One nation under a groove

Irish bands don’t do extroverted and ostentatious. Earnest, yes. No shortage round these parts of conscientious young strummers whose songs seem to serve the same function as nettle baths did for medieval monks.

There have been exceptions down through the years, periods when the torpor has been briefly disrupted by individualist oddballs – most of ’em from Cork – who appear on the radar with the frequency and significance of hairy stars. Mostly though, the exhibitionists of these parishes tend to get treated with the same national suspicion complex afforded snitches and quislings.
Look, I’ve no problem with Bell X1 and Paddy Casey and their ilk operating as honest folk trying to make a buck out of their art. I just don’t get the music – songs drenched in home shopping network production values and gigs that take on the over-reverent air of a folk mass. Such orthodoxy seems anathema to the emancipating and scuzz-ugly spirit of rock ‘n’ roll/punk/funk/hip-hop.
I thought this cult of mediocrity was about to get sandblasted away a couple of years ago with the emergence of bands like Republic Of Loose and Daddy’s Little Princess, but the latter seem to have up and imploded, leaving Mick Pyro and co as sole exponents of a brand of show-off soul that equates showmanism with shamanism.
ROL are, as Michael said in the ‘Thriller’ video, not like other boys. For a start, they don’t sound Irish in any way approved of by the tourist board version of Hiberno-rock. This has resulted in a few jibes from local wags, the general line of criticism being that these Republicans want to be American when they grow up. Fair enough. But one might equally argue that they’re no more American-influenced than any band, except their sin is to nick licks from outside the prescribed list sanctioned by the Irish indie cultural cognoscenti’s little red rule book – namely Nirvana, Neil Young, Brian Wilson, and increasingly, the Laurel Canyon cocaine cowboys.
In the main, Irish whiteys still fight shy of black American dance forms. Or rather, they subscribe to an Anglicised version filtered through various London and Manchester movements. As Republic Of Loose will affirm in a few paragraphs’ time, it wasn’t always so. Van was beatified by Ray Charles and Mahalia, Lynott borrowed ghetto chic from Isaac Hayes and paid attention to Hendrix’s all-black Band Of Gypsies as much as the Experience, while the Rats were blooded on 60s R&B, Motown and the blood and fire of reggae.
But by the '80s, acts like Les Enfants and Swim seemed to be taking their cue from soul pastiche acts like Curiosity Killed The Cat and Wet Wet Wet, a gentrified and denatured version of the dance, decked out in pastels and grey slip-ons, rhythm sections garnished with fretless bass or cack-handed imitations of Bootsy’s slap and pluck technique, inflated and gated drum sounds, sax solos that sounded like beer ads. Later, the hard rock brothers got the funk only through the Chilis or – god help us – Limp Bizkit.

Republic Of Loose are a whole other can of worms. They could fit easily into any colourblind playlist that also features Prince, Timbaland, Rick James, Funkadelic, Ol Dirty Bastard’s Nigga Please, Black Grape’s first album and just about anything off the Ze label circa 1982.
We are gathered here today in the Morgan hotel, a mere four hours after the band have put the finishing touches to their forthcoming second album Aaagh. Tomorrow they fly to New York for a bunch of American shows with Snow Patrol. Manager and local mogul Dermot Doran is greeting the press in his characteristically gregarious manner, CD-Rs are flying, there are last minute title changes, track listing adjustments and photo reshoots. And in the midst of it all, partaking of Guinness and Bloody Marys, sit singer Mick, guitarist Bres and bass player Benjamin, whose collective air seems to be one of men who are still dazed from birthing a beautiful freak that they love dearly but have no idea how the rest of the world will receive.
