Mortars Of Invention

Sipping pints of stout in the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel, brothers Steve and Joe Wall are pondering the inordinate amount of time it has taken their band, The Walls, to produce their third long-player, Stop The Lights.

“Basically the album took us waaay too long,” Joe laughs. “It was fucking ridiculous!”
Steve nods his head in agreement. “We were working on and off for about six years. We’re very slow, and always have been, and maybe we have to accept that. Even with The Stunning we were very slow. The Stunning only had three albums.”
Nobody could ever accuse them of rushing their recordings. Having first formed in the mid-Nineties, The Walls’ debut, Hi-Lo, was released in 2000. Five years later, their acclaimed sophomore album, New Dawn Breaking, finally saw the light of day. Stop The Lights has taken the longest gestation period to date. Fortunately, it’s been worth the wait.
But we’ll come to the new album in a minute. First, some retrospective...
Born in Dublin, but raised in the west of Ireland, Steve and Joe have been making music together professionally since the late ‘80s. Steve is the elder brother, but they both laughingly refuse to divulge their ages. “We’re children of the Sixties, let’s leave it at that!”
They first found musical success with The Stunning, but despite being one of the most popular Irish acts of the early ‘90s, the band never achieved success further afield. “We never had international success with The Stunning,” Joe admits, with a shrug. “So we haven’t been able to reform the band and tour the world. When we reform The Stunning, we do Dublin, Cork, Galway, Askeaton...” He trails off and sighs.
Despite successful tours, No 1 albums and regular airplay on their home turf, The Stunning found local fame but very little fortune.
Steve: “At the height of The Stunning we did make good money but the pie was being sliced up by a lot of people. We did okay. When we broke up at the end of it in 1994 there was a divvy-up and I think we got around £1,250 each. Not a lot of money at the end of seven years work.”
Following the demise of The Stunning, the Wall brothers signed to Columbia Records and headed for London. Unfortunately, despite being handled by Jamiroquai’s manager (or perhaps because of), things just didn’t
work out...
“It was almost like we walked straight into that trap that many Irish bands have done before where you got the record deal but it wasn’t quite the right one, and they seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Joe recalls. “They signed us because they loved our demos and then they tried to get us to work with the Pet Shop Boys producer. It was a bad fit. And they tried lots of bad fits until we eventually realised it wasn’t going to work. So we came back to Dublin and started our own label.”
Steve: “We had a good couple of years in London. We were going out all the time and meeting loads of people – musicians and producers and all that kind of thing. In retrospect it was probably a waste of time.”
Following their unproductive stint in the UK, the disillusioned brothers took their Camden housemate, guitarist Carl Harms home with them. Drummer Rory Doyle joined soon afterwards. Although Harms has since departed the fold, bassist Jon O’Connell became a permanent fixture in 2004.
They were flat broke, but fortune smiled. It being the height of the Celtic Tiger era, and The Walls being affable types with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances,
they had no shortage of basements and buildings to rehearse in free of charge, courtesy of wealthy property-developing fans.
Feeling somewhat burnt by their Columbia experience, they set up their own record label, Dirtbird Records, and released a string of singles and EPs, before recording their debut album in 2000. They didn’t make a fortune off the back of Hi-Lo, but they learnt a lot of valuable lessons about the business side of the music industry.
Outside of the gigging circuit and album sales, they supported themselves by composing music for movies and advertisements. However, nobody could ever accuse them of being in it solely for the money. When the first of many AIB scandals broke, they pulled their song ‘To The Bright And Burning Sun’ from the bank’s advertising campaign.
“It cost us a lot of money. We would’ve felt like hypocrites if we’d allowed them to continue to use it,” says Joe.
The Walls second album New Dawn Breaking was released in 2005. While it went to No 5 in the Irish charts, making a decent living from music was still proving a struggle. Although both brothers became fathers around that time, they persevered with their rock ‘n’ roll career.
“When we started out recording this new album back in 2006, we didn’t really know what kind of an album we wanted to make,” Joe explains. “We wanted to try and do something different in terms of the way we wrote songs and stuff. So rather than just do what we used to do in the old days where myself and Steve would just come in with near-finished songs – chords and verses and choruses and stuff like that – we decided we would try and jam ideas with the band and come up with sparks of musical ideas and then we’d develop them into songs.
“We worked like that for quite a long time, and came up with a lot of interesting stuff, but it proved quite difficult to take those musical ramblings and turn them into finished songs. The problem is you wind up with this massive archive of ideas, and you get quite familiar with them. The more familiar you get, the harder it is to move them on.”
Steve: “I think U2 work in a similar way. Then they bring in Eno and Lanois who are these extra sets of ears, and composers in their own right as well, and they chop and change things and put the jigsaw together. We were doing it on our own and it proved quite difficult.”
As he tells it, the absence of a producer or record company A&R person didn’t help things. “You often hear bands say that they banned the record company from the studio. We probably could’ve done with a little of that pressure,” he laughs. “Sometimes I think it’s missing a little of that thing of the producer or maybe the record company saying, ‘We’re not hearing it’. Sometimes you actually
