Siamese Dreams

In those days rock stars didn’t take the tube,” says Power Of Dreams's Craig Walker. “It wasn’t the done thing. It was the end of the ’80s excess but the record companies carried that excess into the early ’90s. They had lots of money in those days from reselling back catalogues on CD to all the people who’d bought them on vinyl. A whole raft of bands from Dublin were signed. A House, Something Happens, Cactus World News – Whipping Boy, a bit later. It was the U2 thing – the biggest band in the world had come from Dublin and they were looking for that again. It didn’t last for too long. We got absolute star treatment for the first album, which was a bit mad because none of us had ever seen much money before, but by the second album when we hadn’t sold too much we found ourselves on the tube after all.” He sighs. “Reality bites.”

Power of Dreams still managed to produce two more records, and then Walker joined the British prog-electronica band Archive, releasing LPs with them until 2004. By this time, however, Craig had sunk into relative obscurity in both Ireland and Britan. He was recently disappointed to find that Power Of Dreams’ classic first album, Immigrants, Emigrants And Me (re-released this year on its 20th birthday), hadn’t made the top 250 Irish records in the recent Hot Press annual. Still, a couple of things might bring the LP back to prominence: a reformed Power Of Dreams and a new solo record from their frontman.
“A few years ago at an Archive show this guy came up to me and handed me a bit of toilet paper. ‘It’s my business card,’ he said. And he’d written his name on it – ‘Bardi Johannsen’, and I thought, ‘This guy’s cool’. So we recorded Siamese in Reykjavik on and off for three years.”
The duo bonded over a love of melody and ’80s pop.
“I’m a huge unashamed A-ha fan,” he says. “The ’80s were a golden era. Songwriters were excited by new technology, the synths and the samplers but they weren’t being led by them. I think that in the ’90s technology was leading and melody was left behind. ABC, The Human League – those bands just wrote great songs.”
His musical return to the ’80s coincided with a financial return to an ‘80s-style economy. Walker got to experience this in two countries.
“What do they say? Ireland and Iceland have only one letter in the difference? When we started recording this album Iceland was as crazy as Ireland was – everyone had brand new Apple Macs; in every cafe it was bling, bling, bling. By the time we finished the record that was all gone. I think they were happy about it to be honest. The place had really changed. The older Icelandic people in particular thought the ostentatious wealth was a bit disgusting.”
And Walker felt a bit out of step with ostentatious wealth himself when he returned to Ireland in 2007 after a 15 year absence.
“When I came back here first it was crazy,” he says. “I couldn’t believe the change. I used to shop in Lidl when I lived in London and I had these Lidl bags and a taxi driver told me a horrible joke. He said, ‘What do pussies and Lidl bags have in common?’ The punch-line was: ‘There’s a tight cunt at the end of both of them.’ And I thought, ‘Fucking hell, everyone is snobby here now’. People got swept away with it and they were led to believe it would always be like that. It’s gone now but I’m hopeful. The late ‘80s were pretty tough here but that threw up some great music. The same thing could happen now.”