The book of Rev Elations

I’ve been asked this question a couple of times – how do you cover a band whose music you’re not a fan of? My stock response usually runs something like this: you don’t have to be a fan; if you only covered bands you were evangelical over you’d end up with PR blurb, not journalism. But what you can get excited about is their story.

The Revs are a case in point. This power pop trio’s case history is a pretty fascinating box of paradoxes. It’s a tale of two Irelands, city and country; it’s the tale of a band with a vast fan base in a tiny territory; it’s the tale of an old school rock (even “rockist”, to use a quaint 1983 NME expression) combo that has had substantial hits here without the aid of a major label; a band that garnered six Meteor/IRMA award nominations in their first year of public life and then proceeded to bite the hand that offered them those awards. A band that had sufficient support from the denizens of the press and broadcast media to walk away with the Philip Lynott Best Newcomer category at the hotpress Awards in Belfast in 2002. A band that thrives on the good old prole ideals of touring hard and cultivating a grass roots following, yet have pulled more PR strokes and spins than any of their contemporaries, sometimes to the point where it seemed to boomerang back on them, breeding indifference instead of either love or contempt.

Like Lloyd Bridges used to quip in the Airplane skits, that’s not important right now – certainly not to the 6,000 or so diehards on the band’s database, a motivated electorate that can get the band voted to the top of hotpress polls and those aforementioned Meteor categories. No, what’s important is the story.

This is not a Dublin story, although Dublin has been good to The Revs, and the yarn does indeed begin here in the bar of The Clarence, with three musicians meeting their accountant, as manager Robert Stephenson hovers close by and your reporter slurps coffee and waits for an interview.

The Revs are the wonderfully named Rory Gallagher (bass, vocals) and Micky D (drums), both from Donegal, plus guitarist John McIntyre from Dundalk. They were all born disgustingly late, with Micky D breathing his first in 1981, as this writer was making his Confirmation. Like Gemma Hayes, like Clannad, like The Corrs, they are of a generation of musicians whose folks eked out a living on the showband circuit of ballrooms and strawberry fairs and cattle marts. Both Rory’s parents played full time in a pop covers band called Pluto, and he grew up in a living room stuffed with vinyl, everything from Steely Dan to Kajagoogoo, not to mention unlimited access to musical instruments.

By the age of 16 he was playing solo gigs. Only problem was, they were under his own name.

“There was one gig I did down in Ardragh, these Germans came in expecting a tribute show,” he recalls. “I was doing stuff like Blur and Oasis, all the usual, but it didn’t go down well at all. I got the wrath of some 40-year-old German motor-bikers shouting up at me!”

Both Donegal members found themselves drawn to the local live circuit, acts like Big Generator or cover bands playing John Cougar Mellencamp and Thin Lizzy. And although it was all second-hand stuff, it made more sense than the bewildering web of techno records favoured by their friends, nameless, faceless, label-less acts that fit in the warehouses but not the bedrooms.

Rory: “Growing up in Donegal we didn’t get to see The Mary Janes or The Frames. The only time I got to see really good original Irish music was when I went to college in Limerick, when I was 17, 18, and it was such a culture shock, and a relief in another sense. The only bible that I had was… they used to get two copies of Hot Press into the local shop and there were three of us that wanted it, we used to rush down. Up in Killybegs they had Kerrang!”

Rory admits that having parents who gigged for a living made teenage rebellion all the more problematic.

“It’s very hard to rebel against your parents when they’re musicians,” he says. “My dad would’ve played in a heavy rock band when he was 18, all Thin Lizzy and Bad Company, not what most dads did. He would’ve always been telling me to let my hair grow longer. I had to nearly get into music that I didn’t really like to actually rebel against my parents, buying Anthrax and Megadeth, turning it up until it was distorting the speakers in the room.

“When you’re a teenager sometimes you know music is shit but you just want it to annoy people. Myself and Michael formed a band around the time of the whole grunge explosion, we would’ve been big into the Stone Temple Pilots and Mudhoney, Nirvana obviously – that was the start of finding my own feet for me.”

