Racing for the prize

When Kopek won, they were pretty low-key about it,” judge Rhodri Marsden said at the time. “They just shuffled on stage and said thank you. But there were loads of Irish in the audience, waving the tricolour and lots of girls down the front screaming and crying.”
A month later, and despite the continuing fuss around the Dubliners, they’re just as low key. Speaking to frontman Dan Jordan on the calmer side of Christmas, there’s no suggestion that it was they who emerged from amongst thousands of entrants to claim the overall prize at the Global Battle of the Bands final at the London Astoria. His references are to what “the contest” has done for them, and how “it” happened.
“It’s just not our style to win something like that – we’re strugglers,” he implores.
“From the start, we thought that we’d just go and have a ball. We were going around the country playing venues anyway, so we just entered on the off-chance.”
Yet clearly the rock’n’roll sound of the band – completed by Derek Kinsella on bass and Shane Cooney on drums – appeals not only to Black Crowes and Slash’s Snakepit fans.
Glen Matlock, former bassist of the Sex Pistols, and Steve Lillywhite, U2 and Rolling Stones producer, led the five-strong line-up of judges that awarded them the title.
“We were slightly worried that the judges would be obscure people who didn’t really know what they were talking about, and they’d pick some band that other people wouldn’t really be into,” Jordan confesses.
Yet the judging panel’s air of authority has lingered with them. Since the win, they’ve had management and label interest from Ireland, America and Britain.
“We’re taking our time and seeing what comes our way. We’re in no rush to make a decision.”
Indeed, the Kopek story began all the way back in 1998, when the three friends formed a band called Bloom. They were quickly snapped up by a small US label. The result was a four-month whirl around the States, which included the SXSW showcase. Then, returning to Dublin, they changed their name to Kopek. Establishing themselves as regulars on the live scene, they released their debut full-length album The Landing in 2001. Soon after, they relocated to the Netherlands. As you do.
“We went there, the three of us and one other friend,” Dan remembers. “Most of the time was spent writing and, well, doing what you do in Holland.”
In between their sojourns in questionable cafes, fate played a hand in taking them on a Swiss tour.
“It was odd, the way it happened. My neighbour heard me singing out of the window, and then he recognised me in a music shop, so we got talking. He ended up coming back and listening to the band and liked us, so he gave us some gigs in a snowboard bar in the Alps. Every time we leave the country, something good seems to happen,” he says, suggesting that Ireland may have caused them unnecessary struggle.
Handy for them, then, that part of the prize is to tour festivals around the globe for four months. The Kopek World Tour begins in Mexico in April, before heading out to America, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and then back to Europe.
Only adding to the envy of their peers, the prize also includes $100,000 (that’s €82,567.80, we’re reliably informed). And what do they plan to do with all that cash?
“It’s not going to be for anything directly band-related. I think we’re just going to keep it for ourselves. It’s like, ‘here you go, here’s this money for your eight years of suffering’.”