The Answer Questioned

Question: Apart from a certain north Dublin four-piece, which other Irish band has played to several million people in arenas, stadiums and major festivals around the world over the past year? The answer is of course – The Answer! The Northern rockers have been out on the road as special guests of AC/DC on their hugely successful, seemingly never-ending world tour.

“It’s been the busiest 14 months of my life,” says The Answer’s frontman, Cormac Neeson, recently returned home to Belfast after the latest leg of their Stateside trek with the Oz legends. “We’ve now done something like 118 gigs with AC/DC. We’ve been constantly jet-setting all over the world with them, trying to fill out our days off with our own shows. We’ve spent the entire year living on the tour bus, which is crazy. Your head goes into a spin and it can be disorientating when you come home. The first thing I notice is that I don’t hear the tour bus generator ringing in my ear.”
About to head out on their own headlining tour with dates across Ireland the UK, The Answer are now looking to take it to the next level. Their debut album, Rise, has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide, with the follow up Everyday Demons also doing the business. “I’m really relishing this tour,” Neeson enthuses. “Everyone is playing well and there’s a lot of fresh material in the set. Playing before our own crowd is always nice. I’d like to think that playing with ‘DC served as a platform for us. We’ve played in front of a couple of million people. If some of them come to the gigs and start buying our albums we’ll be happy.”
The Answer are Neeson on vocals, Paul Mahon (guitar), Michael Waters (bass) and James Heatley on drums. A classic, hard-rock four piece they have the sort of sound and look that was more prevalent in 1973 than it is in 2009. With influences that encompass all the giants of the era, including Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy, they’ve forged their own take on the genre. “We do have that classic sound but I would always say to people that Free would be much more of an influence on me than say, Led Zeppelin,” Neeson offers. “Paul Rodgers is a great singer and someone who doesn’t often get his due but those early Free albums are fantastic examples of classic hard rock. Rory Gallagher would be up there too as an influence. The passion that he brought to the stage was incredible, he’s a total natural. Obviously his guitar playing is what most people remember him for but he was a great singer too.”
Though they are still relative newcomers as far as Irish audiences are concerned, success hasn’t come overnight for The Answer. The band has succeeded the old fashioned way through sheer hard work and relentless gigging.
“We’re now pushing 10 years together as a band,” says Neeson. “We’re talking about a lot of trips down to Dublin and back, as many gigs as we could play in Belfast, as well as numerous trips to London before we got a record deal. Belfast has always been good to us, as has the UK. The rest of Ireland has been a bit slower. Since playing The O2 and Punchestown with AC/DC and our own Oxegen slot, things have gotten better and we have a following.”
Their tenure on the AC/DC tour has, according to Neeson, been a huge challenge in terms of learning how to win audience approval. “We will never, ever face a challenge like getting up onstage before ‘DC fans,” he offers. “They can be unforgiving. Brian [Johnson} would come into us after the show and say, ‘boys - I don’t know how you’ve stuck it out so long’. He told us that a lot of their support bands over the years didn’t go down well with their hardcore fans and would regularly pull out of the tour after a few shows. If we hadn’t been getting a positive response we wouldn’t have lasted a week. We just adopted the approach of enjoying it. Sometimes, for the first couple of songs they’re a bit wary but they’ve warmed to us and we’ve managed to push our slot up from 30 minutes to 52 minutes”
Touring with the biggest hard rock band in the world has other advantages, not least of them being the opportunity to sample the, er, cultural delights of the places they visit, as Neeson explains. “It’s mad alright. We’d a great night in New Orleans recently – it’s a wild town compared to most American cities and it never seems to close. Myself and the drum tech were heading home one night when we hit the morning rush hour. (laughs)
“There isn’t much I don’t like about America at this stage though I found out pretty quickly that they don’t know how to make butter. But other than that, the food is great over there. We’ve spent equal amounts of time in Europe and America and generally you can’t wait to get back to the States. It has a lot going for it - as a touring band you’ve everything you could want just around the corner and they make everything easy for the consumer. I do a bit of vinyl collecting and buy shitloads of CDs too when I’m over there so I come back laden down.”
According to Neeson the AC/DC tour is a well oiled machine but each show presents its own challenges: “Every venue is different but the most recent leg has been in arenas and they tend to be all very similar in the US – the only way you can tell the difference is the colour of the seats. The sound can vary too, sometimes it echoes back at you and other times it’s totally dead so you have to work with whatever the venue throws at you.”
When it comes to instruments and gear it’s all Marshall stacks and Gibson Les Pauls with The Answer. “We keep it simple. Paul uses a wah-wah and distortion pedal. As far as amps go they generally use Marshalls though Paul has been using a head called a Wizard - one of Malcolm [Young’s] guitar techs makes them and Mickie uses an Ampeg head sometimes.
“I’ve started using an in-ear monitor. It looks a bit stupid. I’ve got the long hair so I can hide it. I put one in my left ear and leave the other ear open. It helps a lot. If you’re in a bad-sounding room and the sound is crap the singer suffers the most. The boys can rattle away on their guitars and drums. If I can’t hear what key I’m supposed to be bloody singing I’m in trouble.”