Listening to the band’s debut live album Sonic Tonic, Rory’s father’s record collection can be heard percolating through. Aside from obvious new wave touchstones like The Jam and The Police, the songs also carry traces of that other Rory Gallagher, plus late 60s power trios like Cream.

“I was always a fan of Cream,” says John. “I don’t have a Taste record but I love the Rory Gallagher three-piece records. You have to work so much harder when there’s only three people in the band, as a guitar player you have to play rhythm and melody at the one time.”

Before the formation of The Revs, Rory Gallagher had a momentary lapse of reason, auditioning for an embryonic incarnation of Bellefire before Louis Walsh decided to plump for an all girl line up. Given The Revs’ subsequent antipathy towards all things associated with Walsh and the pop-tart mincing machine, it seems a bizarre move to say the least.

“I think it was kind of like stepping into the family business,” Rory reflects. “I was kind of like, ‘Maybe I should try this Louis Walsh audition ’cos I’m not really getting anywhere else’. Looking back it was very naïve; I hadn’t really found my feet as my own person. I’m so glad that I didn’t make it.

“Once I got turned down, I had this huge almost John Lennon-ish chip on both shoulders: ‘Fuckin’ hell, I can’t make it either way here’. I think by the time I’d got to the stage of that audition, like a lot of young musicians, I’d forgotten what music was meant to be about in the first place, and that’s when we got together in The Revs, playing five nights a week, playing different pubs, just having a fuckin’ ball for the first six months. I think people reacted to that.”

Have you met him since?

“Louis Walsh? Met him twice. He wouldn’t speak to me the first time, but then I met him about a year later on the plane coming over from London and he was kinda saying, ‘Well done’, but we were both grinding our teeth shaking hands. He’s grand.”

The Walsh episode was to have further fallout in the form of the throwaway b-side ‘Louis Walsh Says (Rock ‘N’ Roll Is Dead)’, by far the worst thing the band have ever written, with unsavoury cock rock couplets like “I got ya numba/On yer knees Samantha Mumba”.

Any regrets?

“No real regrets,” Rory laughs. “You have to start at a starting point to end up at a finishing point. Like, we wrote that song in fuckin’ five minutes, y’know what I mean, that’s what we were doing at the start most of the time anyway. We really didn’t expect ourselves to get into the position we were in (so quickly): one minute we were playing pubs, the next we were asked to play the tent at Witnness or whatever, and it was like, ‘Okay, this our set,’ unfortunately.

We’ve done the studio album now and it’s the first time we’ve actually sat down and gone, ‘What’s that line, does that relate to the fuckin’ song or are we just putting it in for the fact that it rhymes with ‘Mumba’, do you know what I mean? But I’m very disappointed now that I’ve actually written a cock rock lyric, but I suppose it is!”

As Rory says, the new album Suck marks a significant jump forward, shedding most of the post punk trappings and adapting a more sophisticated approach to dynamics akin to the Pumpkins or the more surf-centric Pixies. New songs like ‘Something To Believe In’ and ‘Eire Calling’ are easily the best things they’ve done. Plus, they’re prepared to take criticism on the chin, displaying a maturity that bodes well for their musical development.

But although the trio are far too callow to be diagnosed with Too Much Too Soon syndrome, up until last summer there was a definite concern that the band had been thrust into the limelight before they were ready for it. Their first single ‘Wired To The Moon’, launched on Robert Stephenson’s Treasure Island label, was a top 20 Irish hit in July 2001, staying in the top 40 for nine weeks, eventually going gold, but the tour they engineered around its release took a heavy toll: 26 gigs in 26 counties over 72 hours. In the end, the sprint proved impossible to pull off.

“I think that nearly split us up,” John admits. “We had the list of the dates and we were like, ‘This is not possible’.”

Micky: “The last night we’d to come back to Donegal and play a two hour gig in Killybegs, we started fighting with each other before going on stage.”

