State of independence

There is a season, turn, turn, turn. A decade ago the scene was dead, with a bare handful of Irish acts hardscrabbling to subsist in what was the fallowest period for domestic music since the early ‘70s. Five years later the capital’s gig circuit was very much resurrected, and if most of its denizens were operating from the rather overpopulated wanna-be Jeff Buckley enclosure, at least there was no shortage of local shows to check out of a weeknight, not to mention a healthy DIY ethic. Now, local acts never had it so good, with a proliferation of venues, indie labels, regional radio support and homegrown music TV shows.

This warmer climate has borne copious fruit. Dig the new breed: Fight Like Apes, Halves, Black Soul Strangers, Codes and The Coronas, a royal flush of indigenous acts. Remarkably they’re all self-starters too, and the independent ethos seems to have engendered a mindset whereby originality of expression takes precedence over appeasing A&R snifferdogs on the lookout for quick-buck xeroxes of last year’s models.
Exhibit A, Fight Like Apes, whose current EP for Fifa Records David Carradine Is A Bounty Hunter Whose Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch is out this month, and comprises four rowdy, synthcentric songs that defy description, or rather, demand references so unspecific as to be meaningless. This, singer MayKay confirms, was very much the point.
“Ding-ding!” she laughs. “We had no idea what we wanted to sound like, but every idea of what we didn’t want to sound like. I’ve no problem reading a bad review, I love reading a good review, but I hate reading an indifferent review. That really bugs me, if we haven’t made some sort of an impression.
“None of us can play guitars,” she continues, “but we kind of write guitar songs on keyboards. We always get jokes in venues about having his ‘n’ hers keyboards. Jamie’s got this massive Roland and I’ve got the tiny little micro-Korg, and they play nicely off each other. I think The Frames were our point of reference: if we ever hit anything even mildly resembling The Frames, we’re to all simultaneously jump off a bridge!”
Which would be a pity. Songs like ‘Accidental Wrong Hole’ (“You’re such a clumsy lover”) and ‘Snore Bore Whore’ make this listener long for a peek at the band’s comic book and DVD collections.
“Dead right! We don’t just pick our favourite bands and try and make a half decent sound that’s a mixture of all of them; we take influences from so many things outside of music. When I say to people that we take influences from cheesy kung fu movies, they say, ‘How the hell do you do that?’ and I really don’t know how it gets into our music, but I feel like it does. The funny thing is that the EP title is the plotline for a movie called Future Force that we found on the Internet. We were just looking for crap movies to watch. I was in convulsions for so long. I still get such a kick out of it, and I hope other people do.”
Dublin’s Black Soul Strangers on the other hand, have just released their Paramount EP on Faction records, featuring tunes that recall everything from classic Ruts to BRMC to the requisite Corbijn-complected Euro austerity. Song titles like ‘Down And Out In Vegas With Amphetamine Psychosis Again’ also indicate a fetish for both Bob and Hunter S. The EP was recorded under the watchful eye of producer Stefano Soffia (Snow Patrol, Director, Fields).
“He had a really huge impact on us,” says the band’s Barry Gorey. “He just seemed to magnify absolutely everything. He’s a very hands-on person, he wouldn’t be EQ-ing everything, he’d be moving mikes millimetres just to get sound we were looking for.”
Part of the Strangers’ masterplan was to avoid the club ‘n’ pub circuit in favour of perfecting their sound in rehearsals, a la The Thrills.
“Alan Cullivan, The Thrills’ manager, he’s a good friend of mine,” Barry says. “I hounded him for months with demos and just got advice off him. He was the person who advised us to stop gigging and go away and write and record. It’s a good approach. It was the sort of change we needed to make from being a half decent gigging band to being something a bit different. I’d been playing in bands since I was 16, playing every small crappy venue. When we crammed in gigs I was just trying to get songs finished.”
Codes meanwhile, already have a Top 40 single to their credit, ‘Edith’ (available on Interior Records), a rather beguiling slice of clairvoyant pop. Having a presence on the chart, says singer/guitarist Darragh Anderson, makes a world of difference to a band’s promotional campaign.
“Oh certainly, it just gets play-listed on a lot of stations more quickly,” he says. “Even seeing it in the chart keeps it in people’s memory, it gets requested that little bit more. We did it on a tight budget, so there was lots of blood, sweat and tears.”
Codes, like The Band and Bowie before them, reckon the space they record in is as much an influence on the music as anything in their record collection. Most of their material was sculpted in a haunted Victorian residence at the top of a suburban Dublin hill.
“It’s a scary place to be,” says Darragh. “We didn’t actually record ‘Edith’ there, but our next single was. I think you can hear the history of a place in a record, and hopefully we’ve got some dust on our recordings. I can say the same about lots of albums that I like. OK Computer for instance was recorded in an old ballroom as far as I know.”
The cover of ‘Edith’, incidentally, features a rather striking looking Tippi Hedren/Kim Novak-alike.
“She’s a model from Tel Aviv,” Darragh explains. “A friend of ours, Lili Forberg, is a professional photographer. We went to an exhibition of hers and saw the picture and it was exactly what we were looking for. It was kind of moody, and the model has that stern look on her face. We needed it to be the right girl. She needed to be stern but fair!”
Halves are another band worth keeping an eye on. Barely a year old, they’re an uncannily accomplished post-rock/soundtrack-influenced Dublin combo who’d sit nicely on any bill featuring A Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed, Mogwai or Sigur Ros. Their eponymous three-track sampler EP came out last May, and they’re currently working on a full length album, with a speculative release date set for the first half of next year.
