Song Not Dance Men

Dublin four-piece Neon formed last November, evolving out of dance act, Electro. Electro's founders Carl Hendrick and John Colbert, singer/guitarist and bassist respectively with Neon, had felt a strong need to develop. So they hooked up with drummer Adrian Woods, hailing from a rock background, and keyboardist Rod Morris, who 'd been making his own dance and electronic music at home.

"We've kinda changed the sound a lot from being a dancy-drum loop thing to much more like a classic sound," says Carl. "The fact that the name of the band was Electro was bad from the start. Electro is a type of dance music, so it's like calling yourselves 'Punk' or something. We thought the band should be about the songs and the people, not so much about the type of music we're playing. So we just decided to get rid of the name, keep the songs that we had, but do an overhaul on the sound, and just get it more organic and classic-sounding."

What do you mean by classic?

"Classic's reference points for me would be early Bowie, The Beatles, The Stones — stuff that hasn't dated," says Carl. "Like, when I listen to the last Prodigy album, it's only two years old but it just sounds so dated already. Whereas stuff like early Bowie still sounds fresh today, and it's timeless. So that's the kind of thinking behind it, and that's worked out."

"A lot of the time with dance music you're only there to dance," comments John. "I suppose you're not paying much attention to the song, but more the vibe you're getting off it. And we wanted to make the songs shine more than the sounds and the beats.

And the sounds that we were using at the time," he continues, "they're old too quickly. Unless you're out there and you're putting out an album tomorrow, by the time you get it out, it's dated. So we looked at getting rid of all that, but keeping a certain element of the drumloop thing, because we all listen to that side of music, and we wanted to keep it in our music. And it gives us a little bit of an edge on other people, with drum-loops and that."

"But it's just another tool, you know?" adds Rod, the band's keyboardist/programmer. "It's easy to put a drumbeat behind a song and for it to sound like a good song with a dance beat, but our vibe at the moment is to try and use the software and technology just like any other instrument — if you're building a guitar chorus, then the software is just another part of that. It's not like trying to fuse two different types of music together; we use it like we'd use any other good idea."

"I try to keep the lyrics very indirect," says Carl, the lyricist for Neon. "I'm trying to be as honest as I can without being cliched, yet cliches are cliches because they are honest and true. So I'm trying to pick universal themes and put them into three and four minute songs. You're taking big themes and putting them into rhyming couplets, which is very difficult to do without sounding contrived."

Carl illustrates his lyrical intentions with Neon's uplifting and anthemic song, "We All Belong".

"Obviously it means different things to different people," he says, "but for me it means the people who are into classic, to-the-bone stuff, lyrically and musically. And when I look at what's going on, particularly out of Ireland, with The Corrs, B*Witched, Boyzone, I just don't relate to that at all. That doesn't say anything to me about my life, it doesn't represent anything.

I'd like to think that 'We All Belong' represents those people who feel a certain way, but whatever they feel, it's not that — it's not Andrea Corr posing into a camera. There's a bit more to it than that."