SEX & DRUGS & BUTTERED SCONES?

“THERE ARE certain magazines that have adopted an editorial policy of hating the Sultans. That might sound paranoid but I know people working for them who’ve tried to rise up in our favour and been threatened with the sack. There was one review, in particular, where a journalist called us ‘morons’ and said, ‘if you see a Sultans fan, punch them in the face’. Our gut reaction was to go round and kill him but then these letters arrived saying, ‘don’t worry, he’s only a bollox’, and we realised that no matter what gets printed, people make up their own minds about whether you’re crap or not.

“If anything, that type of abuse brings you closer to your fans. We’ve all adopted the Wimbledon F.C. philosophy to life – ‘no one likes us and we don’t fucking care!’”

Niall O’Flaherty has just come as close as he’s ever likely to get to admitting that the Sultans of Ping may in the past have over-reacted to some of their less flattering press. This is in marked contrast to the verbal battering he gave the media in the Sultans’ last Hot Press interview, reserving his most caustic asides for the Dublin muso types who he felt had tried to stymie the band’s progress. Such was the ferocity of the attack that I’d brought along my personal minder-cum-photographer Cathal “one broken leg or two?” Dawson, only to be met by warm smiles, manly handshakes and a plate of sticky buns.

“It’s a truce rather than a declaration of defeat,” laughs Niall chomping on an oversize apple Danish. “We do feel bitter about some of the stuff that went on here – and continues to go on here – but we’ve said our piece and would now prefer to concentrate on what the Sultans are really about which is making shit hot records.”

CHELSEA BUN

Spoken like a veritable Perez de Cuellar. I’m only too happy to accept the olive branch and declare that the words “all”, “journalists”, “are” and “bastards” will take no further part in this interview. Shit hot records, on the other hand, we’ll gladly jaw about all day and while the Sultans’ latest Teenage Drug LP doesn’t quite fall into that category, it certainly boasts more than its fair share of poptabulous moments. Originally due to hit the racks before Christmas, the release has had to be put back until now due to a bizarre accident that nearly had us writing Niall’s obituary.

“It’s all the fault of a stupid fucking cameraman,” he explains, “who stood on Pat’s guitar-pedal while we were doing a live TV performance and switched it off. I started waving my microphone around to gain attention and, wallop, smacked myself in the face.

It hurt for a couple of days and then I thought nothing more of it until a month later in Japan when I got sinusitis and my face swelled up like a balloon.

“The people who came to visit me were going, ‘eeergh, the Elephant Man!’. There was a danger of poison getting into my eye and the swelling putting pressure on the brain, so it was pretty serious. The only consolation was that Japanese intensive care units are more like hotels than hospitals and as I was getting hourly morphine injections, I quite enjoyed it. The language was a bit of a problem but then again, when a Sumo-sized nurse holds up a big tablet and turns you onto your stomach, you know precisely where it’s going!”

At this juncture, we’ll take a 30 second ‘time-out’ to allow our readers to wince, re-arrange their undergarments and hope to God that their bottom doesn’t get interfered with in the name of medical science. Fortunately, from the band’s point of view, Niall’s hospitalisation came at the end rather than the start of a major Japanese tour.

“Actually,” picks up a scone-munching Pat O’Connell, “it was a tour with a difference because all the gigs were in high-schools. There’s this myth about Japanese kids sitting-down and clapping politely after each song but, in our experience, they bite each other’s ears and go as crazy as anybody else. One of the ‘serious’ rock magazines described our following as ‘rude little girls who spit’ which we thought was a brilliant compliment!”

‘Big In Japan’ used to be a euphemism for selling sod-all records anywhere else but nowadays with bands like Manic Street Preachers happily shifting 60,000-plus albums and radio stations devoting their entire output to overseas’ artists, it’s become an incredibly lucrative market.

“It’s still fairly insular, though,” resumes Niall tucking in now to a Chelsea bun. “80% of the records sold there are of Japanese origin but that’s why they get so excited about western bands. In Britain and Ireland, people have been spoilt to the point where they sit back and say, ‘right, impress me’. The only thing I can fault them for is being very slow to pick up on homegrown alternative groups. For instance, it wasn’t until they toured in the States with Nirvana that anyone gave a fuck about Shonen Knife and we gave them an extra push by mentioning them in all our interviews.”

The Shonens return the favour by lending their unashamedly girlie tones to some of Teenage Drug’s finer moments, just one of the surprises which sets the album apart from its, er, rather less sophisticated predecessor.

“Yeah, Casual Sex . . . In The Cineplex was pretty basic and that’s why we’ve spent over a year writing, arranging and recording this one. When you gig as much as we have, you can’t help but become better musicians and there’s stuff we’re capable of now that we simply couldn’t have pulled off when we first moved to England.

“The other difference,” he continues, “is that we’ve opened our minds to a far wider range of influences. We’ve been listening to Kraftwerk, the Beach Boys and lots of French pop, and saying – quite literally – ‘what can we use, here?’”

FONDANT FANCY

This magpie-like approach to songwriting means that ‘Teenage Punks’ owes a huge debt of gratitude to The Cramps, ‘Love & Understanding’ is the best song the Sex Pistols only half-wrote and ‘Michiko’ is equal parts Sham 69 and UK Subs with a sprig of Buzzcocks on top. High art it’s not but as an exercise in snotty-nosed bravado, it reveals Elastica, S*M*A*S*H and the other ‘New Wave Of New Wave’ bandwagon-hoppers as the fakes that they undoubtedly are.

“I thought ‘Shoegazing’ and ‘The Scene That Celebrates Itself’ were bad enough,” reflects Pat with obvious disdain, “but ‘The New Wave Of New Wave’ is really scraping the barrel. Suede have been ridiculously over-hyped but at least they arrived on the scene fully-formed. From what I’ve seen, Elastica haven’t worked out their image or how they want to sound either live or in the studio.