No worries. Aaagh is a rowdy, plush, ambitious, unapologetic barbaric yawp of a record, equal parts '70s soul supafreakiness, George Clinton chickengrease and gutbucket Dublin wit. It’s a record that might be fun to spend a weekend in Barcelona with, provided you’ve the constitution of a horse. You’re probably familiar with the singles ‘Comeback Girl’ and ‘You Know It’, deftly executed slices of white sneaker-pimp rhythm, Philly strings and dipso lyrics. The album in its entirety is a gnarlier affair – the greasy, hog-tied stinky sodomy and hungover sex-funk of ‘I’m Greedy’, the dancehall Neptunes/NERDish nugget ‘Break!’ (“You like it rough, riiiight?”), the neo-eastern vibe of ‘Parasite’.
More to the point, the album exudes the kind of lewd and lurid abandon that seems to inspire turned up noses in certain quarters of the domestic music industry. Therefore, the first question addressed to this Republican assembly is: how come ROL are perceived to have (god forbid) an attitude?
Mick Pyro: “I don’t understand that a lot of the time, when people say the band’s got an attitude or whatever. All we’re trying to do is play the songs, we’re not trying to piss anyone off. I suppose if you’re trying to do something that’s committed and entertaining and a bit over the top, especially in Ireland, there’s a sense of, ‘Oh, they’re too big for their boots’. But we never claimed to be anything we weren’t.”
Benjamin: “That ‘who-do-they-think-they-are?’ thing is in a very tiny strain of Irish music. Like, we tour around the country, Galway and Limerick and Cork, and sell 600 tickets and got played off the radio over the last year. All we get in Ireland is love as far as we’re concerned. We don’t really hear the chitter-chatter anymore. It’s drowned out by the roar of… beautiful screaming fans!”
What about the wanna-be American thing?
Mick: “All contemporary music comes from America, it’s all built mainly around structures from original American music, all rock ‘n’ roll is electric guitars and drums. I mean, the Rolling Stones sound American. People say I sing in an American accent, so do the Stones.”
Bres: “I don’t understand how Irish bands don’t take from a wider frame of reference when you look at what’s come before – Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison.”
Mick: “Bands seem to think they have to listen to a certain type of music, and only that type of music. The joy and beauty of music is it’s such a vast variety. To not take from that is to do yourself a disservice.”
Benjamin: “We have millions of mates in bands who listen to Marvin Gaye and James Brown – but they won’t listen to ODB and take from that. It’s a fear that everything has to be mediated over 30 years before they can engage with it. I think bands like the Stones or Lizzy were listening to contemporary music.”
Do they think the infusion of different cultures – African, Asian, Eastern European – into Ireland will open up the white indie hegemony?
Mick: “It’s a really exciting thing about Ireland at the moment, that it’s becoming more cosmopolitan.”
Benjamin: “I think with this album it’s a more honest… it might sound American or whatever, but Mick’s talking about drinking Beamish in Brady’s and stuff, it’s a true representation of what it’s like to be alive in Dublin and slightly young. (Pause.) Slightly young!”
My attitude is, I like attitude. Give me The Stones over The Beatles, or The Doors over The Dead, or Happy Mondays over the Stone Roses anytime.
Mick: “When I was a kid I was into metal and stuff, I’ve always been attracted to that hysterical over-the-top style of music rather than the tasteful stuff. I like crass music.”
And Aaagh has its crass moments, although its never unfunny. Mick’s persona is somewhere between RL Burnside, ODB, Shaun, Shane and Snoop. I’d never spoken to him until today, although I had seen him shambling around town, sporting what might be most charitably described as meths-sipping homeless chic. Going by the lyrics, one might be forgiven for expecting some dipso Dada artist. Leafing through the press cuttings before this interview, I was puzzled. Sometimes he seemed gruff and inarticulate, other times he came across as a man of integrity and taste, ruminating on Milton, Pope, Shakespeare, Mingus, Takeshi Kitano and Yakuza movies. In person he proves affable and articulate. As with Shane McGowan (who’s a fan), it’s only when you transcribe the tape that you can fully appreciate the intellect.
