On The Wings Of A Dove

"Have you seen that TV show Boyz Unlimited?" asks Dove's Graham Cruz, as he settles his extensively pierced and tattooed frame into a seat in the Clarence Hotel's Octagon Bar. "Well, I know it's meant to be a pisstake but it's actually spot on. The pop world really is like that. You know, this Svengali-type manager puts a band together and it's like 'you're the blond one, you're the cute one and you're the ugly but talented one'. So many bands are really like that and it's such a load of bollox!"

As it happens, Dove, the latest Irish contenders for the pop throne, do have a manager but, despite seeming almost custom-made for the kiddy music market—two guys and a girl, all three of them are young, pretty, Irish and black—they're very much in control of their own destinies. There are no stylists, no choreographers and no puppet masters behind them. Dove, Graham maintains, are a band who pull their own strings, thank you very much.

"I put the band together," he explains, "I'm very motivated and I knew exactly what I was doing. When we went to Dermot, our manager, it was like 'this is what we're called, these are the people who are in it, this is the kind of music we're gonna do, this is what we're gonna look like and these are the kind of people we're gonna appeal to'. Because we had thought the whole thing out beforehand ourselves. So there's no Svengali-type manager behind us."

Born and raised in Artane, 21-year-old Cruz originally inherited a love of Latin and Salsa sounds from his African father. Despite his mixed parentage, he's as Irish as they come and, in fact, maintains that the colour of his skin usually worked to his advantage when he was growing up.

"There was never really any big deal about the fact that I was black," he smiles. "I was always just Graham, yer man from Artane. I encountered a couple of problems in school but it was no big deal. I was always an optimist and I'd use it to my advantage. Like, I'd sit at the back of class and I wouldn't have my homework done and I'd be given out to, so I'd just mutter under my breath 'oh yeah, blame the token black kid' and that'd be me off the hook."

Although he claims to have been a reasonable academic, he didn't actually sit his Leaving Cert because "I had a dancing gig the night beforehand". But then Graham always knew that whatever he wanted to do, it wasn't going to involve going to college. Despite having "no training in anything", he began teaching dance classes at the age of 16 and soon wound up doing choreography and styling for a number of young Irish pop hopefuls, including the Carter Twins, B*Witched and OTT. Watching their success, he quickly decided to give it a shot himself, figuring that if they could do it, anybody could.

"I spent so long with the styling and choreography, giving away all my good stuff to other people and, you know, looking at some of the people I was working with I was going 'Jesus, if they can do it, anybody can do it!' And so I did."

Dove were formed two years ago when he met Hazel Kaneswaran (whose father is from Singapore) and Nigerian-born Don Ade at an MTV party. They originally called themselves Dubh after the Irish word for black but, realising that the pun would be missed overseas, soon changed their moniker to the more phonetically acceptable Dove. Months of intensive rehearsals followed and their break came when they were invited to perform at the Beat On The Street.

Since then, their career path has been a steady one—a few reasonably received singles, appearances on children's TV shows, supports to OTT etc. Working with an exclusively Irish team (their producers are Dublin-based duo Graham Murphy and Chris O'Brien), last year their single "Blow Your Mind" went Top 20. Their current release, a smooth hip-hop version of Crowded House's 1987 hit "Don't Dream It's Over", is also riding high in the Irish charts and may well be the track that'll break them in England. But, as Graham laughingly admits, their early days are probably best forgotten.

"At the beginning it was very, very poppy and very, very cheesy," he smiles. "It's been a learning curve. It's got a bit more balls than it did at the beginning and that's because it's taken us two years to grow the balls to walk into a studio with scraps of paper and go 'I'd like to sing this'. Cos at the beginning, we'd never done it before so we're not supposed to know what to do and we were relying on other people's input. Whereas now we're quite confident in saying 'actually, I don't like that, change it' or whatever."

And are you doing it for the cash or are there any genuine artistic motives?

"Well, we're doing pop music and we're making no bones about it," he smiles. "We're not gonna claim that it's art. It's pop. Money is the driving force behind it. But having said all that, when I get up in the morning, all I can think about is performing and being on stage, so that's what I'm supposed to do. I'm at my happiest running around a stage, sweating my arse off, jumping around like a lunatic—that's the biggest buzz I get."

And what's the big Dove masterplan? "World domination," he laughs. But first, Dove will content themselves with an assault on the USA—pop music's spiritual home. As far as Graham's concerned, America is the main market, something a lot of Irish pop bands who model themselves on their UK counterparts seem to miss.

"A lot of Irish pop is shite," he states. "But a lot of UK pop is shite as well. It's just because there's so few bands in Ireland we get to hear about every one of them. In the UK you only get to hear the better of the shite and most of that's shite as well. In Ireland because it's so small, every group of four friends who decide they're a band, you get to hear them.

"I think a lot of Irish pop bands look to the UK to see what's going on there. But when you look deeper, the bands in the UK are looking to the States to see what's going on there. So we'd like to skip the middle man and just go directly there."

On the wings of a Dove, presumably.

*"Don't Dream It's Over" is available now on TTMAR Records.