“We missed about six counties,” adds Rory. “At one stage we had to jump out and just play one song in front of signposts and film it. It was towards the end of the summer and we had a road crew that were working for free with us and it was meant to be a bit of a piss up. We had a crate of vodka and a crate of Red Bull. It was a great experience but then… the fun stopped! Two hours sleep each night, and by the third night it was like, ‘This is too much’. We were like Phileas Fogg on downers.”

They may have bitten off more than they could chew, but the band’s ravenous appetite for live work yielded six nominations at the Meteor/IRMA awards, unprecedented for indie minnows swimming in a shark pool. They won the Best Newcomer category. U2 swiped the other five. And yet, at the time, Rory circulated a letter of complaint that contained the following splenetic passages:“The ‘majors’ have traditionally maintained their Irish monopoly by keeping the IRMA membership fees high to discourage independent record companies from joining. Although now apparently IRMA is trying to seem more representative and open to independent record companies by reducing the fees, it’s clear that the majors in Ireland will always control IRMA.

“In their condescending and arrogant manner they also consider and treat the Meteor/IRMA Awards as their exclusive property. The major record company executives annually carve up the industry and Awards between them. This year at least there is a public vote, but then is it a fair competition when you have a band like Six nominated who were not even around in 2001? Six did nothing last year except a few auditions and have our national television network, RTE, give up to €2 million worth of prime time TV to advance marketing and hype of Louis Walsh & BMG’s end product.

“That whole Popstars tripe is really what amounts to a cynical demonstration of the power, arrogance and condescension of some individuals in the industry. It looks to me like they have duped the public, using publicly-owned facilities and – smarter than that – they got paid to hype their own product.

“This letter remains arguably the most pointed thing Rory has written. So what triggered it?

“The Meteors are a public vote,” he explains, “and I know when the different categories and nominations came out we weren’t in them. We knew that there was something up because Rob had been keeping in touch with a lot of people on the website, and basically we had about 5,000 people going, ‘Yes, we have voted’. So when we looked into it, they went, ‘Oh, okay, actually you did get this amount of votes’, and they put us back into it.

“It was like the whole Slobodan Milosevich thing where he was going fine until he decided to call an election and give power to the people. He was living in a bubble of his own, watching his own television station, and he thought, ‘Everybody loves me,’ and then he put it out to the public and they gave him 1% of the vote or something. The same thing basically happened with them.”

So you reckon the Irish music industry is like any other, basically an old boys’ club, or if you like, a musical version of the Masons?

“Well, we’ve got the stone cuttin’ equipment,” he says, “and we’re chipping away.”

Controversy aside, the success of the band’s debut single proved a hard act to follow. After the relative underperformance of the follow-up ‘Alone With You’ (which still managed to reach number 15 and stay on the charts for six weeks in October ’01), the Revs hit upon another of the publicity strokes for which they were becoming infamous: a cover of The Vapors’ 1979 hit ‘Turning Japanese’, timed to coincide with Ireland’s World Cup campaign last summer. In retrospect it was a notion that probably sounded good in the pub, but should’ve stayed scribbled on an abandoned beermat. Aside from the malodorous aftermath of the Roy Keane debacle, which to one degree or another, soured the World Cup experience for the Irish public, it also had the effect of aligning the band in the public mind with a Noo Wave one hit wonder act, long since consigned to a glass case alongside The Knack and Martha & The Muffins. Rory explains the thinking behind it.

“We were in a slightly uncomfortable position because we had released ‘Wired To The Moon’ as our first single and it just took off and put us into the same position in young people’s minds around the country as a lot of signed bands on the level of, say, Feeder,” he says. “Maybe not as high up as Blink 182, but people had us in that frame of mind and there was a certain expectation. What they didn’t know was that we hadn’t got a record deal, it was just with Treasure Island, and they had maybe six grand left in the kitty, leaking away very gradually. We needed an international record deal and our second single ‘Alone With You’ didn’t set the world on fire, and we were kind of losing our ‘prestige’.

