Shocked and Stunned

The adventure had begun the previous afternoon on a train bound for Galway from Dublin. I had been doing everything right, right station, right ticket, right train, but then I made my big mistake. I sat beside a nun.
Nuns are bad news. Nuns are ruthless and single-minded in their determination to annoy people. In particular, they have a fascinating ability to constantly, incessantly state the bleedin obvious. Somebody from Iarnrod Eireann is making an announcement, in that particularly gruesome accent that only employees of Iarnrod Eireann can muster, to the effect that we re all going to have our bottoms smacked if we leave luggage or clothes or radios or rocket launchers or signed copies of the new Carcass LP on unoccupied seats. "That s in case the train is full and people want to sit down," I m informed. Well knock me down with a miraculous medal Sister Boring, I d never have guessed.
I do not encourage this dialogue. Repeat do not encourage this dialogue. My replies restrict themselves to one word yes/no answers except when a glossy magazine pokes its head from the bowels of my new friend s handbag.
"Would you be interested in this," she asks, pressing it against my nose and giving me a headache. "I d love a look Sister," I say, catching sight of the photos of mudhuts and obese Irish priests saying mass for masses of malnourished African children, "but if I read on a train I LL PUKE MY GUTS UP ALL OVER YOU." This gets me off the hook completely. You should try it sometime.
The train arrives late and I m a bit pushed for time and I become even more pushed for time when I turn a corner and discover Toasted Heretic in shorts and sandals strumming some things, hitting other things and generally delighting a rapt, attentive audience of, oh, three or four at least. The net result of all this is that I get to Seapoint, where The Stunning are playing their first hometown gig in over a year, at a time when the band are too busy, what with soundchecks and everything, to talk to me. Imagine being too busy to talk to me. Cheeky buggers. We decide to wait until the gig is over before getting down to brass tacks.
Showtime. Support acts are the bane of my life and The Casual Tease are, well let s just say, not very good and leave it at that. Between bands I sit on the balcony, watching the crowd of around a thousand file in and out getting the two fingers from a bunch of likely lads just cos I had to be on the guest list to get up here in the first place. The Stunning brush by me, walk from the back of the hall to the front and the place goes loolah. And this is as good a time as any for me to start making confessions.
I am not, or at least was not, a Stunning fan. Sure I loved the first two singles. You d either be mad or an outrageous twit if you didn t cos Gotta Get Away and Half Past Two were a brace of the classiest, most agreeable records released by an Irish band in the last couple of years. We all thought The Stunning were going to be the best thing since Eamon Dunphy. (Dunphy is God, believe it.) But then they released two more, Romeo s On Fire and Brewing Up A Storm and these blew what they had into tiny little pieces. These were inhibited, clumsy efforts and I thought Oh well, that s another one gone , turned over and didn t lose too much sleep.
But tonight was an education. Tonight was me being forcefed humble pie. Tonight was sweat and excitement and fun and tunes and going home with a smile and a couple of ringing ears. You might think that this is merely a case of me chickening out, being nice because I m running scared or something but there are more shitty Irish bands about than most people care to admit and when the time comes and given the opportunity I ll have no qualms about saying so. Tonight that opportunity did not present itself. Tonight was brilliant.
How brilliant? I ll tell you. We re talking major league, grade A ooh ah Paul McGrath-type brilliance here. Tonight even the crap singles are great that brilliant. Seapoint becomes a throbbing, dancing, bobbing prancing madhouse. Half Past Two sees it turn into Wembley on ladies international hockey day with thousands of screaming schoolgirls singing every word and thousands more looking at me saying give us a jockeyback mister. Tightrope Walker is epic, a monster with fire in its belly dancing on tables yet embarrassing nobody. It grooves and lopes and lollops about and I d consider calling it sexy except that I d probably be excommunicated. Crawfish I can t stand.
But here comes the bit which will have the purists baying for my testicles. There are songs on show tonight which, if Steve had a voice which wasn t as deep and as strong as it is, could easily have convinced me that I was listening to the Go-Betweens (Testicles, we want em The purists). The Go-Betweens, as every sane person will know, were the best band in the world, a band of whom it is incredibly difficult, though sadly necessary to write in the past tense. You are all a bunch of tone deaf bastards is what I m trying to say here. The Stunning are so many things that I ll probably wonder how I managed to come up with this one when I next see them but tonight, God it was so obvious. And unexpected. And wonderful.
