Mixing up the medicine

The first thing that strikes you about Dublin outfit Las Vegas Basement is their all-consuming devotion to the golden age of rock and pop. Their debut album, appropriately entitled, End Of An Era comes lovingly wrapped in an LP-style gatefold sleeve, complete with inner-bag containing pick-up instructions and advice on protecting those precious micro-groove records.

“People say it’s a marketing gimmick,” offers guitarist/vocalist Tom McDonald. “But when you think about it – it isn’t good marketing to spend the kind of money we’ve spent on making it like that. In fact, it’s totally ridiculous for a debut album. But I always wanted to record an album – release a proper record, you know. Obviously, we’re all well past the vinyl era, so this was the best way to do it, rather than doing the generic thing of putting it in a plastic box.”

Not surprisingly, the music contained within this mini-triumph of design mirrors the band’s own sense of visual aesthetics. Working from a template falling somewhere between the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and the Who’s Tommy, songs like, ‘Shine On’, ‘Mr Lane’ and ‘Desertscape Highway’ come wrapped in swirling Wurlitzers, mellotron, tablas and sundry other assorted Summer of Love instrumentation, underpinned by classic guitar textures and psychedelic vocals.

But keyboard player Gerard Eaton insists the band aren’t stuck in a sixties groove: “We’ve one or two songs that are suggestive of certain bands or certain eras,” he says. “It might lead the ear to hear those influences in everything else on the album. But there’s much more wider influences within the band and we’ve all gone through our different phases.”

Despite some early record company interest Las Vegas Basement have decided to go the independent route for the moment. “Columbia records in the States were keen and it was all looking great for a while,” offers Tom McDonald. “And then it went sour – your classic story really. We’d give them a demo, which sounded pretty much as it does on the album and they’d say ‘We’ll get a producer in and work on it’. We’ve three producers in the band – we don’t need any more. We realised that we’d spent six months licking people’s holes wasting time when we could have been making music. We’d never say we wouldn’t sign a deal but I can’t see it being with a massive label. It would have to be someone who thinks, ‘That’s a great record – we’ll put it out as is’.”

“Our eyes are really set on the States at the moment,” Gerard Eaton chimes in. “Our manager is based there and we’ve been and forward a few times. It’s looking promising; hopefully we’ll be close to a distribution deal soon. We’re flying out this Saturday for a ten-day tour, this time taking in Boston and Philadelphia as well as New York. We’re financing it ourselves but you can’t tour the States without money and we hope to be back in the summer with some help.”

Drummer Aidan O’Grady: “We’ve built a bit of a fan-base over there and we’ll be bringing copies of the album out for the first time. The reaction has been great - we almost got Ryan Adams to come to see us one night. We were introduced to him and we asked him along to the gig. He didn’t turn up but it was a nice feeling putting his name on the guest list.”

End Of An Era is out now on Poor Boy Records