“So basically, if you’re worrying about your next song being a hit, why not release a hit?! Looking back, I don’t know if it was a naïve thing to do, but if we hadn’t done it I don’t know if we’d be sitting here now. Basically we’d no money left, it was sink or swim. So it kept us afloat until it got us a record deal eventually in September, nine months after we recorded it.”

To their credit, The Revs are wary of associations with retro ’77 stick-on tattoo merchants like Good Charlotte or even Avril Lavigne, trust fund mall rat brats drip-fed on Mohican London postcard punk (or in Lavigne’s case, Alanis-lite) rather than the inchoate rage of Richard Hell or The Pistols. It’s a subject addressed on their new single ‘Death Of A DJ’, which consciously invokes The Smiths’ ‘Panic’.

“A lot of the supposed hard rock/punk now has just become like Warrant,” says Rory. “It’s taken eight years for the majors to cop on to the points behind grunge: anti-establishment, it’s got a Bill Hicks slant on it, sardonic, if you’re good looking hide it, that’s basically what bands are doing now, and it’s polished and so glaringly obvious but people don’t seem to be getting it. That’s what I’m trying to put across in the song, exactly what you were saying. The Smiths were a punk band as far as I’m concerned, with a punk ethic.”

The only problem being that Morrissey’s vision of England always excluded Brixton and Bristol, and for this listener, punk was as much about Sandanista as The Clash’s debut, as much about dub and dada jazz and proto hip hop and PiL and The Slits as snotty white boys with guitars. Plus, Lydon, Strummer and the CBGBs crowd always had a curiosity about other disciplines that fed back into the music. It’s worth remembering that Martin Scorsese was talking to The Clash about scoring Gangs Of New York as far back as 1980.

If the Revs were a movie, what movie would they be?

“Scary Movie! Not Another fuckin’ Teen Movie! Hopefully not Spinal Tap. Did you ever see the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky, the guy who did Requiem For A Dream? It’s fuckin’ amazing,” Rory says, “I’m a huge Bill Hicks fan, I’m just reading his biography. Book wise I’d be a big fan of George Orwell, 1984, John Steinbeck’s East Of Eden. I like a lot of the Irish stuff ’cos it fills you with a sense of pride while you’re reading it. I’m trying to read Ulysses but I keep putting it down. I’m gonna get there, but at least I’m honest, I’ll admit that I’m struggling – most people read the fuckin’ preface and decide to tell people what it’s about!”

Interesting he should mention Joyce. A few days previously the band’s management had invited me to a luncheon/album-playback in one of JJ’s old abodes, based on a recreation of the dinner scene from ‘The Dead’. I declined the invitation for various reasons, but in ways it was typical of The Revs’ ability to make a silk purse out of a promotional sow’s ear. Depending on who you listen to, the band are either publicity seekers who’ll do anything for a cheap headline, or a hard working band who’ve shown the initiative to get off their arses and generate a stir rather than tugging forelock and letting someone else do it for them.

What’s their response to the idea that the band and their handlers have been guilty of pushing too hard, of overly stage managing their publicity?

“We’re aware of that,” says Rory, “but hopefully the reason it happened was we were building towards getting the fuck out of Ireland. That’s no disrespect to Ireland or anything, but we want to travel the world and play music. We had never released anything outside of Ireland in the last year and a half. We’d been out of Ireland for about six weeks, so if we released something the only place we had to promote it was Ireland. Now that we’ve got this deal (a licensing deal for half the world with Sony – PM) we’re gonna be in different territories, so it’s going to be pretty hard to get a hold of us. Hopefully.”

Was there a conscious point where you decided, okay, enough already, too much information?

