Stunning Farmer Slur

Oh, don t ask me.
Sorry, but I must. I want to know. Hot Press readers want to know. Most importantly, it might make a nice opening paragraph anecdote. Isn t it true that you came this close (makes a gesture with index finger and thumb indicating a very small space) to landing the part of Deco Cuffe, obnoxious lead singer, in The Commitments?
They were auditioning me for the part of the singer, and they had me learning off these Otis Redding songs. It was an experience, but I m glad I didn t get the part.
Readers tempted to make disbelieving grunting sounds at this junction and mutter, Oh yeah? in a sneering fashion should note that Steve looks as if he s entirely in earnest.
I don t think it would have worked with The Stunning. At the time I didn t know if I d even take the role if I got it, cos I knew the lads in the band were a bit worried about it. If I had accepted it, it would just have been for the few bob, not to further an acting career. I knew at the time it wouldn t be good for the band.
The band is first and foremost in my mind. It s something I ve dreamed about ever since I was ten years old and learned how to put a record on my mother s record player by myself. I think it d be a bit upsetting if something happened, some mistake took you on the wrong course and planted this idea of you in people s minds that wasn t really you.
Ironically, it was an interest in acting that led to the formation of The Stunning in the first place. The band came about purely by accident in this case a very painful motorcycle accident in which Steve s face came into uncomfortably close contact with a stretch of road, forcing him to have a steel plate inserted in his chin. At the time, he had been planning to move from Ennistymon to Dublin to further an acting career.
The week after I came out of hospital, I moved to Dublin anyway and went looking for a flat, with this huge bandage on my face, he explains, wincing slightly at the memory, and I d arrive at a flat and they d just get an awful shock they thought I was some sort of lunatic or a drunkard that kept falling down basements.
I should have just stayed home and let the thing heal. I didn t get any acting work! I couldn t enunciate or anything.
(Unfortunately, Fair City was not yet in existence.) The whole lower half of my mouth was completely dead, so I just decided after a while, Well, it ll suit rock and roll! , he laughs.

Steve Wall s face does not look like that of a man who has undergone extensive surgery. In fact, if this is what falling off motorbikes does for your appearance, I m tempted to give it a try, which should please any Manic Street Preachers fans out there. Apart from being embarrassingly good-looking (as opposed to those of us who just look embarrassing) he is much more animated and talkative than I had expected.
Generally I d yap for ages about something, he admits. Some nights I m on stage and I m relaxed and everything is going really naturally and I d talk to the audience, then there s other nights when I have to keep saying to myself you have to connect with the audience, you must talk . . . The Stadium gig we did recently was really bad I was a bit cranky that night. I dunno why.
Everybody around us was getting worked up about it, and we were getting worked up, when I mean, it s just another fucking gig. We d just played six gigs in seven nights the week before that, and we were well rehearsed and tight. My brother Joe was great though he d sense it and cover up on nights when I m a bit funny.
I was uneasy because the place was filled with journalists, you just feel more scrutinized and it s almost like an interview. You feel that there are people writing marks out of ten. That s always the case when we come to play in Dublin. You know that all the journalists are going to wait till then to come and see you.
This Dublin -v- Country divide is something that s apt to crop up repeatedly in conversation with members of The Stunning camp. Along with the Sawdoctors, they are the most successful non-Dublin band of recent years, non-Dublin, that is, in both origin and inclination. Without being as blatantly countrified as the Sawdoctors, they share a sense of allegiance to the west of Ireland that lends a distinctively Irish sound to their music. So how Irish are The Stunning exactly?
I see us as being very much an Irish group and I say Irish in capital letters. I have highlighting it in a way, but there is a big gap between Dublin and the rest of the country in terms of music. And the media and music press have not helped that at all. But I think in the past couple of years they ve had to sit back and rethink the whole thing because there ve been bands like ourselves, the Sawdoctors, Engine Alley, Devlin, Toasted Heretic and the Cork bands like the Frank and Walters and The Sultans of Ping FC, who ve come through. It wasn t expected. There s always so much attention focussed on Dublin. A&R men coming from London got as far as Dublin but as far as they were concerned, outside of that was hillbilly country.
And in the meantime, in the shadows, and just sort of fertilising away down the country, he continues with a laugh, were all these bands doing their own thing, and that s why they re all so different. Even within Galway, the bands are poles apart, whereas in Dublin, they haven t been as original or something. It s taken everyone by surprise here, and I think it s a great thing.
Steve is wary of sounding like some begrudging bog-man, due to his own experience of living in Dublin.
I m not speaking as a country man who s going to stand up for the West and all that sort of thing. I was born in London and lived there till I was six years old and my folks moved to Dublin. This is why I understand the difference, because I was regarded as a jackeen and then moved down to Ennistymon and was hated in school because I d a very strong Dublin accent.
We were regarded as city slickers that thought they knew it all, and the thing is, when we arrived down there, that s exactly what we thought. We thought, all these lads down here, they don t have a clue, they don t know about Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Sex Pistols and I knew, because I was brought up in Dublin and I felt above it all. But over the course of a year and through various fights, I realised the amount of culture that exists there that is so deep and rich.
I went from a school that was really big in first year in Templeogue there were something like four hundred pupils to Ennistymon where there were eleven of us in first year! You couldn t get away with anything, there was no back of the class, there was just one row across!
But I m glad now that it happened. The people are different in a lot of ways. The people outside of Dublin tend to be a bit insecure when they arrive in Dublin, but the difference is that when Dublin people are down in the country, they re the opposite. They re sort of cocky almost as bad as the yanks who keep saying how quaint everything is.

