Keywest Interview

On a street in Dublin, not far from the Hot Press offices, there is a slogan printed on the ground: ‘If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one’. It’s a nice sentiment, sure. But how many people are capable of turning this kind of motivational, homespun wisdom, into something approaching reality?

Maybe it’s the time they spent plying their trade just a stone’s throw away on Grafton Street, but Keywest seem to have mastered that art. As a completely independent act – and a proudly self-reliant one, at that – they’ve clocked up triple-platinum sales for their first album, The Message. Their sophomore offering Joyland has just arrived to much fanfare and acclaim – and they are chasing determinedly after next week's No.1 spot in Ireland. Forget the road less travelled, this a path built entirely by the band.
Perhaps it's just as well, because regular roads aren’t their luckiest suit right now.
“We were headed to Athlone to do some radio just the other day,” explains guitarist Andrew Glover – or, as he’s more commonly known, Glove. “Halfway down the motorway, one of the front wheels started to come off the van. I stuck my head out the window, and saw it bumping along. Now, I don’t know a lot about vans, but I know that’s not meant to happen. We just kept going, 80 kilometres an hour, constantly bracing ourselves for impact. That’s us, ploughing on against the advice of everyone we didn’t ask!”
In the end, a kindly mechanic looked after the band's wheel-related woes, but the truth is that calling on the help of others is a rare treat for the quintet. In the context, a relatively leisurely hour spent chatting and drinking coffee in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel offers a welcome respite from a warp-speed schedule for Glove and his childhood friend, frontman Andy Kavanagh – even if the interview is book-ended by some frantic smartphone bashing.
“We’re a complete factory,” Andy says. “It’s really enjoyable to be involved in, but it’s tough staying on top of it all. To be honest, a lot of the stuff we’re doing is because we weren’t happy with the results we got, when we paid other people to do it. I started developing websites because the ones we had made for us seemed rudimentary. The same with music videos – the first one we had done was crap. I’ve watched enough movies to know a crap edit, so I started learning about shooting videos. It’s not easy being a jack-of-all-trades.
“We’ve had the discussion over and over,” he adds, “about pursuing the big label deal – which, to be honest, we’ve never really done. We go back and forth on it. Everything gets done for you, which is great – but we’re at a stage ow where we’re almost autonomous. We’ve made so many of our own mistakes, and we’ve learned from them. We’ve built a foundation. We can express ourselves across the board, from our music to our graphic design.”
Glove grins: “There’s a lot of times in this band where you think, ‘Hang on, are we not supposed to just be making music?’”
For years, it’s been a story of putting in the hard yards. They admit, with disarming honesty, that it has been very tough at times. But this band was born with a never-say-die spirit.
“There’s definitely been moments where you just want to pack it in,” Andy admits. “In times of stress, especially, you’re walking the edge. But the stress comes when the best stuff is going on. We’ve had 10 people come in and out of the group at different times, and it’s always been when things were starting to take off. The only reason it’s worked out with the other boys is because they’re from England – once they moved over, they had no choice but to knuckle down!”
He laughs at the thought. The Artane duo now find themselves outnumbered in the band by musicians from across the Irish Sea.
It was a chance meeting in Los Angeles with bassist Sam Marder that set the wheels in motion. When Sam found himself without a band, he was on the next plane to Ireland. When a guitarist decided to leave the group to pursue other things, Sam knew a man – and in came James Lock. The trick was repeated shortly afterwards, when drummer Harry Sullivan joined, to complete the current line-up.
“We always had another room in the house,” Andy laughs.
“Not when Harry arrived,” Glove interjects. “We’d run out of bedrooms by then. The storage room became half storage, half Harry.”
“It was a meagre existence,” Andy continues. “We lived in this house with really poor insulation, so it was pretty cold. Over to Tesco at 5pm every day, because that’s when they’d reduce the food.”
That may sound a bit grim, but it hasn’t all been bad. Certainly, Andy was happier shopping in Tesco than working in one. “I have worked in Tesco,” he begins – with an intake of breath that suggests there’s a lengthy list to follow – “...and McDonald's, and Clark's, Barrett’s, Schuh... I got fired from all of them, not because I couldn’t sell. It was stuff like falling asleep. And sleeping with other staff members (laughs).”
Once the band began to play their trade on the street, mid-shift snoozes and workplace romances became a thing of the past, replaced by performing for the public on an almost daily basis. For a year, Key West based themselves in Galway, where they made a patch of Shop Street their own. Then, it was back to the streets of the capital – leading to some strange encounters with the city's unique cast of characters.
“It’s a numbers game,” Glove muses. “If we see a few hundred people every day, then you’re going to have loads who are really nice, loads who aren’t really pushed, and then...”
“Dingers,” Andy proffers. “You meet some absolute dingers.”
Some examples please?
“We have a guy who comes up to us, and gives us his change – one coin at a time. I don’t know how his trousers stay up, because he seems to have an endless supply of change. He’ll be there for the guts of two songs, and the crowd really gets into it. He drops a coin, looks at us, drops another coin, looks at us. On and on, for about five minutes. You also get the religious fanatics, who give you pamphlets instead of money. You think, ‘Hang on – I can’t spend that...’”
Glove takes up the conversation. “There was also Mick The Manager. He was sort of the head honcho of the homeless guys in Galway. He’d waltz into the middle of the crowd, and announce himself as our manager. Donations could be given to us, or people could just give it to him, because he was our manager! We still bump into him whenever we’re down there, and he’s always delighted to see us.”
Occasional amusing moments aside, there’s lots of serious work to be done on the streets. What began out of financial necessity has now become the platform on which the band have built a sizable following – and a rapidly growing reputation. It also helped the band to master their craft.
“You can drop us into any situation now, and we’ll thrive” Andy says. “There was a time when I was an awful frontman, just wide-eyed withnfear. I’d go on stage, and people in the audience would want to take me off and give me a cup of tea. Now, we have a really good hold on what we do. It’s rehearsals 16 hours a week.”
“With a live audience,” Glove adds.

