Orchestral Manoeuvres For A Lark

When a band comes armed with a reputation of being a bit ‘wacky’, one tends to approach them with a certain degree of trepidation. Happily for all concerned, Dublin pop warriors Grand Pocket Orchestra are pleasingly free of twee bullshit. While they do have a tendency to ‘go a bit mad’ on stage, their sound practically demands it, all frenetic energy and dizzying time signatures.

In conversation they're reserved, softly spoken and often hilarious, as likely to go off on a tangent about Jean-Claude Van Damme’s best worst character names (for the record, their vote goes to Cyborg’s ‘Gibson Rickenbacker’) as they are to wax lyrical on their own work. Speaking of, new album Ronald & Sylma manages to pull off a neat trick, spreading 15 tracks out in just under 35 ferocious minutes, the result a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, "What the hell was that?" affair that will wear out your repeat button. Was there a conscious effort to be more radio-friendly with the follow-up to 2010’s critically acclaimed debut, The Ice Cream?
“You worry about that afterwards,” says lead Orchestrator Paddy Hanna. “You don’t want stuff to be inorganic, like, ‘Oh, we better shoehorn this in’. It’s kind of like that film Mean Girls. You know the way it’s really funny until the end and then they just shoehorn in this really forced happy ending? It’s awful. There are no rules to writing a successful song and people who think there are, are often a bit misguided. There are certain tricks you can do to get big hits but you can never say what the biggest hits are going to be.”
Still, lead single ‘Wednesday’ is perfect radio fodder. A relentless barrage of hooks, melodies and indecipherable lyrics, it takes a few listens before you can really get your head around it. Washed out yet undiluted, it's reflective of Ronald & Sylma as a whole; a potent mix of clever effects and live sound.
“Everything on the last album was jagged,” notes guitarist Mark Chester. “There’s not much reverb and we wanted to have that wash behind things so you can’t quite tell what’s making what noise but to also carry the melody. And warmth too. The other one isn’t warm at all because there’s no bass in it and… it’s really badly recorded!”
“The whole process of recording the first album was the most amateurish thing you could imagine,” Hanna admits. “We were hammered throughout the whole thing and playing with borrowed, and in some cases stolen, equipment. Lots of, ‘Oh, what does this button do?’. We had a little bit more knowledge this time. We were a bit more professional.”
Currently a part of the Popical Island roster, the five-piece appear to have found a home that suits them, sitting alongside like-minded contemporaries such as Tieranniesaur and Land Lovers, having previously run afoul of record label red tape.
“With The Ice Cream, we were shopping it around and it kept getting rejected,” recalls Hanna. “We almost got it out on an English label but they pulled the plug on it at the last minute. They said they really liked the ‘blippy bloppy’ stuff and then when they heard the album it wasn’t as blippy bloppy as they’d hoped. And it was just like, ‘Ah lads, we’ve got Fischerspooner on our label, you know? We’ve got bigger fish to fry.’”
With a penchant for onstage heroics firmly established in GPO lore, have they ever been outdone by the dreaded technical difficulties?
“We’ve played gigs in the past where literally everything broke,” says Hanna. “We played one gig in Kerry…”
“We were all plugged into one guitar amp and hunched over one side of the stage,” nods Chester, evidentally still emotionally scarred from the ordeal.
“It’s quite funny,” continues Hanna, “because footage from that gig recently surfaced on a Kerry tourism video and it was like, ‘Come to Kerry, the land of fun and glory!’ and you just see three seconds of us looking all cool, obviously the very start of the gig. They should have cut to the end where we’re sweating going, ‘What the fuck is wrong with this?!’ and throwing microphones at people because we didn’t know what to do. Yeah, show that in your damn tourist video.”
A quick Google of ‘Grand Pocket Orchestra’ immediately invites you to the band’s MySpace, that most enduring of social media outlets. A predictable hive of inactivity, there is one notable fan who seems determined to keep GPO up-to-date with all the latest country music news. Who’s the Garth Brooks aficionado in the Orchestra?
“We don’t update it,” sighs a bemused Hanna. “It says, ‘Album out August 27!’ which is for The Ice Cream and we’ve been trying to delete it for years. As far as country music goes, for a laugh, we used to play Christian rock songs because it’s so easy to play and you just sing, ‘The lord God save me from this darkness’ and we did it country music-style, it was filmed and put up on YouTube, just this completely haphazard performance. So I looked at it recently and there was a comment from this lad who was like, ‘Great tune, I really like the music’ and I figured he was totally taking the piss, so I looked at his videos and it’s all just videos of him just shooting an Uzi. The Uzi’s kind of gone a bit… in the ‘80s it was like every villain’s weapon of choice. It’s used well in Invasion USA with Chuck Norris. But why does he have the straps?”
Why indeed.

Ronald & Sylma is out now on Popical Island. Grand Pocket Orchestra play Whelan's, Dublin on February 24 as part of the The Music Show Hits The City series of gigs.