All of this had a definite ring of truth as far as I m concerned. I remember holidaying in Kerry, at about the age of 15, and being amazed that people were wearing Smiths T-shirts. This, for someone who thought civilisation ended just west of Castleknock, was a revelation.
I think in times to come it ll be called a revolution, speculates Steve, when the bands from outside of Dublin started doing things that are actually affecting bands in Dublin and the way they think. It ll affect the rock press as well, because they ve no choice but to accept The Stunning, The Sawdoctors, Toasted Heretic and the rest, because these bands have a following. It s almost like the blacks in South Africa there s just too many of us now . . .
Aren t The Sawdoctors hamming it up a little though?
The Sawdoctors are reflecting their own lives, claims Steve. All they re doing is writing about what comes naturally to them. They re writing about real life in small towns, where the countryside is a stone s throw away and your town is surrounded by farms, and you go to school with farmers sons. It s the way I was brought up in Ennistymon.
To me, The Sawdoctors aren t doing anything out of the ordinary, because they re writing about stuff that s real to them. There s no essential difference between The Sawdoctors and The Undertones, because The Undertones were just writing about real life as they grew up in Derry school, chocolate, girls, subbuteo, duffle coats . . .
And The Sawdoctors are writing about . . . hay, he laughs, and girls in the convent. If I d been born in Ennistymon I d be writing about convent girls too, cos that was the life there.
The lack of songs about convent girls on The Stunning s brand new album probably won t hinder its success any. Once Around The World is the follow-up to the phenomenally popular Paradise In The Picture House debut, released in 1990, which was the first release on an independent Irish record label to top the charts here.
A lot of people judged us on Paradise In The Picture House , which we expected, but at the time, we needed to get an album out as fast as possible. We don t really regard it as our debut, because it was more like a collection of singles, recorded over three years and thrown together on one album with a couple of other tracks to try and hold it together.
Overall it was a bit on the mellow side, he adds. This one has a punchier feel to it. It s more what we were trying to do originally, which is to get a sound that s almost like a live album. It s very unproduced.
Paradise In The Picture House has just been released in Japan and Steve doesn t relish the prospect of having to go over there and start performing Got To Get Away again.
The only song on it we felt was current was Brewing Up A Storm , and that s the reason we recorded it for this album, because we felt it should be included on what will be regarded as our debut album outside of Ireland.
There s always the possibility that the critics will be sharpening their thesauruses in preparation for the time-honoured tradition of Roasting The Second Album Over A Hot Fire, just to keep you in your places . . .
Maybe, says Steve. I think people were surprised, especially the critics, and especially the critics in Dublin, by the success of the last album because they didn t realise the following The Stunning had around the rest of the country. They started to get a small whiff of it when we were doing those gigs in the Olympia. We were building up a steady crowd and then eventually, there was that mad gig, with about eight hundred people on the street outside. It was mayhem! We were actually scared!
So maybe this time they re going to be hard on us. And this time we ve got a lyric sheet in it as well, so they ll probably be pouring over my lyrics and pulling them apart. But I don t give a shit really. The fact that a band like the Pet Show Boys can still make loads of money proves that critics don t matter, doesn t it?
The mild PSBs crack is about the closest thing to an outspoken attack to be had from Steve Wall, even after a couple of pints of Guinness on an empty stomach. He s choosing his words pretty carefully, ever since an innocent remark in a previous interview caused a minor furore.
I mentioned this club in Ballina that I had visited, which was the first place I knew that was playing Acid house music. It was a really sophisticated club, with video monitors and strobes and stuff, he explains, and farmers sons and townies all coming in, and that was printed in the interview, and the people in Ballina took exception to this!
They thought I was putting down farmers, and we got letters complaining. On the back page of the Western People their music page there was this huge headline, Stunning Farmer Slur ! We used to get fanmail from some people up there and it all stopped and they sent me a really dirty letter! It said what ve you got against farmers, what s wrong with farmers dancing to acid house music? It was complete shit! I mean, I m not far from being a farmer s son myself. Some of my best friends are farmers . . . he grins.
Do you feel uncomfortable being the focus of so much attention then?
Not really, no. Not at the moment anyway. Most of the time it s really nice to have people coming up to you after a gig or whatever. One time in Limerick or somewhere though, it was after a gig, and I was in the toilet having a piss, and some guy comes in, stands beside me at the urinal and says, Not a bad gig. Listen, a word of advice . . . And I just put my hand over and grabbed him by the lapel and said, listen, just keep looking at your dick. I don t want to hear any of your stupid advice, because that s one thing I cannot stand, ever, is people coming up to you telling you how to do something.
You know yourself when you re not doing something right. The people that are always giving you advice are the people who will never do anything themselves.

