Matt finish

If I was gonna choose a job, this is the only one I’m interested in. I’ve had other jobs where the money is better but I’m just fucking excited about music’s possibilities yet again.” The Pale’s frontman Matthew Devereux is explaining the modus operandi that has seen the Dubliners return with the shift in direction that is their new album, Lonely Space Age.

Matthew still has many fond memories of The Pale’s formative years, but he’s not sorry that they’re behind him. “A lot of our shows back then had a shock value,” he admits. “It was more about our excitement, doing something new that even we hadn’t seen before. That period of time was really exciting but it was unsustainable, keeping up that level of energy. I felt like Iggy Pop by the end of it: I didn’t put on weight for five years because my metabolism was becoming based around gigging.”

While never officially deciding to call it a day, The Pale took a conscious decision to step back from their relentless touring schedule around 1996. They promptly decamped to the studio environment, working on material as The Pale and under the Produkt moniker (“an eight-piece full scale rock group”). The Pale featured on various compilation albums, including Phutloose’s excellent It’s All Good, and made a few special guest live appearances in the intervening years. But it wasn’t until the original band members moved into a house/studio together, that the ideas for Lonely Space Age began to take root. But they didn’t want to release it until the right label came along.

“I’ve watched great records being released without the infrastructure behind them – Black Mountain Falls by Cathal Coughlan being a perfect example – and we didn’t want that to happen to us,” he says. ”When the opportunity came to put it out with PsychoNavigation I jumped at it because the drive was still there.”

The album will surprise many old Pale fans, as it is a more restrained and even, dare I say, mature offering. Matthew?

“I think the word you’re looking for is improvement,” he laughs, before getting serious again. “I remember one review of the first album that said, ‘if The Pale are going to produce more records, they’re going to have to keep one step ahead of themselves all the time’. That played on my mind. At first, it seemed like a jibe but it was more of a guide and I think that reviewer was bang on.”

Hence, the progression from the likes of ‘Dogs With No Tails’ to ‘The Moon, It Isn’t Really Lying In The Gutter’ (“kind of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or ‘Within You Without You’ territory, where we’re trying to be pivotal around an eastern minor melody”). However, there are still some obvious links to the past, like the fabulous ‘Jumping Beans’.

“It’s Easter 1979, and it’s about a good Roman Catholic boy with a bowl haircut awaiting the Pope’s visit,” Matthew smiles. “There was a lot of optimism associated with the ‘70s where we believed we would all be in space by 2000, and in a way ‘Jumping Beans’ is an acceptance that we’re not but weren’t the ‘70s great craic anyway.”

With reaction so far uniformly positive, Matthew is delighted that critics and fans alike have taken to The Pale’s more experimental edge.

“A large slice of pop music has become stagnant because it’s monetary and not artistic but I do think there’s still a lot of credibility left in pop music,” he insists. “No matter what Radiohead say, maybe they are still a pop group, pop being short for popular. They are allowed to experiment openly and I think that’s fucking fantastic. Then there are bands like The Polyphonic Spree, The Flaming Lips, Spiritualised, when you see people going out on a limb. I reckon their record companies have to wear brown trousers before they put those records out and it’s fantastic. There are some people that just remind you how unique and how invigorating music can be.”