While the lessons learned from working the street were a key factor in the creation of the songs that make up Joyland, the band are aware that there may be a downside to being seen as a busking band.
“There’s a stigma attached to being buskers,” Andy states matter-of-factly. “Absolutely. In contrast, if you come out and get a deal straight away, there’s a hype machine behind you, and all you need to do is hop on.”
“There’s definitely a difficulty with shaking off that old view,” Glove adds. “But at the same time, I’d hope there’s people who say, ‘Well, we’ve seen these guys performing on Grafton Street. We know it’s real, and raw, just five lads and their instruments'.”
Indeed, it’s that organic feel that the band aimed to capture on the record. “We've made an album that sounds exactly like it does on the street,” Andy says. “It has the vibrant, rhythmic feel that you’ll hear there, with a certain gothic Americana style that really works too. We can test songs in front of a crowd, and judge them on how many CDs a performance sells for us. If you do a song ten times, and it’s consistently a poor seller, then it’s not going on the record.”
The thirteen tracks that have made the cut are like a snapshot of the band’s keenly-crafted style, from jaunty opener ‘All My Mistakes’, through the balledic ‘Apple Tree Hill’ and gospel-tinged ‘Cold Comfort’, to the closing track ‘Soldier On’, which caps things with the sort of wailing guitar solo that might just be described as indulgent!
“That’s a fair assessment!” Glove laughs. “In my head, that’s our ‘Hey Jude’ outro.”
People may be surprised to find that there’s more than a hint of darkness on the album too. ‘Reaper At The Door’, as the name might suggest, isn’t exactly a sunshine and lollipops ditty. The title track, meanwhile, is a moody creation, pondering the band's current place in the world of music. “All these songs are personal,” Andy reveals. “I never write songs plucked out of thin air. Honestly, because I’m not really able to do that. People assume that they’re always about relationships, but a lot of
it's what we’re going through as a band. ‘Soldier On’ is about us. And so is ‘Joyland’.There’s an image of the paupers on the street, trying to make it with ‘the real bands’; the freak show in the middle of a crowd that points and laughs.”

Whatever about that image, no one is laughing at Key West now. Gradually, they have emerged as real contenders, their consistent progress a testament to burnishing their immense talent with plenty of hard graft – and, for the record, they aren’t complaining about that, either.
“There’s an awful lot of moaning from bands in Ireland,” Andy opines. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that – and I won’t mince my words on it, either. A lot of them are whining about why their music isn’t being played, when they should probably be spending more time working on their craft, and figuring out why it's not being played. You don’t blame the examiner just because you failed the test.”
In any event, radio play is not the be all and end all anymore.
“Look at someone like Ben Howard,” Andy points out. “I don’t think he’s being played all over the airwaves, but people want his album, and people want to go see him play live. That’s one of the things that comes up when we discuss signing with a label. Do we want to be all over the tabloids? The truth is that we’re happy just selling out shows all over the world.”
When he says all over the world, he means it. While the band will be touring in Ireland and the UK in 2015, next year should see Key West flying the nest.
“We’ve made that breakthrough in Ireland,” Andy asserts. “But in a sense we're only starting. The plan for next year is to continue to expand here of course – but also to head out and do what we’ve done here, elsewhere. We sold-out two nights in London. After a few trips to Belfast, we sold out Mandela Hall there. It’s something we’ve seen can work. It’s achievable now, without big budgets and TV advertising. We're getting feet on the street and following that model, in Los Angeles, Germany, Sweden, even Japan.”
For Irish fans, there’s still plenty to look forward to, not least in the form of a sister album to Joyland, entitled Fairground. Available shortly at the group’s live shows – and online – it’s just one more example of how the band are aiming high, calling the shots – and treating their loyal fans well.
“We have a fantastic amount of music to share now,” Andy says. “Fairground is as strong as Joyland. We just wanted to make sure that both albums would hang together really well.”
The jigsaw, you feel, is slotting into place. The path from Grafton Street to international stardom is well travelled, from Glen Hansard and Mundy to The Riptide Movement and Hudson Taylor. Just don’t expect Keywest to ape any of their predecessors – the road they walk will surely be one they’ve paved for themselves.