Reasons to be Cheerful Pt. 2

“THE THING about a career in pop music is that you’re only going to be famous for about five years,” sighs Julian Gough, lead singer with Galway’s Toasted Heretic and (therefore) an expert in such matters.

“Thing is,” he continues, delicately nibbling at a slice of dry toast (no pun intended, we’re, ahem, doing lunch), “it doesn’t particularly matter which five years they are.”

By my reckoning, that gives Julian and his band at least another two years of free admission to nightclubs and having people like me wanting to talk to them before the bubble bursts and the cruel indifference that is phonecalls from journalists doing “Where Are They Now?” features begins. After all, Toasted Heretic have been famous before. Loads of times! They’ve released three moderately successful home-produced albums. They’ve been built up, knocked down and then rebuilt again by the music press on several occasions. They’ve even had a couple of hit singles. Or to put it more bluntly, they’ve been there and been done over that. Still, even their most devoted fans thought it was all over after the Another Day, Another Riot fiasco with Solid Records, which saw their debut album proper sink without trace almost immediately on release in 1992. Nothing has been heard of the Heretics since then.

Until now that is. Mindless Optimism, their latest and, according to themselves, greatest opus is released next week on their own Bananafish label. And so, I’m here with Julian and his main collaborator, Neil Farrell, to talk about it.

The Year Of the Lawyer

So guys, what’s it like? “Erm, this album is personal. ‘Heretic Two’ – this time it’s personal,” laughs Julian, fumbling for words (this is their first interview for over a year). “Basically every song on the album is looking at the world and looking at various things the way they are and deciding that, despite everything, it’s still okay. It’s still worthwhile, looking at the appalling nonsense of life and coming to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter and everything is fine, it’s still worth being.”

“Yeah,” adds Neil, “Ten Reasons Not To Commit Suicide would have been a great title.”

We can take it then that you were pretty depressed over what happened with the last album.

“Not so much depressed, we were more angry,” says Julian without a trace of bitterness. “It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, I mean we couldn’t blame any one person. We’re annoyed that we got caught up in a set of events that wasn’t under our control. And we were misled and fibbed to a bit, which I didn’t like at all. I mean, we’re not babies, we didn’t have to be protected from the truth. I was very pissed off to find out subsequently that certain things had been going wrong and no-one was telling us. Like, when we were teenagers we were bringing out our own bloody albums. We do understand the business. We’re not these naïve artists who whine about being misunderstood by the record companies. Still, I guess we learnt a few lessons from the whole experience.”

“And we made a few lawyer friends” says Neil laughingly.

“Yeah – The Year Of The Lawyer. It was a bit of a disaster all round but some good things came from it. I wrote a novel and the band got great energy out of the whole thing.”

What’s your novel about?

“Erm, it’s about . . . me.” (Why am I not surprised?).

Go on.

“Well if you read it, it looks like a book about a band but it’s not, it’s a book about ME! (he says this very loudly and maniacally). And the reason it’s a book about me, apart from the fact that I find myself endlessly fascinating, is that I don’t exist anymore, that version of me isn’t around. It’s a book about the way I used to be and, by extension, the way many of my friends were.”

So what caused this change? The problems with the album?

“To an extent yeah. The book and most of the new songs came from the disappointments and disasters of the last year. You know, various ups and down, some of which you know about and some from more personal areas. I had some difficulties and my way of dealing with them was to get them onto paper. And if things hadn’t been going wrong for me, I wouldn’t have got that book written. It’s the same with the new songs. Songs can’t exist without things having gone wrong in various areas and I think that they’re great songs, so I’ve no problem with disaster.”

But surely it’s better when things are going well?

“Of course it is but all I’m saying is if you’re defeated now and again, don’t define your life by your disasters. That would be terribly sad. I’m talking about the way in which I changed, which is reflected through the lyrics.

“One of the consequences of the way I’ve changed is that I now know probably five times as many people as I did eighteen months ago. Somehow I opened up to the world. I was very closed off from people and the world, quite self-sufficient, and by falling apart slightly, I ended up noticing other people and that they existed and that they were real. So I got to know quite a few of them. In fact, I now know a vast number of people and a lot of them, a lot of people, do seem to have been broken by something when they didn’t need to be. It’s very easy to define yourself by a failure or a catastrophe. Something happens to you, something terrible, when you’re young and you circle it endlessly. That’s just so sad, and really, it’s not necessary. Nothing should defeat you but death. I genuinely believe that you don’t need to have your life ruined by anything, that it’s your duty to yourself to free yourself from your past.”