The old Stone Roses drumbeat has found its way in here too. Everyone dances like they wished there was no tomorrow. Romeo and Brewing Up A Storm come right at the end. And so do we. The place is like a sauna, perspiration trickles down my back and I itch like crazy. It s a good job I m far too cool to dance.
Afterwards in the dressing room the mood is strangely subdued. The fact that everybody is completely bollocksed may go a long way towards explaining this. Steve has dumped his sweatsoaked shirt and wanders around looking a bit like, I don t know, that Jesus bloke you sometimes see hanging from crosses in churches and graveyards and stuff. Even dying looks as if it may be beyond him so I decide, on purely humanitarian grounds, to postpone the interview until we ve all had time to recover. I get Steve s phone number, say see you tomorrow and leave. This is what happens.

For somebody who s about seven feet nine Steve Wall is a hard man to track down. It s one thirty in the afternoon, the band leave for Waterford at three and my train departs for Dublin and that night s Fun City wooh yeah extravaganza at roughly the same hour. We don t have much time, and none whatsoever for smalltalk, so it s hardhitting questions all the way, delivered in my legendary, no nonsense, evade-at-your-peril style, questions which you have a right to hear the answers to and which it is my duty to ask.
Erm, so how s the tour going anyway Steve?
"It s going well you know. The album s made a huge difference to it. For the first few gigs I don t even think the album was out and when it did come out it took about a week to establish itself. Reactions vary from town to town. In some places they re really wild while in others they re really well mannered. The other night in Longford it was mayhem. We had somebody out half the night just pushing people off the stage. In Cavan they re really nice; they come into the dressing room and sit down and chat to you and you can have a sensible conversation with them, but then you go to this place in Ballina called The Hothouse and it s full of fuckin loopers. Deejays in cages and all these farmers in from the country going mad to acid house music."
I pride myself on my knowledge of the local music scene. I know everything. I ve got spies. But I didn t know anything about the band s LP until it actually appeared in the shops. Was a low key approach deliberately adopted or am I just walking around in a coma?
"In a way I m sort of glad that we ve had a fraction of the hype that people like The Four Of Us have had. When Songs For The Tempted came out every bus shelter had one of their posters, they had full page ads in the music press and they sold 30,000 copies of the album. Nobody knew anything about The Four Of Us, they hadn t seen them, hadn t seen them playing live, hadn t heard the music and all of a sudden this album comes out and because people see full page ads in Hot Press and Q magazine, they say, Jesus they must be good and albums are sold on the strength of that sort of hype.
"The way we did it was the complete opposite. It was just through non-stop gigging around the country, we spread the gospel in that way and look at us, we re number three. People have been asking us about an album at gigs for the last year and all we could say was, when we get a deal . We got so pissed off using this as an excuse for people that we just said fuck it, we re going to put everything we earn this year into the kitty for an album and we ll do it ourselves.
"It went straight in at number eight on its first week. Totally out of the blue, we couldn t believe it. We had visions of this being a slowly climbing kind of thing and of running around the country doing record shop appearances and radio interviews with local stations to try and get it to go higher."
How about major label interest?
"We haven t really courted it that much. I used to send demos to record companies but that, as everybody knows, is almost pointless because they get sackloads of them. I think we re definitely in a stronger position because of the album. It s been sent out to most record companies on CD and already there s been a lot of interest from a guy from Arista who saw us at the Stadium with The Fat Lady Sings. He was fuckin raving about us."
What about your market? I don t for example see you doing a massive amount in England.
"I don t either. The album s being released there in September and I dread the thought of going around England in a van next October or November playing these small venues in Birmingham or Liverpool. I m not interested in the English scene at all really. I like some of the music that s coming out of there but when it comes to the laddishness of it all that s what I hate, it s so flavour of the month, there's nothing constant about it at all, it s just slap here s this unknown band on the cover of the NME. And everybody s saying wow-brilliant-man and the next month they re fucking slating them. The English thing is so segregated, it s just like their racial attitudes: you re into this style or you re into this music. I think in America and other places you don t get this and things there seem to last a bit longer. A lot of people have been saying that the band would go down really well in America because we ve got a bit of personality about us."