Amongst other snippets of information that crop up during the course of the interview, trivia fans, are that Steve was stopped twice for speeding while travelling to Dublin today, that he knows the perfect way to punish Larry Goodman, and that he has trendy parents. He seems particularly proud of the latter.
I rang home the other night, he says, and my youngest brother Vincent, who s twelve, answered, and there s rock music blaring really loudly in the background and he s shouting down the phone, really loud, Steve, yeah, can't hear you, couldn t hear the phone ringing. Mam is in the kitchen playing music. She was playing our single, just when I rang! Vincent said, She s in there analysing your lyrics!
I hope when I m fifty that I could still go and see gigs, and still want to see gigs and be open to new music. It s really important to stay in touch, to let yourself be amazed at things, to be open to new experiences. The reason I m talking about this now is, I don t feel it happening to me, but I see it happening all around me, to people I ve grown up with. They re becoming adults. And it s hard to be an adult in an adult world and not succumb to things like financial pressure, the norms of society that force you into being a stereotype.
There s a great poem on a similar subject by Patrick Kavanagh, called Advent , and there s a line in it that goes Through a small hole appears much wonder , and that really encapsulates the whole idea. When you re a child, it s as if you re on one side of a wall and you don t know what s on the other side of it, and it seems amazing because it s a small hole you re looking through . . .
Our time is nearly up and Steve prepares to go and meet some friends. He mentions the joys of recording the latest album in France, and claims that one of the reasons that Irish people do so well abroad is that they are so aware of their own culture, their poets, musicians, and writers.
Irishmen definitely have soul, he smiles.
Ah Jaysus, he d have made a great Deco all the same.

10 Records that inspire The Stunning
1. Led Zeppelin II Led Zeppelin
2. The Sun Sessions Elvis
3. Revolver The Beatles
4. The Cry Of Love Jimi Hendrix
5. Cooley Joe Cooley
6. Raw Power Iggy & The Stooges
7. Astral Weeks Van Morrison
8. Old No. 1 Guy Clark
9. King Of Blue Miles Davis
10. Loc ed After Dark Tone Loc

10 Things To Do With A Stunning Album
1. Buy it
2. Play it loud
3. Impress your friends by owning several thousand copies
4. A CD with the sides sharpened makes an effective device for chicken-hunting
5. Tribes in Papua New Guinea are already using it as an insert in their bottom lips (not the cassette), some elders have already progressed to the 12"
6. Use it as a contraceptive (melt it over the erect penis with a cigarette lighter)
7. Fashion an attractive party hat using four tapes, some oatmeal and several tubes of toothpaste
8. It s the devil s music burn it
9. Play it again
10. Play it again so much that you have to buy it again

10 Best of Current Irish Bands (In no particular order)
1. Captain Hex
2. Engine Alley
3. P.A.M.F.
4. The Blue Angels
5. Something Happens
6. The Sleepwalkers
7. The Golden Horde
8. Fatima Mansions
9. The Saw Doctors
10. U2

10 Places To Stop On A Trip Around The World
1. Inishboffin
2. Tavira, Southern Portugal a good time was had by all
3. Chateau de la Rouge Motte, Domfront, Normandy ditto
4. Ulan Bator
5. Kathmandu Derek left his keys there
6. Rio de Janeiro
7. Negril, Jamaica Padraic, our manager, wants to retire there!
8. Moirana the northern tip of Norway Jimmy visited here in Sept. 90 to discover the only place open was the Irish pub!
9. Wilmington, Delaware small town America!
10. Gumschluck, Turkey several songs written and much raki consumed here.

10 Stunning Beauties
1. Cindy Crawford
2. Jessica Lange
3. Bridie O Flaherty
4. Helena Christiansen
5. Ava Gardner
6. Leeane
7. Yer wan in the Army Of Lovers video
8. Emily Shanahan from Roscrea
9. Anna McGoldrick (Jimmy had a crush on her!)
10. Mary Elizabeth Mastroantonio