ROO NATION ONCE AGAIN

This article should be unnecessary. If Gerry Casey, his brother Phil, and their old school mate Marty McMullan had followed the path that, back in 1997, everyone from the NME to assorted London labels foresaw opening up in front of them, then you’d probably know all about Roo Nation (or Roo as they were back then) by this stage of the game.

Four years ago (operating as a four piece with Scarlet Wilson) the band cut a dashingly discordant swathe through various open-mouthed Belfast venues – looking like Blur’s Co. Down cousins, but sounding like a stressed blender trying desperately to make sense of the chunks of Husker Du and Chic and Television and Abba and God knows what else that had been thrown into its merry mix.

Roo looked the part, carried themselves with a degree of savvy and suss that their grungier contemporaries could only yearn after, and were capable – amidst the angular madness – of writing absolutely sublime pop songs.

When, pre-Charlotte, Gerry was offered the job of Ash’s main guitarist by Tim Wheeler, he didn’t even think about accepting. His own band were on the cusp of great things.

Then it all went quiet.

“We lost our way a bit,” Gerry admits. “A lot of our mistakes were made in front of a lot of people. We had been together for two months and had loads of record companies watching us. But we’d only eight songs written. We couldn’t cope. We thought that success was a given and just stopped writing songs. There was a dark night of the soul. We were playing a gig at Katy Daly’s and were like spoilt little bitches who just knew we were going to get looked after. And we got heavily shat upon. We didn’t even finish the show, just stormed off home and had a crisis meeting where we decided we’d never play any of that stuff again. And we didn’t.”

Roo, it seems, were in the middle of an identity crisis. Painted into an indie boy corner, they were actually spending their evenings listening furtively to the back catalogues of Ninja Tunes and Warp – getting progressively more obsessed by the expansive musical alternatives offered by the likes of Aphex Twin and DJ Shadow. The effect this had on a guitar-based foursome was debilitating.

“We were spending three or four months writing one song,” says Gerry, “and that’s why they were turning into these huge gestalt monsters – really it was four different tunes trying to get out. But that’s very much history. We’re a different band now.”

Following Scarlet’s departure, Roo are now Roo Nation and gone are the squealing guitars and songs about girls. For the past year and a half the band have been running The Incubator club in Belfast’s Menagerie, building their own studio (“It’s got eggboxes and everything”), getting to grips with a host of new equipment, and slowly going about the business of constructing a new more representative sound for themselves.

And what they’ve emerged with goes some way towards easing the concerns of anyone who thought they’d missed their boat. Whereas the band’s previous material veered off on a hundred different tangents at once, there’s now a satisfyingly coherent meshing of breakbeats and sultry drum and bass.

Soulful where they used to be schizoid, fluid where they used to be frantic – Roo Nation are about to re-emerge and remind us why they were so special in the first place.

“We believe in this music. We want to give the fucker wings. And the only way to do that is by bringing it to people.”

Which means that, after a period of brave readjustment, Roo Nation are now setting their sights on pastures new

“I just think we’ve grown up an awful lot, become different people,” says Gerry. “I think at the minute we’re really in need of a change of geography. There’s a lot to be said for the fact that you can work away here without being bothered or pressurised, but, as a place, there’s a lot of big problems, and I’m not even talking about the obvious ones. When you’re trying to do something creative here, the immediate barrier you come up against is the lack of any real peers. If we were living somewhere like Bristol – where there’s a thriving culture, a thriving, challenging scene, with people you want to aspire to emulate, then it would definitely help. At the minute we just feel out on a limb. We’re sick of struggling in this place, we’d rather struggle somewhere else for a while.”

Fingers crossed, Belfast’s best-kept secret is looking set to slip.

The Incubator runs every second Thurs. at The Menagerie in Belfast