Talkin bout a revolution

Judas!” As heckles go, it’s the one that has achieved immortality, a cry in the dark that sums up the fear and loathing of the music fan who feels their idol is turning their back on them. Captured for immortality on film, it was just one of a series of incredible moments in the recent Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan’s fateful journey from folk to rock. Yet the film also reveals Dylan’s belligerent response. “I don’t believe you,” he drawls, “you’re a liar”. Then he turns to The Band and issues the order – “Play it fucking loud…”
If The Revs have been on the receiving end of any such biblical abuse, it doesn’t show. The effects of yet another all-Ireland tour (about their eighth, by their reckoning) are also still to become apparent, and all concerned are in fine form, maybe because, like Bob, they’re setting out on their own fateful little journey. Perhaps it’s the reason that yet again they find themselves playing the kind of venues that they should have outgrown long ago: a realisation that The Revs need to re-connect with their audience.
“I think,” says bassist Rory Gallagher, “that we were one of those bands where everybody knew our name but maybe didn’t know our music, or maybe associated us with ‘Turning Japanese’, which was horrible. A lot of people have been coming to the gigs now through hearing the single and we’ve actually got 30 and 35 year olds there now. All the people who were crazy into the band when they were 15 or 16 are at university now.
"Those gigs have been brilliant. People are going, 'We’ve grown up listening to you and it’s good to see that you’ve grown up with us'. It’s all good at the minute; we didn’t want to be 36 or 37 with spiky red hair jumping up and down on stage. We’ve always been fairly honest, even when we were slated at the start, we were very much into The Police and Green Day and The Clash. That was our take on it, our average age was about 20. Now we’ve moved on a bit, I’d like to think we’ll make a natural progression like a Neil Young or a John Lennon.”
Time was that a Revs interview that mentioned artists of such a stature would have been laughed out of town. As it is, plenty of eyebrows might still be raised because, well, we’ve got the measure of the Revs haven’t we? The one Dundalk and two Donegal boys who toured their arses off, built a huge fan base and had a bona fide hit with debut single ‘Wired To The Moon’. For about five minutes they were a breath of fresh air, but things turned rapidly stale as they lurched from one PR opportunity to another. By the time they released the aforementioned World Cup cash-in, the battle lines were drawn – although you may be surprised to find which side the Revs themselves were on.
“The reason we released it was purely monetary," explains Gallagher. "We were still an indie band, we’d put our own money up and the second single hadn’t done so well. The bank account was going down, so we put out that single to keep the band afloat. Not only did it do that, but it exploded. Even so, after that we were releasing some really good singles but we weren’t getting the airplay from where we would have liked because they associated us with pop-punk."
A debut album, Suck, followed and tried to expand their sound but, to be frank, most of us weren’t listening, not even those involved with the band. Drummer Michael O’Donnell sums up their next move succinctly. “We just got sick of it after a while. We split with our manager because he was pushing us in the wrong direction. We’d grown up and he wouldn’t see that." To many, however, manager Robert Stephenson had become synonymous with the band’s success. His 'Blast All Ages' shows had brought them a vital audience, and his label Treasure Island was releasing their records. For his charges, though, the horizon was darkening.
“From doing the likes of the Reading Festival, we’d started to meet really interesting people,” Gallagher explains. “We were talking to Meg White (of The White Stripes), looking at all these different bands. In the van we were listening to Doves, Flaming Lips, John Martyn – but we still had to put on our guitars, and go and play this other kind of music. It was a question of whether we were going to break up or spend six months in our bedrooms completely reinventing ourselves, earning nothing and just getting away from everything and taking a chance.
“It’s horrible when music becomes a job," he continues. "The whole point of being a musician or an artist is that you don’t have to work by any rules. Once you get into that position you get such a sense of freedom, it’s terrible when you feel like you’re working in AIB. We got to the point where we hadn’t listened to any of our records for a year and a half. You go home, you’re into your music and then you go and do your job."
Was there a single point when they realised something had to give?
