Kylie paid for our record”). Their debut album, The Well, was a critical and commercial success. Their songs and videos were on heavy rotation, their tours sell-outs, and Butler began appearing on magazine covers. Living the dream, he was also hanging out with the cream of the Australian musical scene.
“We mixed all of our stuff in a place called Rhinoceros. It was the top studio in Sydney and it was owned by Michael Hutchence and INXS. He used to drive in on his Harley and pop his head in and say ‘hello’. We had a few nights out with the lads from INXS. It was
great excitement.”
Sadly, despite ID’s initial success, the ride didn’t
last long.
“We sold a lot of records, but once again the demons came out in the band.”
When it came to recording the second album, Mushroom weren’t happy with ID’s new musical direction. Nor, one suspects, were the rest of the band. To a large extent, Butler blames himself.
“ID was essentially Midnight Oil without the gloss,” he explains. “We were fairly hard-hitting. And I was quite the ‘Angry Young Man’. You have to realise that Nelson Mandela was still incarcerated. The French were testing nuclear bombs in the Atolls of Papua New Guinea. There was a lot of shit going on in 1990. The Berlin Wall had barely come down. I was more of a poet and social commentator. I probably neglected melody sometimes in favour of substance and content. It was to my own detriment. I felt I had something to prove. To be honest, that’s the thing that fucked me over.”
ID were dropped, the label refusing to give the band the rights to the second album. Meanwhile, after almost a decade together, Butler had broken up with his New Zealand girlfriend. Badly bruised by the whole experience, he went a little off the rails.
“I was shattered. Suddenly it was all over. I felt really insecure. It led me into a spiralling mess. I didn’t want anything to do with music.”
It took a couple of years, and the encouragement of producer Rick O’Neill, before Butler started to write songs again.
“Rick had been involved with Mushroom when ID were signed to them, and he tried to get me back on track. Funnily enough things really began to come together again. He put some money up and got me back into the studio. I was feeling really good. I had an album almost finished.”
It was never to be. Tragedy struck when he returned to Ireland for a short holiday in 1997.
“I came home to Waterford and my dad died suddenly. It was completely unexpected so I didn’t return immediately. Rick and some of the record company people actually came over for the funeral and I assured them that I’d be back soon. But then after my dad died, my mum had a brain haemorrhage – and I’ve basically been here ever since.”
Unable to leave the country because of his ailing mother, he got a job training apprentice electricians
in Dublin.
“Because of my experience working abroad, I managed to get a teaching job with FÁS, teaching in Ballymun and Finglas. I still do the same thing now in Waterford, but I lived in Dublin for almost three years. I felt completely and utterly fucked musically for a long time. But it’s funny. You never stop going. You never stop following your dream.”
After a while, almost inevitably, he began picking up his guitar again. Having written a song for his late father, ‘Jettison’, he finally mustered up the courage to play it in front of an audience.
“I’d completely lost my mojo so it took a lot of balls to play singer-songwriter nights. My first one was in The International. I played ‘Jettison’ and when I finished there was complete silence. I thought I must have fucked it up somehow. And then after 30 seconds everyone stood up and applauded. Which was some fucking relief, I can
tell ya!”
He continued to play singer-songwriter nights sporadically, but music was more of a hobby than anything else. Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, he returned to Waterford when another FÁS teaching position came up. By the time his mother died four years ago, he had bought a house and settled down with his old secondary school sweetheart, Fiona, and her three children. A return to Oz wasn’t really on the cards... It’s only in the last couple of years that he decided to try to make a proper go of it again. Having played with a number of local musicians, with varying degrees of minor success, the genesis of Propeller Palms came together in early 2010 when he hooked up with guitarist James O’Halloran, drummer Peter Sauvage and bassist Deedo Dunphy. Although they made a good sound, the decision was quickly made to add some “gloss and finesse,” as he puts it. Propeller Palms is now a ten-piece.
“It’d be much easier to just have a four-piece, but I always like a challenge,” he laughs. “I always envisioned female backing vocalists, and Susan [O’Neill], Michelle [Haberlin] and Aisling [Brown] did all the work in the studio. And then Ed [O’Neill], Michael [Quinlan] and Brendan [Long] came in on brass.”
Together Propeller Palms blend elements of hard-edged rock, blues, funk and soul, evoking comparisons with everyone from Bruce Springsteen and the Stones to The Who and Sly Stone.
“People also say we’re like The Commitments. They say that because there’s so fucking many of us, but if The Commitments had written their own stuff, it wouldn’t be a bad comparison.”
The youngest member of the band is 24, but Butler – or ‘Uncle Paul’ – is by far the eldest.
“The other day I had to explain to the band who Graham Parker and the Rumour were and about the song ‘Hey Lord, Don’t Ask Me Questions’. Colm O’Hare in Hot Press said we sounded like that and everyone had to YouTube it. I found that really funny. I was actually really touched by that comment.”
With support from local radio stations like WLR and Beat FM, Propeller Palms built up a large local following. However, it wasn’t until they played support to legendary dope smuggler Howard Marks on his last Irish spoken-word tour that the rest of the band began to take it seriously.
“We did an acoustic set for him on a number of dates on his last Irish tour. It was really successful. Howard really enjoyed it and his promoter Johnny Keenan really enjoyed it, too. And that gave us the stimulus to keep going. We were kind of a Tuesday night pizza and cans band before that, just playing venues around Waterford. After the tour with Howard, though, the rest of the band were going, ‘What’s next?’ Before, I had to drag them to rehearsals.”
Their debut album, All In This Together, was recorded in July of last year.
“We recorded it in Sun Studios in Dublin with [producers] John Hallahan and James Durkin. It was recorded, mixed and mastered in ten days. James insisted that we captured the moment rather than going in with some clinical attitude. There are some overdubs and backing vocals, but the album was played live, more or less. It was old-school – no tapes, no backing tracks, no click tracks, no nothing.”
All In This Together will be launched in Dublin’s Grand Social on February 16, and promises to be quite a night.
“The album is representative of us, but our real buzz is up on that fucking stage kicking ass.”
More than anything, though, the album is representative of Paul Butler and his dogged pursuit of the rock ‘n’ roll dream. Lyrically and thematically, not much has changed from his socially conscious ethos of the ID days.
“The clock is ticking for all of us, and it got me thinking. You know, life is short and life is sweet, and we’re all in this together. Each of us needs to recognise that we’re all part of the one thing. Without that recognition, we’re fragmented. The reality is that from the floor sweeper to the surgeon, we all need to respect one another. Respect is the key to our survival.”

Propeller Palms will launch All In This Together in the Grand Social, Dublin, on February 16.