Roy Division

“Sorry, I just can’t stop yawning!”

It’s barely gone six on a Thursday evening and Royseven’s Paul Walsh looks like he’s Father Jack-style chugged down a bottle of
Dreamy Sleepy Nightie Snoozy Snooze. Normally I’d be worried that this desperate yearning for 40 winks has something to do with my interview technique, but Paul and the chaps are just back from a rigorous bout of German promo, which allowed for little in the way of quality duvet time. Not, I hasten to add, that Clonmel’s most rocking and rollingest former resident is complaining.
“It’s been a busy but brilliant few weeks,” the bequiffed singer enthuses between revitalising sips of Southern Comfort & red. “We had gigs in Hanover on Tuesday and Wednesday for something called CeBIT Sounds, which is a technology and music festival, and before that we were doing loads of radio and press interviews. We’re associated with the Volkswagen Sound Foundation, an annual initiative whereby a panel of industry experts choose three bands – one rock, one pop, one R&B – who receive a tour bus for the year, a five-figure cash sum and loads of great gigs. Our mentor and the guy who insisted on us being one of those acts is Henning Wehland, the singer with a really famous German band called – unfortunately – H-Blockx. I wanted to ask him, ‘Do you know what your name means in an Irish context?’ but it never seemed the right time!”
Cathy Davey was the subject of considerable internet sniping before Christmas when she became the face of Lexus cars in Ireland. How have the German bloggerati reacted to Royseven hooking up with Volkswagen?
“It hasn’t in any way been an issue,” Walsh says. “I don’t know what Cathy’s deal with Lexus is, but Volkswagen have been doing their Sound Foundation for at least 10 years now, and pump a lot of money into music. I was talking to the Marketing Director yesterday and they’re actually considering starting their own label, so it’s that level of commitment. I think that criticising bands for accepting sponsorship is more of an Irish and British thing, and largely unfair because record sales are down and musicians like everyone else need to make a living. As long as you’re not artistically compromised by it, I can’t see a problem.”
Having bid a not particularly sad farewell to Universal Music Germany in 2007, Royseven signed a new deal with Roadrunner, a label normally associated with extreme metallurgists like Slipknot, Slayer, Obituary and the deeply unlovely Deicide.
“You should have seen the comments when they put up some of our videos on the Roadrunner YouTube channel – ‘Oh my God, this is gay shit!’ Roadrunner were at one stage a 100% death and thrash metal label, but recently they’ve diversified and signed bands like ourselves, Moloko, Friendly Fires, Young The Giant and The Wombats. What’s great is that the Roadrunner founder and CEO, Cees Wessels, won’t let a band join the label unless he’s personally okayed it. We didn’t get that sense of everybody from the top down rooting for us at Universal – especially after our A&R man quit and went to Roadrunner, which is how this latest deal came about. In fairness to Universal, they admitted they didn’t really know what to do with us and gave us back the rights to our debut album, The Art Of Sincerity – something they’d never normally do.”
During the time Royseven were label-less, Paul kept the wolf from the door by doing punditry for RTÉ television.
“Without that and the generosity of my parents, I really would have been a starving artist,” he reflects. “I enjoyed the RTÉ work and would love to go back to it in the future, but it was a relief when Roadrunner signed us and we were able to become full-time musicians again.”
Nixers knocked on the head, the band started assembling the songs that last September they went into a Hamburg studio to record with Andreas Herbig, whose production CV includes such heavy-hitters as a-ha, Phil Collins and Enrique Iglesias.
“Andreas started off as the proverbial teaboy in a studio – he never went to sound training school or anything – and now has something like 30 Top 10s and combined sales of 65 million to his credit. Without turning into Boyzone, we wanted this album to have a poppier edge, which he’s definitely given us. It was weird working with Andreas at first because he doesn’t take any prisoners – if he thinks something’s shit he’ll tell you! – but once we were a few songs in, we realised he was absolutely the right man for the job.”
He was certainly the right man for radio, with major stations like Munich’s 95.5 Charivari and Kiel’s Delta FM, who are also big admirers of the Choice-winning Two Door Cinema Club, immediately adding Royseven’s ‘We Should Be Lovers’ and ‘Killer’ singles and their parent You Say, We Say album to their playlists.
“There’s a fans’ Royseven street team who’ve been brilliant at texting and e-mailing in requests, but then it’s down to those stations believing in the new material and wanting to play it.”
Germany isn’t the only country where Royseven have suddenly found themselves being salivated over by eager DJs.
“Most Irish artists complain – with, it must be said, some justification – about being ignored by radio, but ‘We Should Be Lovers’ is No 8 on the midweek airplay chart here. Beat in Waterford were the first to pick up on it, then we got FM104, 98, 2fm and Today FM. I’m a big fan of Twitter, Facebook and all the other forms of social networking, but none of them have even a hundredth of the impact of being played every morning on The Ray Foley Show.”
Current Irish commitments taken care of, Paul and his bandmates return to Germany in April for a couple of arena shows with One Republic.
“They’re 15,000-capacity each, so I’ll have to brush up on my Bono-isms,” he laughs. “We got a taste for big gigs when we played a World Cup Fan Festival in Gelsenkirchen with Bryan Adams that had 22,000 people at it. We did another four dates with him including the Montreaux Jazz Festival and, honest to God, he couldn’t have been nicer. He’s known for being quite vicious with support acts – he’s thrown bands off his tour after just one gig – but he came into the dressing-room every night and said, ‘Thanks, you were great!’”
I’d be guilty of gross dereliction of journalistic duty if I didn’t ask about the video for ‘We Should Be Lovers’, which has five alternate endings including one that has turned young Mr Walsh into something of a gay icon in Germany.
“The storyline is that me and my girlfriend appear to be very much in love, but coming back to the house one day I find her in bed with another man,” Paul explains. “At which point the video stops and you’re asked to choose an ending depending on how you feel – do you feel desire, do you feel lust, do you feel disbelief, do you feel anger or do you feel hate? The options are 1) I walk in and punch him; 2) It was all a Dallas-style dream, which is the one that’s gone out in Ireland; 3) In a prolonged scene I give him a kiss, and her a look that kind of says, ‘Up yours!’; 4) I slap her; and 5) We end up having a threesome.”
Is there one in which art is imitating life?
“That’s for the viewer to decide,” he laughs. “We wanted the video to be ambiguous and I think we’ve succeeded!”

Royseven’s You Say, We Say album is out now on Roadrunner. You can listen to 'We Should Be Lovers' on hotpress.com now.