Sew Far, So Good

“This record does feel like it was made with hands,” says drummer Peter Maybury, “not with computers.”

The man’s got my attention now. After all, this is not something you hear often in the blip nebula that is 2010.
Alternative rockers Thread Pulls are proudly taking me through the album art for New Thoughts, their debut LP, which Maybury designed. On the cover, an unidentified man holds part of a loudspeaker to his ear; “If you reverse the wiring of a loudspeaker it becomes a microphone,” he explains, “and when we were recording, (producer) Stephen Quinn made up a microphone for the kick drum from an old loudspeaker. It picks up all these sub-based frequencies that other microphones can’t. Your ear is normally a receiver and I really liked the idea of reversing that with a loudspeaker.”
Thread Pulls began life as a trio, but when drummer Ed Kelly moved on in 2008, he left the band in serious need of a line-up shuffle. Bassist Maybury switched to drums, guitarist Gavin Duffy switched to bass. Between them they also play synthesizer and trumpet… oh and Duffy sings. Got that?
“The old stuff was radically different,” Duffy recalls.
“I still really like it,” Maybury says, referring to two full Thread Pulls albums that remain on the shelf. “I think it really stands up, but it’s just something else – it was more of a niche interest.”
Niche or not, the band was quickly picked up by some crafty Scandinavians for a string of European shows, even releasing some material on Copenhagen label, Escho.
“Nils Bysted (founder of Escho) saw a review and ordered our EP online,” Maybury explains. “It seems that we weren’t very good at sending it out – a month later he hadn’t got it! He contacted Gavin by email and said ‘Where’s my CD?’ and Gavin kind of picked up a friendship with him. He had us out in 2006 in Copenhagen for a festival and we still tour with his band, Thulebasen.”
Dividing their time between Scandinavia and their home town of Dublin seems to have paid off for the talented twosome, with more than a few hacks dubbing New Thoughts a late contender for Irish album of the year.
“Playing a show here you’re more aware of your surroundings,” Duffy says. “In Europe, every day you arrive in a new city to a venue that’s completely different to the venue from the night before. You’re not aware of who’s coming to the show or what the set-up is and there’s a bit more freedom with that.”
“For me, Europe was a good kick up the ass,” Maybury adds. “You show up with your stuff, every venue is different, no set-up is ideal but you realise that you’ve got your 40 minutes and you’ve come all this way to play that show, so you just give it everything.”
On this side of the pond, Thread Pulls have supported everyone from Fuck Buttons to David Kitt, RSAG to Osaka label mate Patrick Kelleher. Their LP launch in the Workman’s Club last month was their first Irish headline show; “It was slightly overwhelming,” Duffy admits, “When you’re doing support shows you have the comfort of just warming up for the other bands, so it’s only when we got to the venue that we realised ‘This is our show!’ It was really great to see people turn up and really get into it.”
How does a Thread Pulls song come about?
“It’s all pretty easy,” Maybury shrugs. “We don’t consciously say ‘Okay, let’s write something new’, we just kind of set up and play and a sound happens and it goes from there. An idea tends to emerge after a few minutes and you play around with it for a while and come back to it a week later to see if it’s any good. Gavin’s amazing in that he can just start singing spontaneously…”
“It’s just the way we work,” Duffy blushes. “A melody comes out and it’s more to harness some sort of structure to see if this idea will work. Then you can go back later and actually write the content properly.”
Thread Pulls’ groovesome, hook-laden sound is very obviously not the work of a stylophone or an ultra flashy Tenori-On and Maybury’s on the money when he says New Thoughts feels like it was made with hands. In fact, Duffy’s old school freak-out trumpeting often becomes the star of the show.
“I think it might have appeared on stage at a few of the very early gigs,” Duffy laughs, “but it wasn’t actually played! When you’re used to playing a bass guitar there’s a sense of comfort in that, but it took a bit more guts for me to play the trumpet, because it really has to be right.”
“It really made sense,” Maybury notes, “we’ve got this fairly sparse arrangement of a really reduced drum kit and bass – the trumpet just had this lovely kind of purity to it.”

New Thoughts is out now on Osaka Records. Thread Pulls play Club Head Bang Bang, Tralee (October 7), The Model, Sligo (8), The ESB Substation, Cork (9) and Block T, Dublin (11).