People use the word country a lot to describe you. Is this annoying?
"Not really. I can understand people saying we were a country band maybe two years ago when there was a country resurgence and we were writing that kind of stuff. I can only write music which reflects the kind of stuff I m listening to and that I m into and I slowly realised that, with the exception of Steve Earle, I wasn t really mad about it so we began to drop all the country songs from the set. Now we re at the stage where only two songs could be described as country. I just found that I wasn t listening to it anymore."
So how would you describe the rest?
"Most of the set is, I don t know, The Stunning s sound which is probably a melting pot of different things. One thing that goes through everything is a kind of groove. It is quite dance-orientated, although at the same time you wouldn t call it dance music."
Where did the LP title come from? Why Paradise In The Picturehouse?
"I wrote this song about two years ago called An Empty Feeling . I was leaving this woman at Connolly Station to catch a train to Belfast and I can remember walking around Dublin, brokenhearted, for about an hour afterwards. It was one of those winter evenings, lashing rain and everything, and you know that time on a winter evening when everybody s coming out of the matinees and they ve just got a glazed look about them and they re not stepping out into Dublin, they re in New York. So Paradise In The Picturehouse suggested itself for use in the song and then one evening when we were mixing it the line just jumped out and I said fuck it, that s it ."

I tell Steve about my theory that people who use words like picturehouse are in some way old-fashioned. He laughs when I ask him if he calls a radio a wireless but are his own musical tastes rooted in the past?
"I was mad into The Beatles s a kid. I used to go through stages. I had a Led Zeppelin stage which was me with the hurley stick in front of the mirror. I was into soul, then I got into blues and used to tape PJ Curtis show every night. I still have the tapes even though it s only crappy medium wave sound quality.
"Then after that there was the whole Sex Pistols explosion and I got sucked into that as well. It wasn t easy trying to get into it and living in Ennistymon, going up to the top of the house and touching the hanger off the central heating system to try and get to hear The Jam on the John Peel show, RTE had a programme on TV and it was mostly Rory Gallagher and The Boomtown Rats, but once they had a video for The Undertones Teenage Kicks, and it blew my mind. It was so frustrating being stuck in Ennistymon with an explosion going on in London or Derry or wherever, I d love to have left home and got away from the Christian Brothers. I remember getting my head shaved and my ear pierced, they made me take the earring out at school and when I went home I d have to open up the hole because it kept healing over. It was really frustrating for me growing up where I did."
Steve has little knowledge of The Stone Roses and I am trying to tell him about the song The Stunning do which sounds a bit like them. I don t know the title and am reduced to doing a mime. "It s the one that you danced to like this," I say, flinging my arms wide, shaking them madly and walloping some poor young lad in the mush. For a split second the lad (5) looks as if he is about to take action but he counts to ten and I am spared a beating.
What about groupies and on-the-road debauchery. Talk to me about making love the whole night long. Talk to me about syringes and puke.
"There are girls that travel around and turn up at a lot of gigs. It doesn t get out of hand though, it s all very Catholic. We re a bit like The Waltons, just one big happy family. As far as debauchery goes we just don t have the money. The album cost a fortune to record but we just said fuck it, we ll go into debt for it. There s a lot of stuff not paid for, we still owe money to people for the singles, we could be playing in Ireland for the next ten years and not get rid of the debt we have, it s swallowing up all the money we re making from the album as well.
"If we were rich enough to stay in hotels that s where you might see some debauchery. We travel back to Galway whenever we can. You get home at seven in the morning, sleep until three, then you meet the lads at four and jump back in the van again. One night we had a hotel after a gig in Cork and The Dixons were there and it was just mayhem. But when you re travelling home you don t get the opportunity. "
As I write this, and hopefully as you read it, Paradise In The Picturehouse sits proudly at number one in the hit parade. Maybe you re not such a bunch of tone deaf bastards after all. And by the way, if you ever bump into Steve, ask him to do his Emlyn Hughes impression.
Stunning just isn t the word.