need that.”
Given that the album took the best part of six years, this almost goes without saying. While Steve and Joe were happy to doodle away forever in the studio, the rest of the band soon grew impatient with their time-gobbling working methods.
Joe: “Myself and Steve have quite an appetite for working on things and stuff, but some of the other band members were starting to get a bit strained. It was wearing thin, all of this working on ideas in loads of different ways. Because nobody was getting paid for this, and we were spending all our time in the studio.
“In some ways, I think our sensibility for writing songs has returned a little bit to the way we would have written songs before. With this album we were very determined to write songs that would touch you in some way emotionally. They wouldn’t be cerebral trips. They’d be songs that you could listen to the melody and the lyrics and know what they were about. It took us a long time to get there.”
Eventually their bandmates grew tired of toiling away forever but getting nowhere in the studio, and began to take other gigs, leaving the Wall brothers to work alone. Unfortunately, when Steve and Joe finally had some concrete ideas for the others to work on, they found that their rhythm section had been headhunted by Bell X1.
“We were used to being able to call the lads in whenever we needed them,” Joe laughs. “Suddenly we were calling and they’d go, ‘Sorry, but I’m touring America for the next two months’. It was like, ‘Oh...!’ We were slightly hurt.”
Meanwhile, the brothers obviously had to make a living themselves. They toured for a while as an acoustic twosome, performing new material and old Stunning favourites, but found the experience deeply unsatisfying.
“We just found it really unchallenging,” says Steve. “Personally I rarely last longer than 20 minutes at any singer-songwriter type gig before I have to go to the bar. I said to Joe one night as we were driving back from a gig in Cork, ‘two guys on stage with acoustic guitars is actually twice as boring as one guy with an acoustic guitar!’”
When they did have the whole band together for touring, it was often crushingly expensive. A 2007 tour of Australia with Crowded House almost broke them financially. They wound up filming and recording their bandmates and using virtual imagery for their live gigs. While it worked very well, it was no substitute for the real thing. Happily, schedules eventually gelled, and The Walls got together with their physical bandmates to record a finished album.
A fine piece of work, Stop The Lights opens with ‘Bird In A Cage’ - an autobiographical account of their early years in Ennistymon: “I was 13 when we packed up in the city/and moved out west to a town in the country/everybody thought that we were so lucky/but I wasn’t all that sure...”
“That song kind of covers the both of us,” Steve explains. “If someone asks me ‘what’s your life story?’, it’s kind of all in there. It’s like a press release!”
Joe: “It’s like a biog. It was quite a challenge actually to get that to work as a pop song. It fits into four minutes. We came up with that idea with the music first and it was about 10 minutes long and we didn’t know what we were going to do with it. Then Steve came up with the lyrics and turned it into a song. It started with a bassline and the lyrics made it into a song.”
Steve: “Basically I think the challenge with that song was it was kind of a short story set to music. And all songs have to have that verse/chorus thing to keep the listener happy. We’ve always tended to write your classic pop songs
with a certain structure to them. That one was more difficult because the verses were quite long. So it took us a long time.”
Joe: “You can be a bit more ruthless with other songs that there isn’t such a defined story. With certain pop songs you can say ‘you know that verse there? It’s too long so let’s just chop out that bit – because it doesn’t really matter’. Because sometimes the lyrics are kind of abstract or whatever. But with ‘Bird In A Cage’, you couldn’t really do that. You couldn’t take a big chunk out of it. It’d be like taking an important chapter out of a book.”
There’s plenty more where that came from. As you’d expect from such veteran songwriters and musicians, Stop The Lights is an impressive collection of catchy, melodic and well-crafted songs. According to Steve, “We’re really happy with the new album, we think the songs are strong, and we’re looking forward to gigging them. I just hope we don’t suffer the same fate and we’re not consigned to being just another Irish band playing around Ireland.”
As it happens, they may yet wind up playing around a series of Irish living-rooms. Much of the finance for the album was raised through the Fund It website, where fans can help pay for recordings in return for extra goodies
from bands.
“The Fund It thing was great,” Joe enthuses. “We had basically finished the album, but there’s still loads of stuff to do beyond that – mastering, artwork, marketing. All of that stuff costs the same, if not even more, as making the bloody thing. Selling an album these days is a different kettle of fish. The Fund It thing gives you a reason to get in touch with people who’ve bought your stuff before and are on your mailing list.”
Depending on the size of donations, The Walls offered various rewards – signed copies, extra tracks and rarities, songwriting masterclasses, etc - to fans who sponsored the album.
“One of the rewards we offered was that we would come and play a 45-minute set in your house,” Steve says, with a laugh. “So there could be a couple of mad gigs ahead of
us, where half the town is crowded into somebody’s sitting room.”

Stop The Lights is out on March 9 (see review in Critical Mass). Catch the Walls live in Whelan’s, Dublin (March 29); Dolan’s, Limerick (30); Monroe’s, Galway (31); Little Big Night, Cork (May 4); Inishbofin Arts Festival (5); and Leopardstown Racecourse, Dublin (June 21)