“For me personally, there was a huge moment. We were doing all these gigs and interviews but not paying much attention to it, because it was going so well we thought people must have been enjoying it. We forgot to see if we were enjoying it ourselves. The Witnness highlights from 2002 were on TV and we were on doing ‘Turning Japanese’. I remember we were in a hotel in New Ross watching it, looking at us and thinking, “What a crowd of wankers.' I couldn’t believe it was us.”
But ask yourself, how many of us would have done any different? People join bands for several reasons, and getting famous is usually foremost among them.
“We kind of got sucked into it,” agrees Gallagher. “It was nice being recognised at home, getting people coming up to you. Whatever interview was going, we’d do it if it got us more exposure. Being completely naive and unaware of overexposure, we were in our element. When you begin to concentrate more on publicity than the music, you become no different to the bands that you’re slagging off.”
Did the people at home change their perception of you?
Michael shakes his head: “Not in our wee town. Everybody’s really cool”.
Rory: “If you go seven miles in any direction, though, you get people coming up to you and either giving you a hug or throwing an egg at you. You can get really screwed up by the fame thing. I suppose it was good that it only took off for us in Ireland and not the UK or the States. You can see why people end up in rehab."
You must have enjoyed it a bit, surely?
“We embraced it for the first while, and then the records that we were making became so far removed from our own. You realise that you’ve become caught up in this whole pop market, the very thing that you joined the band in the first place to avoid. You’d be going to functions and instead of holding your head up high you’d be going, 'Oh bollocks, there’s someone from Radiohead, I hope they haven’t heard the new single.' We’re good musicians but we never had the chance to grow, it’s almost like we got a development deal but it was in the public eye. We were only together nine months and we were stuck on the main stage at Witnness, going, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’”
He’s right. I saw that gig and they were awful. What I did notice, however, was the fervency of the crowd, something that Gallagher is right to remember.
“We’ve got such respect for that old audience; they saw some sort of spark in us that they seemed to connect with. Now that we’re becoming good songwriters and musicians, you look back and think there must have been something there."
As always at this time of year, there has been much hand-wringing in the press as to the state of the nation’s young, prompted by shameless displays of post-exam results fun. Having met more young people on his own than all of these writers put together, what does Gallagher think?
“Most journalists are in their 30s, and are looking out for something that they would have ideally loved to be doing when they were 18," he says. "A big advantage for us was that we put the audience at ease, it became a communal thing. People didn’t have to sit back in awe of us, they started to buzz off that. We used to sit for two or three hours afterwards talking to people in car parks, just finding out where they were coming from. I don’t know if I could make any socio-political comment on what they were thinking, but we did seem to connect.”
The problem being, of course, that this particular band of the people were finding themselves increasingly adrift.
“At the start of this decade, every band seems to be very acoustic and Travis-y and we don’t want to jump on that bandwagon” – Rory Gallagher, Hot Press, August 2001
And so began the process of writing a new chapter in the Revs’ story. Demos were put together in Donegal, a wish list of studios (based on current favourite listening) was drawn up and tapes were sent out. Working on a budget of about “seven bags of Tayto”, the band were relying on goodwill and someone, somewhere seeing that spark in them once more. They found what they were looking for at Yellow Studios in Malmo, with the engineering team behind the all-conquering Franz Ferdinand album. “What was great,” says guitarist John McIntyre, “was to work with people who’d never heard us before, and had no preconceptions, they didn’t make any judgement. They were enthused to work with us, and we had a lot of respect for them”. Gallagher agrees. “When we heard the Franz Ferdinand single, it seemed to be the path we would have liked to go down at the start. It’s edgy but it’s pop. We were into that early ‘80s sound, we just never got around to working that hard to make it sound that interesting."
The resulting album (self-titled, as these statements of intent so often are) is now with us, and it’s good stuff. The production is bold, the arrangements interesting and the songwriting confident. It truly sounds nothing like The Revs as you know them, something that will bring sighs of relief from many corners. It’s a result that the trio have worked hard at, according to Gallagher.
“Everything was written out and looked at and lived with, in order to avoid anything throwaway. We scrapped about twenty ideas for songs, the kind of stuff that we would have released before."