There’s a similar disjunction at work in his band’s second album, which sounds considerably more sophisticated than This Is The Tomb Of The Juice, all commercial blocky beats and top of the line production, but still retains the malodorous waft of dissipation.
“Well,” says Mick, “if you don’t wash in real life then I don’t think you should try and make clean music.”
But here’s a thing. Few Irish bands write about dirty sex. They seem to be wrestling with an artistic Oedipal complex, as in, ‘What’s me ma gonna think if she hears this?’
“Actually that’s a bit of a problem. I couldn’t play a track for me ma, I said, ‘I can’t play it for ya, sorry’. She said, ‘It’s okay, it’s art, it’s art!’ But I love that madness, I just love when people surrender all pretensions to normalcy and let rip. I love that chaotic thing.”
And it’s not as if it ain’t endemic. The thing about a lot of old Irish legends and drinking songs is that they’re bawdy as hell. It was only when the country got flattened by famine and the priests took over that the malaise of Catholic guilt got a hold.
Benjamin: “Even up to ‘The Midnight Court’ and stuff like that, there’s a guy lying in a field falling asleep, having a wank, dreaming about maidens, and then stuff about marriage and the politics of sex and everything.”
Bres: “The Dubliners’ ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ was banned.”
Mick: “All those songs, especially the rebel songs, are vicious. And there’s feminism right through Irish culture that people forgot all about with the rise of Catholicism. Irish culture was dominated by women.”
Indeed, there’s a great line in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Tain where Queen Medb offers Daire Mac Fiachna a litany of riches in exchange for a loan of the Brown Bull of Cuailnge, not least being the promise of her own “friendly thighs”.
Benjamin: “Just to sweeten the deal!”

But never mind the sex, let’s talk about drinking.
Over the last couple of years, ROL have established a reputation as a formidable live band, one whose Oxegen set in July of 2004 moved the editor of this publication to pen a positively evangelical editorial.
By contrast, this writer’s first impression of the band was no impression at all. Filmmaker Shimmy Marcus, a friend of mine and brother of bass player Benjamin, had long prevailed upon me to catch them live. When I did, at a Hot Press Yearbook launch of about three years ago, they were steaming drunk. Not the kind of wired and wild inebriation that makes for exuberantly abandoned gigs, but rather a fatigued and flaccid sort of drunk, thowing barnyard punches and failing to connect.
In recent times though, the band seemed to have adopted, if not abstinence, then moderation as their oracle. Still, many of the songs on Aaagh are pickled in alcohol, and there are at least two references to being drunk in the middle of a doughnut shop. Yep, a doughnut shop. If soul music is usually righteous, preaching positivity and purity with a side order of social conscience, Republic Of Loose’s version of the gospel could’ve been ghost-writ by Bukowski.
“Art imitates life!” laughs Mick. “Naw, the drinking thing is a bit ridiculous. It’s something I’m trying to pull back on. But writing lyrics for this album… you might as well write about your life. The last album I was trying to write in the metaphysical abstract, gibberish kinda shit. This album, I decided to write about what’s actually going on, and a lot of that is drink.”
So, going by the songs, one might suspect that Mick leads a rather well-oiled existence.
“Yeah, I’m fairly dissipated and debauched and I tend to get fucked from acting the bollicks. But I intend to get my shit together for the next album and write about jogging and colonics and that kinda shit.”
May I venture that it doesn’t help if your manager owns a string of bars around town?
“It’s weird, ’cos we all came together through that scene, Doran’s. But also, the Bukowski thing, I was psycho for Bukowski. It fucked me up. I saw Barfly and it fucked up my brain, I watched it every day for about three weeks. It’s just too fuckin’ glamourous.”
