Kelly's Heroes: Interview with the Raglans

Bet you hope this song ain’t about you. An effervescent, confident indie tune and all, but…

“You said you’d make a young man of me but I don’t know what that means… Cheap drinks and romances. Might be your last chance.”

So, Stephen Kelly, tell us about the lucky lady behind this back-handed compliment of a first single?

“Yeah, well…” the Raglans frontman ventures. “Some aul one tried it on with me! And rather than going for it, I wrote a song instead.”

A young musician with his priorities in order, we can only applaud. As is the rock ‘n’ roll way, however, we suspect there’s been plenty of other, less mature ladies, lining up to inspire a lyric that would follow ‘(Lady) Roll Back The Years’ on to their debut.

“Funny you say that. I was talking to this girl recently and she was telling me that this other girl had told her that she was the inspiration behind one of our old songs, ‘Where The Rain Don’t Fall’. She was like, ‘Yeah, that’s about me!’ I was, ‘No, it’s not. I just made it up.’”

Not exactly Mötley Crüe-style stuff, Kelly. In fact, most of the clichés the quartet have experienced four years into this band lark have fallen more in the Spinal Tap bracket.

Guitarist Sean O’Brien recalls a show with The Strypes some six months back.

“We got in an elevator with all our gear and we didn’t know what floor to go to but we thought, ‘Ah sure it’ll be fine’. Until we got to… the stage. It just opened up and The Strypes were there, playing, as we tried to hide.”

Kelly nods solemnly that it felt like they were “rising up in the middle of the show like Beyoncé” while drummer Conn O Ruanaidh can only laugh: “We could just hear the music and we were like, ‘This couldn’t be…’!”

Rounding off the foursome, Rhos Horan completes the sorry tale.

“We tried to go back up and we just got stuck at a wall. And then it got real panicky. Terrifying.”

Naff – that is, entirely unplanned – stage entrances aside, most everything has gone swimmingly when the band have performed with the teenage Cavan beat combo. Joining Hot Press in Dublin’s Library Bar, they’re just back from the UK, where they played three dates with The Strypes.

Apparently the youngsters, too, are shirking extracurricular excess to keep their eye on the prize.

“They’ve been so busy that they don’t have any time to do any of that ‘rock and roll’ stuff,” says Horan. “They’re going from one place to the next every single day. They’re all pretty… not weirded out, but like ‘wow!’ They’re modest about the success though, which is cool.

“It’s mental,” says Kelly. “I think they come from an isolated background... literally in the middle of nowhere. I’d say going from meeting the Elton Johns of this world back to that is nice.”

The two outfits place an emphasis on live intensity so Raglans knew that even though they’re the relative veterans, they’d to bring their “A-game”.

“Ever since we played with them first it’s been like that. We had them support us on our first EP launch, because we saw them play and we just thought they were so good. There was nothing cynical about it, we just really wanted to play with them and saw that they were similar to us. They reciprocated by bringing us with them when they started to do stuff in the UK. To go somewhere for nights in a row where it’s just rammed to the front with people? It’s exactly what we think Raglans is built to do. We just blew it up every night with the lads.”

So Raglans have their allies as they launch their album campaign. And yet, they’ve never really fit into any scene. That suits them just fine, considering their own musical tastes vary from member to member, with just a love of pop dressed up in dirty guitar clothing and singalong ‘oh-ah-oh’ harmonies (in a charming Cribs way, not an irritating Kooks way) uniting them.

“Very early on, we decided that we didn’t want to be a scene band,” O Ruanaidh proffers. “We didn’t want to be a genre band. I don’t think we could do it. There’s a lot of back-patting that goes on in scenes.”

“When you reject it, you do get scorned a bit,” continues Kelly. “People start to view you in a certain way. We can be a strange decision as a support to people. We don’t fit into blues, folk, indie… we’re more of a ‘mutant’.”

They may like the rough-and-ready approach to gigs, but Raglans have always been a considered band. With origins lying in a festival field, where Kelly and Horan met in 2010, O Ruanaidh and original guitarist/mandolin man Liam Morrow were soon recruited under the ‘Raglans’ banner, a name Kelly had used solo having pinched it from the Kavanagh poem, ‘Raglan Road’ that was famously put to music by Luke Kelly. Thus ensued relentless gigging and some well-placed early releases; a 2012 EP recorded with Morrissey wingman Boz Boorer, for example, was the first thing put out on Whelan’s Records, the label wing of the legendary Dublin venue.

Thoughts of a long-player, however, were kept in check. They knew they needed time to build a strong collection of songs so that, as Horan puts it, “We all knew which ones would cut the mustard.”

Then, a “natural delay”, when Morrow left amicably to finish his college studies.

“We were in survival mode,” says Kelly. “We thought it would immediately be perfect, but it wasn’t. It took loads of work and that pushed us back a bit. But we’ve come back better and stronger with Sean.”

Feeling like a finished enough article to make their album mark, Raglans decamped to London – where Stephen Kelly is currently based – last October to record with Jay Reynolds, another big production name who’s worked with everyone from Elton John and BB King to Pulp and The Verve. Were they immediately pumping him for tales of Cocker and Ashcroft?

“It’s exactly what we did do!” laughs Kelly. “He was only making tea on the Richard Ashcroft sessions, he was only starting out on Urban Hymns. He was saying he was in the studio when they did that ‘Lucky Man’ fade-in guitar and he remembers thinking, ‘That sounds really good!’ His mentor is yer man who pioneered that Phil Collins snare sound, Hugh Padgham. He learned from him, so we got all the stories about how he actually did that and stuff, which was crazy.”

Has that legendary Collins snare crept on to the Raglans' debut?

“There were a couple of times where we suggested it… but I think Jay’s a little hesitant to steal off his master. He’s no Anakin Skywalker!”

He certainly doesn’t have the foresight The Force should bring. Though he was “chuffed, real proud” with the band’s quick and quality work-rate as they turned around the record in 13 days – “I’ve only done EPs in this time!” goes O Ruanaidh's faux-shocked impression – he didn’t see them bewitching a typically too-cool-for-school London crowd so quickly.

“We were telling him we were coming back to do shows and he was like, ‘Aw, the London one will probably be tough’. Will it? We played it before and it was packed!'”

With an infectious album custom-built for festival crowds arriving at just the right time, Raglans’ road to proving any doubters wrong is well mapped out. Happy travels fellas.

Raglans is out March 21. The band play The Academy, Dublin on March 29“