What is definitely evident is the leap that the band were desperate to make. The crass punk-pop of before is largely absent, replaced by a broader musical scope that pays its dues to what’s gone before (not least the classic ‘60s sound of The Beatles and Cream) yet still manages to sound modern. They’ve pushed themselves lyrically, too. The last time I spoke to Gallagher, on the subject of the Iraq war and George Bush’s impending Irish visit, I was struck by how eloquent and informed he was. That feeling continues on The Revs, not least on the song ‘Borderland’.
“The lyrics came really quickly," he says. "The best bit is: 'It doesn’t matter where you are, everyone comes from Africa, sunlight changes skin.' You have those five seconds of clarity when you’re watching the news on television, you’re thinking, 'What the fuck’s going on?' All these things are just getting in the way of people who just want to get on with things. It’s just a comment on that. I hope it’s not taken up as a political song about Ireland, it’s more universal. We won’t be introducing it as, 'This is not a rebel song, this is Borderland Bloody Borderland.' There was that fear that it would slip into the preaching thing, because we all hate that.”
Despite such protestations, the track is one of a number that has the stamp of early U2 all over it, by way of Interpol and the rest. Despite the fact that most Irish bands would usually run a mile from any such comparison, Gallagher is more than happy to acknowledge the debt. “I think early U2 are brilliant," he says. "Maybe because we’re a bit younger we’re not worried about it, but older bands were sick of all these A&R people coming over looking for the next U2. One of my earliest memories was ‘Bad’ at Live Aid.”
“My first concert was Zooropa at the RDS,” concurs McIntyre. “There is a huge influence there."
At the other end of the album’s spectrum comes ‘Robert Stephenson’, the most old-style song on the record and a bittersweet look at past events. Gallagher laughs. “It’s very sweet, I think it’s quite endearing. We tried to write it as a break-up song."
Indeed, if you weren’t aware of the situation, it could easily be read as a paean to gay heartbreak. “(More laughter) It was just our weird sense of humour. We’d had the Louis Walsh song, but by the end of our time with Robert we’d become the thing that we’d been slagging. It was on our mind, so we just thought the whole situation was funny. Rather than having some stupid bitchy attack and him coming back, we thought this would be a nice way to do it. When we actually sit back and think about it, we have great memories. There’s stuff like, 'Don’t look back and shake your head, what’s done is done', it’s just a harmless piece of fun. We’ll have to send him a copy with a box of chocolates."
Despite their youth, the band are very aware of the importance of taking care of business. A new manager is in place, and they now release records on their own label Evelyn. You would have thought that, given their commercial track record, the deals wouldn’t have been slow in coming forward. According to Gallagher, they just weren’t the right ones: “The stuff we were offered would have meant we’d lost too much ownership of our own material. Talking to people like Damien Rice made us realise that. We had the licensing deal with Sony, so we’re laughing. We get to choose the deals, and it’s all in our favour. It’s the modern way of doing things."
Like it or not, The Revs changed things. They proved that the Irish music scene doesn’t end when it reaches Dublin’s city limits, they mobilised audiences up and down the country too often ignored by the great and the good, and they opened the doors to the charts. To their credit, they have emerged from the whole sorry episode with their friendship and good humour intact.
And lest we forget, ‘Wired To The Moon’ was a great tune. Things have moved on while they’ve been away, though. The Blizzards have stepped into their pop punk shoes, following the lesson of building an audience and following them into the charts. The Rags, 8Ball, Delorentos and the rest have all proved that there can be a middle ground between The Jimmy Cake and The Chalets, the very ground for which The Revs are heading. This time they might not find it so easy, however good their album.
Gallagher, for one, is in the mood to commence battle once more.
“There seems to be ten rules that you could nail to the front of the hotpress office as how to become a successful indie band in Ireland, but what use is that? You end up selling maybe 5,000 albums every time you release something. We always took a chance. It’s not that we don’t care about the indie scene here but it is very formulaic, there are certain influences you have to have, a certain way you have to present yourselves. That’s just shite.”
Pics: Liam Sweeney