Small but perfectly formed

‘Time Flies’ sang Michael Rafferty, frontman with The Minnows (née Tiberius Minnows), on the band’s debut single in 1991. Listen to him rhyme off a list of contemporaries and tourmates from way back then, and you’ll no doubt agree that it doesn’t half.
“An Emotional Fish were the great white hope at the time,” he says. “We played with Aslan and Light A Big Fire. Then you had the bands from Belfast of the time – the likes of Ghost Of An American Airman, Heat The Beans, Peace Frog. And The 4 of Us, of course. They were the boys that got ‘the deal’. But we always felt we offered something different to them all.”
Tiberius Minnows were one of the few Northern bands to make any popular impact in the lull that occurred between the end of the punk scene, and the mid-'90s renaissance led by Therapy?, Ash and The Divine Comedy. Their hook-laden, jangly Rickenbacker rock – showcased on the album Holylands – took the four Dungannon men off around the UK, Ireland and Europe, picked up a following in Japan, and, thanks to their ubiquitous debut hit, saw them establish a residency on radio stations and local TV programmes throughout the summer of its release.
“It was bloody everywhere,” Michael admits. “Made the Irish Top Ten, was voted Irish Single of the Year. Our follow-up, ‘Oh June’, did well too, but not as well as ‘Time Flies’. The big problem was we weren’t able to make the next move. There were big labels from across the water offering us deals, but they got turned down for the most ridiculous reasons. I mean, I can remember sitting with our management as they turned one down because of the royalty rate in Botswana. Unbelievable.”
“I think we were carried away by the hype,” admits drummer Stephen O’Sullivan. “And we listened to people who were constantly telling us to hold on until something better came along. We should have trusted ourselves a bit more. But at the end of the day, if we’d been obsessed enough about getting a deal, we would have got one. We were always just happy writing songs and playing live.”
Like many comparable acts, it wasn’t a single moment of crisis that sealed Tiberius Minnows’s fate (unless you count the time a DHSS clerk threatened to withdraw Michael’s dole money after seeing him play at The Empire), rather it was a slow draining away of enthusiasm that brought the operation grinding to a halt.
“We never actually split up,” Michael reveals. “We had a bit of a sickener and then life kinda took over. Stevie got married, day jobs and careers started to intrude. It just began to wind down a bit.”
Fortunately, with little bitterness in the tale, the boys remained friends throughout the subsequent hiatus – hanging out with one-another, swapping new band recommendations, and, eventually, almost a decade after first making their introduction (and after giving their name a short back and sides), they decided the time was right to start recording once more.
“It was a case of reassessing everything,” Stevie resumes. “There was no great strategy behind things. It was a very organic process. We would go off for weekends in Donegal and just play songs. It was a good way of feeling our way back in again. To remind ourselves why we wanted to be in a band in the first place.”
The result of all this –Leonard Cohen’s Happy Compared To Me – is, thankfully, much better than its title. It’s also a record befitting gentlemen of their vintage. While the band’s classic indie pop sensibility has survived the ravages of a decade of adult life, the lyrics (documenting break-ups, breakdowns, depressions, and various dark nights of the soul) bear the war wounds of some grim emotional experiences.
“It’s a pretty personal and intense album – pretty heavy,” admits Michael. “But I think it keeps the core Minnows’ values. We like melodic songwriting, like harmonies. So I think that stops it from being bogged down in misery.”
Due to be released this month, a mere 12-years since their last album, it’s a testament to the band’s self-belief and perseverance.
“We knew the songs were good and that people would like them if they got the chance to hear them,” says Michael. “We made a few mistakes previously – maybe we played too much, maybe we drank too much. But I think we’ve always believed in the band and the songs, and we’ve remained friends throughout it all. We enjoyed a certain level of success, but there are so many people out there who didn’t get a chance to hear us.”
Just like their first singles, the album is being released through Good Vibrations Records. A turn of events that delights Michael – “We’re really honoured to be on Good Vibes” – and also offers him the opportunity to top up his already impressive stockpile of Terri Holley stories.
“We were sitting in our house one night back in ’91 and heard a rap on our door,” he reveals. “When we opened it, Terri was standing there with 48 cans of beer and he walked in saying, ‘Let’s talk business’. It was a brilliant time. Lots of crazy things were going on. I remember him saying, deadly serious, that he wanted us to move to Hamburg for three months. But he was absolutely brilliant. He went to London on his own with a bag of our records and got them played on Radio One. Sometimes people forget it about Terri – but at the end of the day, he knows his music, is a great champion of the underdog, and is a great believer in the idea that you should get up and do things yourself. So, although we probably wouldn’t strike onlookers as a typical Good Vibes band – we don’t sound anything like The Outcasts and Protex – our attitude is in keeping with the label’s values.”

Leonard Cohen’s Happy Compared To Me is out now on Good Vibrations