But what are they supposed to do? Steve Lamacq from the NME is the head of their record company and immediately they’re going to be the best new band in Britain whether they like it or not.

“When you’ve been busting a gut to get press, it’s not easy to say, ‘no, we don’t want to be on your front-cover’. A year from now, Elastica might very well be a good band but I don’t think they’re going to be allowed to develop.”

“‘Riot Grrrl’ is another pathetic attempt at creating a scene,” thunders Niall who’s now greedily eyeing my fondant fancy. “There’s nothing there musically, ideologically or any other ‘-ly’. It was presented as being very worthy and very intelligent – perhaps it was worthy but I never heard much in the way of reasoned argument and they walked themselves into so many paradoxes that it became a bad joke. Someone like Morrissey has the intellectual capacity to be controversial. He’s also a supremely talented songwriter which is a charge you could never level at Huggy Bear.”

Having given 75% of the current British music scene a sound kicking, perhaps Niall would care to stick his pixie-boots into the rest.

“There are some good bands operating from an adult perspective – Tindersticks, for instance – but that’s getting away from the basics.

What we’re about is teenage energy. Kids bashing their heads off walls and jumping around till they fall over. The worst thing in rock ‘n’ roll is art. Actually, no. The worst thing is pretence at art.

I can just about handle, say, Leonard Cohen because he’s being honest. He’s not pretending to be someone or something he isn’t.”

However dumb these sentiments might appear, a quick look at Niall’s face while he’s talking determines that he’s being totally sincere. Now that Simon Carmody’s on a career break, would Niall be interested in applying for the position of the world’s oldest teenager?

“Fuck off!”

Right, we’ll take that as a maybe. For much of the 80s, Cork enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the also-ran town of Irish rock. They may have earned themselves bucket-loads of acclaim but Nun Attax, Five Go Down To The Sea and Microdisney didn’t exactly conquer the planet. I can imagine then that there was much merriment, alcohol abuse and general depravity when not one but two Leeside bands suddenly found themselves on the same edition of Top of the Pops.

“We were in England at the time,” recalls Pat, “but I’m told there was a good buzz around town the day ourselves and the Franks charted. And I think that’s acted as a catalyst for the new venues that have opened up, the magazines that have started and RTE deciding to base No Disco in Cork.

“It’s a happening city but thankfully not in a bad, bandwagon-hopping sort of way. The British press tried to invent ‘Corkchester’ but it was such a ludicrous concept that it didn’t last more than five minutes. In fact, the only influence we’ve had on the new generation of bands coming through now is that they want to sound nothing like the Sultans of Ping.”

“Which is healthy,” agrees Niall. “Wouldn’t it be disgusting if Cork suddenly started drumming up dozens of Sultans or, worse still, Frank & Walters!”

When you see an advert for the Australian Ping Show at the Olympia, that’s the time to start worrying! Despite his obvious fondness for the St. Tropez of the south-west, Niall is now permanently based in London where he’s recently acquired his own bijou residence.

“For a variety of reasons, I’d find it difficult to move back to Cork on a permanent basis. That said, London is a very dull, very drab place at the moment. It’s certainly not the city of rock ‘n’ roll that it was in the 70s and 80s. Everyone’s desperately looking for ‘the next big thing’ but if there’s another Sex Pistols or Smiths waiting round the corner, they’re obviously well hidden.”

Now that he’s only a 75p bus ride away from the capital’s swankiest dens of vice and iniquity, has he become a consummate ligger?

“Unfortunately, after half-a-dozen pints I become a ligger with attitude and if you start calling people ‘prick’ and ‘bastard’, you very soon find your name being scratched off guest lists. I’m not overly fond of the incestuousness, either. Everyone’s up everybody else’s arse trying to stroke favours.”

“The rest of us,” butts in Pat, “are technically living in Cork but what that means in practice is that we spend one week out of every eight there and with us going to Australia and America this year, we’re going to get home even less.”

VIENNESE WHIRL

Having sampled the delights of rock ‘n’ roll stardom in Japan, are the Sultans looking forward to a spot of Teenage Drug-peddling in the colonies?

“The States is going to be a huge, great big adventure,” predicts Niall. “We’re in the process of sorting out a record deal there, probably with an independent, and we honestly don’t know what they’re going to make of us. Their idea of ‘alternative music’, certainly in chart and MTV terms, is quite narrow but The Cramps and The Ramones do okay and hopefully we’ll be able to find a niche too.”

With Niall and Morty’s well-documented love of the beautiful game, I suspect they’ll be trying to line-up the odd gig during July in New York and Orlando.

“I’m more interested in playing Nottingham the night Forest clinch promotion to the Premiereship! Actually, now we’re on the subject of football, I must tell you about our trip to go and see Gary Lineker – or, I should say, Gally Leenarkar – in Japan. Whereas in England it’s all beered-up blokes, you get more women at J-League games than men and they treat the players like pop stars. You know, the number 7 with the flowing hair gets hacked-down by the Oriental Vinnie Jones and they burst into tears.

“If I stood on the terraces at Milwall or West Ham wearing PVC trousers and a blouse, I’d get a few funny looks. We were dolled-up to the nines at Grampus 8, though, and they loved it.”

And how was old Gall . . ., sorry, Gary looking?

“Well, he’s definitely put on a few pounds since his Spurs days. It was pissing rain, there were ten men marking him and he didn’t seem particularly interested.”

And that’s where we must leave it for today. The last Viennese Whirl has been eaten, the final glass of Ribena drunk and the Teenage Punks From The Planet Sexy have to go off and rehearse.

“You journalists really are cynical bastards!”

Niall. You promised!