“Almost everything we listen to is from outside Ireland,” says guitarist/keyboardist Brian Cash. “A lot of Constellation stuff, a lot of stuff on Fat Cat or Play It Again Sam, those labels. Dave, who plays bass and piano and violin, is from a classical quartet background, so his forté would be working out string arrangements, whereas Elis, one of the other guys, he understands electronics quite well. Myself and Tim are more into keyboards and guitars.
“Certain film composers get name-checked at practice, so eventually we’d love to be one of those bands who are lucky enough to make a couple of records and after that work on something in film. The first CD was like an introductory piece; we chose three songs that highlighted three different areas we are going for. We have a longer record coming out in spring that leans more toward string instrumentals. There are also big apocalyptic rock songs; the majority of the songs are about six minutes long and that’ll be more like what we’re doing live than the first CD.”
Perhaps the most commercially conspicuous act in this class of ‘07 is Terenure four-piece The Coronas, who’ve just released their debut album Heroes Or Ghosts and the latest single ‘San Diego Song’, the third in a hat-trick of Top 20 singles. The band, who in a previous incarnation were known as Kiros, have been playing together since they were 15. Now in their (very early) 20s, frontman Danny O’Reilly and guitarist Dave McPhillips are well aware that a debut album, like a debs’ ball, only happens once in your life, so you’d better look good in the pictures.
That debut showcases a band that is equal parts porous (vintage Britpop, third generation US punk, Radiohead and Jeff Buckley) and precocious (musicianly flourishes enhanced by a plush production job courtesy of Joe Chester, whose Murder Of Crows album wasn’t exactly lacking in the sonic department either).
“From the word go, after recording the first single ‘The Talk’ that we did with Joe, we realised that we were working in the same direction,” Danny says. “I really think he got the best out of us. We were delighted with it when we finished up. When we went into Phantom they were like, ‘So you got Joe Chester – it wasn’t Gareth Mannix in Grouse Lodge!’ We looked at a couple of other producers, but we realised after a couple of days with him that it was going to work.”
“You could see our sound evolving as we were recording,” adds Dave. “We started thinking about the songs a lot more.”
Of course, these days the stakes are higher for a band cutting their teeth in the studio, because those early demos might just find their way onto Bebo or myspace, which is a bit like having baby photos posted on the internet.
Danny: “We’ve just come along at a time when word of mouth can spread and you can let people know about what you’re doing. Some people are even saying the album is a Best Of of demos that we’ve done before, which is a good way to be. We’ve recorded a couple of songs at different times, but I really think we’ve nailed them now, finally, the way they’re meant to be.”
Dave: “I think now there’s more of an acceptance of and respect for an unsigned band or an indie band, and the way the music is going on with downloads and stuff, you can sort of get your music out there without the record company. It can only be a good thing.”
The Coronas have never been shy about cutting out the middleman. Their Live At The Voodoo Lounge official bootleg was doing the rounds of college campuses back in 2004, when they were still called Corona, and they followed it a year later with a self-titled studio EP.
“I really think that helped us so much,” Danny says. “We did a demo of a couple of songs, and we were just burning it off and giving it to people, and it surprises us the odd time now, people still come up to us and say, ‘I have that demo from ‘99 when you were 14. That was a cool song – would you do that again?’ That really helped us get a crowd. One of the first gigs we did in Whelan’s was sold out, and we had nothing properly released, we’d just handed around an EP. And there were people touting tickets outside. That was a turning point, and from then on we decided to record a single, and a month later we went in and did ‘Decision Time’.”
Which was the second of a triptych of Top 20 entries – no small beer for a band barely out of their teens.
“We had built up a following,” Danny points out, “and the songs were staying up in the charts for a couple of weeks; it wasn’t like a Daniel O’ Donnell thing where he’s telling everyone to get it exactly this week, and then it’s out of the Top 100 or whatever. We kept getting surprised. We went in to do an in-store for the first single at HMV and the bouncers were saying, ‘I dunno – we’d a band in here last week and they’d only four people at it.’ They weren’t really expecting much, and then there ended up being 80 or 90 people there, and they’d all buy a single straight away. The word was spreading.”
The band also made their Late Late Show debut recently performing ‘San Diego Song’, a tune whose pleasurably pained tone is pitched somewhere between hangover angst and pissed bliss.
“We were a bit tentative about releasing it after the album, because to be honest, in our opinion it’s not even the best song,” Danny admits, “but it is a bit catchy and radio friendly. We always thought it was more of a live tune or a b-side but Joe was one of the people who said, ‘You have to put your front foot forward; it’ll definitely get a bit of notice.’”
Dave: “Basically it came from a holiday in San Diego for six weeks, the piss up that it was.”
Danny: “We wrote it literally sitting on a couch in San Diego in a few minutes. And as soon as we played it live people started reacting to it, so why not release it? We’re delighted with the play it’s getting.”
So how did they pull off the Late Late coup?
“They were going to try and get us on after Christmas,” Dave says, “but someone pulled out at the last minute and it was ideal timing for us, with the album only out a week. But we don’t really have a strategy. For all three singles we’ve done some sort of video, just so people like the music show on Channel 6 or whoever can show it, and they love it, they’ve been playing the videos loads because they like to support Irish bands. The same with TG4 and City Channel, it all makes a difference. You just get the videos out there and send the same press pack you send to the radio stations. Get the acoustics out, ready for any excuse to sing into a mike.”