Music Nation: The God Of Small Things

Much to the bemusement of the Central Hotel staff, Dermot Lambert arrives for his Library Bar appointment with Hot Press wearing a bright red spacesuit and carrying two full-sized cardboard Daleks. The former Blink frontman and his young son are pictured wearing the same costumes on the cover of his just-released solo debut album, Tiny.

Dermot’s suit has the years 1963 and 2013 emblazoned in silver writing across the breast.
“The idea there is that I’ve travelled through time the hard way,” the now 50-year-old Dubliner explains. “So I’ve now arrived at this place.”
The Daleks represent where he started from creatively. Tiny’s opening track is entitled ‘Dear Mr Lambert’, and features a young girl reading a rejection letter that 10-year-old Dermot received from the BBC after he’d sent them a Doctor Who script.
“I was so proud to receive that,” he recalls with a laugh. “Unbelievably proud! BBC wasn’t available in Ireland. Our next door neighbours had it. I went in there one night and there happened to be this programme on. And there were Daleks in that particular episode. I was like, ‘Oh my God! Best thing ever!’ I was just totally absorbed with Doctor Who. I started writing stories and keeping scrapbooks and cutting bits out of the TV listings.”
It’s interesting that he opens Tiny with a rejection letter. Although it features songs obviously borne out of bruising disappointments, Dermot’s music industry experiences have hardly been entirely negative. Blink’s debut album A Map Of The Universe was released in 1994 and two more followed – The End Is High (1998) and Deep Inside The Sound Of Sadness (2004).
Along the way, the band enjoyed hit singles, industry awards, critical acclaim (Billboard named The End Is High their ‘Album of the Month’), and arena tours with the likes of Crowded House, Carter The USM, Moby, Mercury Rev and The Ramones.
Blink even played Wembley, though that show was memorable for perhaps the wrong reasons.
“Every member of Blink and my brother Aidan [manager] were all guilty of at least one crime each that could have finished the band,” he laughs. “I used an expletive onstage at Wembley that didn’t go down well with the 10,000 audience, and had the record company people in the pit running for cover. I used the c-word onstage. And whatever about the Irish, the English don’t like it.
“We were supporting Crowded House so it was an older, more mature audience. If it was with Carter, I might’ve got away with it. And I was actually just being funny, I wasn’t even being particularly offensive. I was introducing a song and, whatever way I introduced it, the word came out. To this day if I could undo a moment, that would be it.”
Blink fizzled out around nine years ago.
“We ran out of steam,” he shrugs. “The third album took so long to record, and cost so much of our own money. By the time we actually had to release it we didn’t have the money to promote. It’s kinda funny because it’s only nine years, but the world is now a completely different place. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter. MySpace didn’t even exist.”
Although Blink’s mad ride had ended, Dermot continued with the music business. Since 2005 he’s been busy helping other Irish bands with the already legendary Garage Gigs, giving acts such as The Script, Royseven and Ryan Sheridan their first-ever shows.
He estimates that he’s staged 1,400 Garage gigs since 2005.
“I don’t mind saying out loud that I had a fairly significant part to play in the upsurge of bands in the last ten years. A lot of the groups who are really well-known, I can tell you what their first gig was because it was on my watch.”
Tiny was recorded in fits and starts over the last two years in Ashtown Studios, and mixed in New York by producer Howie Beno who’s also worked with Depeche Mode and Katy Perry.
“When Blink finished I was happy enough to sa,y ‘I’m not doing anything like that ever again’. But I threw the baby out with the bathwater and I didn’t realise until a few years later that I’d still be writing songs that I’d still be wanting people to hear.”
Although Blink drummer Barry Campbell played on the album, it’s still very much a
solo project.
“I wanted to do absolutely everything my way. I wanted to break the laws of convention and not have a democracy in my life, for once. I just didn’t want to collaborate with anybody. And Barry is different because it’s a one-on-one kind of thing and there was always the understanding that if I didn’t like something, or if I wanted something to happen, then that’s ultimately the way it would go. So it was the first time I had taken responsibility because very often with a band you can abdicate the responsibility, and then if things don’t work out you can say it wasn’t your fault. So good reviews or bad reviews, whatever happens now, I’m taking the rap for that.”