Seeing is believing

After a mere four months together, Dublin quartet The Voyeurs are making quite a racket on the live circuit, drumming up a full house on their virgin visit to the Temple Bar Music Centre with repeat performances at several key city venues. Chuck in a debut EP, support slots with high profile acts such as Snow Patrol and crowd pleasers The Revs, as well as daytime playlisting on Fm104, and it’s all ears pricked. For vocalist/guitarist Neil Dixon and bassist Darragh Deady, their rate of progression has been a bit of a shock.

“Don’t ask me who the hell all those people were cos I’ve no idea!” quips Neil, former guitarist with Sack, of the TBMC gig. “I think people must like the name or something,” he reasons.

“It’s great having that kind of support behind us,” adds Darragh. “People come up to us after gigs, moreso than any other band I’ve been in before, and say ‘That was really great’ or whatever; and then we see the same face at the next gig so we know we’re doing something right. It does wonders for the confidence of the band. If you’re not getting a reponse from people, then what’s the point of playing live? What’s the point of recording? The only thing that keeps us doing this is the response we get from people every time we play and that makes such a difference.”

Although only in the current line-up for a short while, both are seasoned musicians, with Neil first picking up the guitar early on in life.

“I started playing when I was very young, around nine or ten,” he says, “but I lost interest in it totally when I was about 12 or 13. Then when Oasis came along, I’ll admit it, I wanted to play guitar again. We set up the first incarnation of The Voyeurs at around that time. Loads of people were in bands where we lived. For our age group, Oasis were such a big thing because they were the only popular rock act that appealed to virtually everybody. People today who are around our age, 21 or 22, whether they’ll admit it or not, they thought Oasis were brilliant. And they fucking were!”

Influence-wise, they cite classic melodic rock with an edge, most notably The Smiths and My Bloody Valentine, threads of which can be easily detected in their sound. Quite a change for the gig-going public who had become accustomed to soft spoken singer-songwriters with acoustic guitars and shitloads of reverb, The Voyeurs represent a revertion to the ways of electric guitars laced with flangers and chorus and soaring melodies.

“I’m not into that kind of music (acoustic) at all,” says Neil. “Personally, I find folk bands boring. We’re in a rock band for a reason - we want to make noise! We’re pretty melodic, yeah, but we like to have a bit of beef behind it too.”

This ‘beef’, as they so eloquently put it, is in full swing on the EP which was released at a jammers gig in the Music Centre in April.

“We recorded it ourselves at home,” says Darragh. “A load of friends got together to do it. It cost us nothing to make. That’s the great thing about technology now – people can work on their music without spending ridiculous amounts of cash on big expensive studios.”

“With the EP, we decided to bypass demos and all that shit,” adds Neil. “That’s why we got it out so early. You can spend fucking years recording good demos and throwing them around, but you might as well do it yourself. At least people will listen up a bit more and it might be easier to get a record deal then if they see that we’re able to do it all ourselves. In terms of the music, we’re a rock ’n’ roll band. We’re not trying to do anything wildly obscure. You’re only ever as good as what you’ve heard before and it’s very hard to come up with something totally new. All you can really do is take what you’ve heard before and give it your own personal touch. A good song is a good song and that beats everything else.”