Seconds Away!

Time is a valuable commodity – and that’s an adage that Minutes frontman Mark Austin is only too familiar with.

Since his band trumped the likes of Star Turtle, 79Cortinaz and Chaplin in the Vodafone Bright New Sounds competition earlier this year, Austin has had precious few minutes of his own to think about anything else but the trio’s inevitable upward trajectory.
“We won the competition on the Thursday night,” he recalls. “Friday was a bit mental – we went into the rehearsal studio first thing that day, then it was straight into recording the single on Saturday and Sunday. We were in a constant state of tiredness over those few days, but it wasn’t as if we were going ‘Ah, this is shit, I can’t believe we’re wrecked, blah blah blah.’ We thought ‘This is cool, we could definitely get used to this.’”
Austin’s talking, of course, about their new single ‘Harmonic’, recently recorded at Windmill Lane under the supervision of Tom McFall. Along with a deal with Universal’s new digital label NoCarbon, its recording comprised part of the Bright New Sounds prize. I ask him what it was like working with such a respected studio whiz.
“Tom was probably the most open producer we’ve worked with,” he enthuses. “If we’d said, ‘I want a fuckin’ orchestra on this track’ he would’ve said, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s give it a shot.’ In terms of the single, we recorded a demo of ‘Harmonic’ last year, but it was a bit too long. This version is more tailored for radio. It’s a bit more of a slap in the face than the old one, I think.”
It’s certainly been a whirlwind couple of months for the band - but their victory in the competition, and even their participation (the finalists were the entrants whose tracks had been most downloaded) was begotten by a healthy dose of providence.
“I broke my hand playing indoor football at the start of the year,” Austin chuckles. “I was extremely freaked out when that happened. We were actually gearing up to record our own EP and put it out ourselves – we had everything planned, studio time booked, everything. I couldn’t play guitar for six weeks. We’d entered the Bright New Sounds competition at that stage, but they told me that it could be ten weeks before the bones fused. I got my cast off on the Tuesday, and the gig was the following Thursday, so it turned out to be a great thing – if we had released the EP, we probably wouldn’t have done the competition. Fate stepped in there, definitely.”
With their NoCarbon deal, The Minutes – who formed from the ashes of their previous incarnation Stars Of The City – are also making history as the first Irish band to be signed to the label. I suggest that it’s a lot of weight on their collective shoulders.
“Not really,” Austin disagrees. “I don’t feel as if we’re being put to the test. It’s the first time it’s been done in Ireland, but NoCarbon has released a good few things in England, and one of their bands, The Rivers, are doing OK. It’s the way the whole industry is going, anyway. It’s probably only a matter of time before there are no record shops.”
It must be a little odd, though, not to be able to walk into a shop and see, as many bands dream of, your product on the shelf?
“Maybe - but at the same time, you accept it,” he avers. “You don’t want a hundred CDs sitting underneath your stairs, which I’m sure has happened to every Irish band that’s ever put something out. As long as it gets out there and people are aware of it, they’ll buy it.”
Their transition from an unsigned band to being signed to a major label offshoot in a matter of days must have been more than a little surreal, though. Are The Minutes happy to relinquish a certain degree of power?
“It did all happen very quickly,” agrees Austin, “but it wasn’t really a case of them laying down the law and saying ‘Do this, do that, do the other’. I think it helped that we knew what we wanted. If we had gone in wavering on something, we might possibly have had our arms bent behind our back, but there was none of that in this case.”
And they’ve already got their eyes on the bigger prize, with Austin confident that they’ll build on their healthy start to 2008.
“We want to do an album – with someone, or on our own. There’s definitely an option to go further with Universal/NoCarbon, but I’m sure that all depends on how the single does. That said, we’re more aware of what we want as a band than we ever were; there’s no farting about anymore. We’re just going for it now, everything’s fallen into place. You could say that our time has most definitely come.”

‘Harmonic’ is out now on NoCarbon