Strange Frequencies

The story of Black Soul Strangers is not a new one. Three friends from Dublin (Barry Gorey, Martin Daley, Conor Tobin) knock around in different bands, meet up with a drummer from Donegal (Brendan O’Mahony) and decide to form a band. With a singer in tow they spend a couple of months playing every venue that would have them. Then, when said singer decides he’s had enough, Barry takes over and the band decide that they want to do something else… disappear.

“We rented this old solicitor’s office and went and sat in there for a year, just writing,” explains Barry. “We decided that if we wanted to give a proper bash we had to get some great songs together so we concentrated on that rather than gigging. The four of us knew what direction we wanted to go in, rather than before with five people. We had to sit down and construct these songs. Then we started to do one or two gigs and then it all went mad, with labels and managers chasing us.”
So having made the conscious decision to take themselves out of the music industry for a while, Black Soul Strangers had to learn to deal with it. “It’s really hard. It takes the shine off everything. People expect more of you when it’s not just four friends in a room having a laugh. Suddenly it’s actually good and you have to go somewhere with it. You get this whole business side of things involved and it’s a completely different aspect to take in and deal with. When it happened we just had to take it on board and once we got our manager sorted we were just told to go off and write and record.”
The final decision was to go with Faction Records, the label with a strong track record of nurturing new talent. Barry for one was impressed. “I remember when it started out thinking it was a great idea. The bands that they had on that compilation were great, it emerged out of that whole bland Irish music scene with these exciting bands.”
What does he mean by this? “Irish music is in a healthy state in some ways, a lot better than it was five years ago but that’s only in terms of Ireland. With respect to bands succeeding in the UK or the US, nothing has happened. The Thrills completely fell on their arse. To me they were a band who inspired me when I started writing music because they were selling millions of records around the world. Then you get great bands like The Immediate who fall apart.”
“The first thing we said when we started out was that we didn’t want to be another Irish band, we didn’t want to tour up and down Ireland for six months of the year. It’s so easy to get like that because it’s cash in the hand and you need that money but we never sent any of our early demos to anyone in Ireland, it was always to the UK or the US. When we do get our album together the plan is that it won’t be this big push in Ireland. Anything that happens in America or Britain will always transfer back to Ireland anyway. It’s blatantly obvious.”
Such confidence and, yes, arrogance manifests itself in the band’s debut EP. Like most other bands of their generation, the prospect of releasing an actual product still excites them far more than simply posting music on the web. “We’re at a point where you could put songs out every week but you can’t beat producing a physical thing, to work away towards your goal. That helps you push yourselves more to getting somewhere. It helps focus your mind creatively. We want to work on the songs, the running order, the artwork, everything. It becomes a statement of where we are as a band.”
With Paramount out there, the band are undertaking a fair amount of those gigs that they once eschewed. Don’t expect to see much of them after that though, as the aim is still to take the album that follows to other shores. Is Barry worried about the same sort of backlash that greeted bands who have taken that route in the past? Apparently not. “Ireland is a terrible nation of begrudgers. When someone becomes successful the easiest thing you can do is attack them. I remember someone telling me about bands getting slagged in the street just because they’d been successful. That wouldn’t happen in any other capital city in the world but Irish people do it. That’s fine, it’s only one country in the grand scheme of things”.