Dangerously so. And there’s nothing as tragic as middle-class boys who fall in love with that life, thinking if you glug enough beers and wine, the work will come spewing out of your Smith-Corona. Sean Penn hit the nail on the head when he described Bukowski’s writings as unflinching snapshots of any of us on the toilet after a long night of sex and drinking. For all the repetitive self-mythological/self-parodying rubbish Bukowski vomited forth, classics like Tales Of Ordinary Madness and Notes Of A Dirty Old Man couldn’t have been written had he not put in long, lonely hours learning to write like his heroes Celine and Fante.
Mick: “John Fante is probably my favourite writer. His stuff is so well structured and the tone of it is so precise.”
Fante’s spirit infuses my favourite song on Aaagh, ‘The Idiots’, an expletive-ridden hymn to gutter romance (“Fuck those idiots/They don’t know jack about love…You’re my baby/So fuck what they’re talkin’ about”) stacked with improbable N Sync-type harmonies.
Bres: “You’re the first guy outside the band who’s said he’s loved ‘The Idiots’. Women always love it.”
Mick: “I wanted to make it so cheesy in a way that it wasn’t cheesy.”
Well, the song’s scenario is hopelessly romantic, but the pair of characters depicted are such fuck-ups it’s kind of poignant, like a scene from Ironweed. It’s the Bukowski of ‘The Most Beautiful Woman In Town’ rather than the macho two-fisted version.
Mick: “That’s what I love about (Fante’s) Ask The Dust. Yer man Arturo Bandini is pretty fucked up, but the end has a beautiful purity to it. That song is a real emotional song for me. I wasn’t gonna do it, ’cos I thought it was too personal. But I found a way to mediate it, found the right flow with the lyrics and stuff. I didn’t want to make it cheap, I just wanted to put some darkness into it, and it took me a long time to do it.
“To create anything you have to work at it,” he continues. “Especially with music. But you’re geared up all the time and then you need the release. One minute you’re in a van, next minute you’ve people screaming at you. What are you supposed to do after that – go and take a jog? It’s a problem. You have to be careful. I used to drink a lot more before gigs, but I’ve done a few gigs now completely sober and I think you have more control, singing more. It’s great to party, but I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. Although, if you put a lot of yourself into a performance, you need to come down.”
Presumably in the beginning alcohol helped Mick lose his inhibitions as a performer.
“I think it did but…”
Benjamin: “After a while, man, it starts fucking with your stuff. But it’s the afters that’s the really big fucker. You’re transforming from a metaphysical scenario, not real, to sitting in a tiny room again with your mates. It’s fucked up and bizarre. I remember back in the day playing gigs in Doran’s and you’d have four people clapping, and even that was a rush, y’know what I mean?! It’s an adrenalin-endorphin thing.”
Mick: “But there’s different ways to get your kicks. You can only sustain that life for so long and after a while it starts affecting your art and then you’re fucked. The more people at a gig and the more a crowd are into it, the easier it is because you can let them do the work.”
Benjamin: “Anyone need a drink? Another Bloody Mary, yeah?”
Another Bloody Mary for the road. A road that, on evidence of Aaagh, will rise with ROL for some time yet. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the new record is the rapacious commerciality of tracks like ‘Mary Caine’ and ‘Break!’. It’s a rub between spit and polish, between style and content, that reminds the listener of how the soundtrack to the coked-up and paranoid ultraviolence of Scarface or Carlito’s Way was not classic radio rock or feral rockabilly but ecstatic disco and Moroder motorik. But if ROL’s musical aesthetic borrows from hip-hop more than rock, so does their business sense.
Benjamin: “Dre said years ago, music and money. Shakespeare was a commercial player. Top Of The Pops doesn’t mean it’s not the shit. This idea that if something has to be credible you can’t sell records is bullshit. There’s very little shit at the top that isn’t the cream.”
Mick: “Not that we’re in it for the money. We’re broke on our asses, but we’re gonna keep doing it.”
And doin’ it, as LeShaun orgiastically moaned on the LL Cool J tune, and doin’ it well.
Photos by Graham Keogh.