Neil too has some thoughts on this subject. “It’s also to do with being bigger than events that surround you, that’s one of the key things. If you have belief in yourself, and everything goes wrong . . . Y’know, speaking from my own personal life, if everything went wrong in the morning, from to do with the band, to do with relationships, to do with anything, I know that I’d be laughing about it by the end of the night. It’s like you can be so fucked by circumstances that you could find it very inspiring. I think that we all learnt that kind of self-belief through all the shit that happened last year and it’s one of the most amazing feelings.”

Artificial Legs

“Do you know what I wrote in my diary last night?” Julian asks us (rhetorically of course). “This might seem a bit wacky but I wrote that lately I’ve been feeling almost blessed in some way, to be allowed to live this life. Because, from my position now in my life, it’s fantastic and it’s almost self-fuelling. I’ve adjusted to the world in a way that means I can just keep on being happy. Whatever happens, I can deal with it. If I lost a leg, it would almost be fun, do you know what I mean? Oh, excellent, artificial legs, cool! Something new!”

Eh, thus the Mindless Optimism title?

“To be honest” says Julian, “I don’t want to sound like some wanker going on about how this album is the greatest achievement of our age. It’s not that, but what it is is a bunch of songs that say, I’m just going to talk personally here (looks over at Neil, who nods), that say more directly and more honestly than anything I’ve ever written before exactly how I feel about the world, and about life.

“I’m perfectly happy that people would disregard it, and not agree with it, but I’d just love to have it heard. Because I don’t think that pop should set out to change people’s lives, no that’s crap, but we happen to have created this album and I know that if I heard it while I was going to school then it would have changed my entire life. I fucking know it would. I’ve played it to lots of people, friends of mine, and asked them what they think and almost everyone gets it. They don’t have to listen to it three times. I think that in the past there was a certain preciousness to our music and to the lyrics. With this album, because we’ve all changed so much probably, there’s no war between the song and the listener, there’s no barrier at all.”

“Musically as well it’s a lot less complicated,” continues Neil, “a lot less wacky and an awful lot louder and more coherent. One of our problems in the past might have been that we did so much, perhaps too much with each song musically. You know, we’d go from jazz to swing to rumba to heavy metal. On this album there’s much more force behind the music.”

“Actually,” Julian laughs, “I think we both feel hopelessly inadequate talking about it. You know, we spent so long boiling it down to this little totally compact thing, i.e. the album. Everything that we’ve learnt and lived through over the last year, year and a half, we spent six months cramming into ten songs. So it’s all in there and it makes it difficult to talk about. It’s the first time I’ve understood what people mean when they say ‘let the music speak for itself’. You know, I find myself about to say something to you and suddenly I realise that it’s a line on the album.”

“Basically all we’re trying to say,” says Neil, “is that it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. There’s a single idea behind it all, you can call it mindless optimism but it’s not. Or at least, it’s not mindless but it is optimistic.”

Julian puts it best: “It’s like look at the world, look at the fucking mess that we’re all caught in the middle of. Now look a little closer, and think about it, and you come out the other side and everything’s alright. It’s fun, it’s a hell of an adventure.”

Goodbye Swear Words

Will you be disappointed if other people aren’t as enthused as you so obviously are?

“Well, I wouldn’t really mind. I’d be a bit disappointed in the world if it didn’t listen but it’d still be okay, because we’ve done our best. We have no right to demand that the world pay us attention. Anyway, there are so many factors involved that I wouldn’t take it as a direct insult if it didn’t take off.

“We haven’t got a major company behind us this time, so we’re going to have to try and license the album in France and America ourselves. If we can’t get a deal then it won’t sell. So I do realise that we’re still in the real world,” Julian laughs. “I’ll tell you one thing though – I feel in tune with my time for the first time ever in my whole fucking life at the moment. Like, I voted for ‘Creep’ as single of the year in Fanning’s Fab Fifty and it was number one and I just couldn’t believe it. Normally the stuff I vote for never even gets into the top fifty.”

Before I leave they play me the album. They weren’t exaggerating. There’s a laughable (almost) positivity emanating from the thing. Listening to it, all thoughts of deadlines, bills and fucked up relationships leave my mind.

“What do you think?” Julian asks me afterwards.

Very Zen, I reply.

He’s delighted. “Did you realise that there isn’t a single swear word on it?” he says. “It’s all distilled, you get to what you want to deal with and then focus in closer, closer and you come out the other side again. It’s the angriest album we’ve ever done and it’s the only one that doesn’t have a swear word on it.”

Fucking amazing.