“Oh yeah. September. I changed my phone number ’cos basically every fuckin’ journalist in Ireland had it. It’s funny that we’re talking about you not being totally into the band ’cos there’s this psychological thing I’m noticing where people kinda go, ‘Aw, The Revs, I dunno, I dunno’. I notice that most of them are people from outside of Dublin that have moved to Dublin as a teenager or whatever, and I think we remind a lot of people of fuckin’ horrible roots around Ireland, the showband-y circuit.”

Okay, on that level, here’s a phrase to conjure with: the hardcore Sawdoctors. There is that undercurrent of The Revs as rabid punk culchies tearing up and down the country.

“(Much laughter). I think that’s why the 18 year olds in Dublin that don’t know about the rest of the country kinda go, ‘The Revs, aw yeah’, whereas people from the country are going, ‘Aw Jesus, no lads.’ I’ve just noticed that! We’re never gonna be as cool as any of these bands like The Jimmy Cake, so don’t be rubbin’ it in our faces! We’ve never really knocked on that door, although we really love the music – I just bought Mic Christopher’s album yesterday, and our playlist in the van is Damien Rice and Mundy, and John is a huge Frames fan since he was a teenager, we love them. But they’re all a few years older than us, it’s a big brother thing, they’ve so much more of a vast knowledge ’cos they’ve been around a lot longer.

“We don’t really hang out in the in-spots around town, if we’ve downtime we go home to Donegal. We don’t mind that we’re in different circles; we do our own thing around the country with the Blast all-ages shows. And who’s to say in ten years that we won’t be like the Frames and there’ll be all these other bands like us?”

Suck appeal!

The moshpit faithful tell us why The Revs are so special

Mike MC
“Well, you gotta admit a band with a Rory Gallagher and a Michael Daniel O'Donnell in it is gonna be kickin. As well as that they are one of the hardest working bands around with the work the do with Blast etc...”

Eugene Kennedy, Belmullet, Co. Mayo
“To me it’s three things. Firstly, it’s their songs. They write their own songs, not like manufactured pop bands! They have various tastes in music – it’s not all the same. They have various kinds to suit everyone’s taste! Second of all, when they perform live, NO BAND can match them. I'm one of the fortunate people to have seen them live and they were awesome, brilliant, excellent. There are no words that could describe their live performance, they are simply that class. Third and last they’re Irish! The best band to come out of Ireland since U2. Without a shadow of a doubt!”

Aileen McGreevy
“They're just so damn class! Their stuff always puts me in the best of moods, you can’t help but start jumping round the room going mad and doing air guitar, while singing along (though terribly outa tune) at the top of your voice before you accidently get carried away and before you know it you've tripped and landed face first on the ground terribly twisted and sore and unable to move an inch or shout for help cuz you lost your voice singing along so loudly! Yet somehow, you still don’t seem to mind cause they're still in the CD player doing their thang!!! (Or then again, maybe that’s me...).”

Emer O'Connell, Cork
“I dunno what exactly it is, I think it’s just everything about them. They’re so cool and having seen them live (last weekend!) their energy onstage is amazing. They’re also three very good looking lads. They’re gonna be huge, and best of luck to them!”

Bob, Dublin
“Greatness.”

Amanda Ryan, Tipp
“The Revs Suck. Or so the title of their new album says. Once again showing their originality, their ever present sense of humour also shines through. Where any other band would praise themselves in an album title, The Revs will definitely spice up the charts with their Suck appeal. But The Revs go far beyond an album title. Their catchy music hooks people easily and the bait is a welcome change from the monotonous tone constantly set by other bands. Once hooked, a person can indulge in their wide variety of songs and attend their vibrant gigs. This lively band brings a sense of magic to the word music and their amazing talent and energy gives them an excellent Suck Appeal.”

Aideen Kelly, Newbridge
“I first heard The Revs when ‘Wired To The Moon’ was released. As soon as I heard it I had to find out who this lot were. I’ve seen them play four times now. They give off such energy on stage. The room is quite literally Reved up to the last… the buzz is always fantastic and the audience always gets involved. Rory, John and Micky D are all fantastic musicians. With their Irish charm and completly rocking tunes The Revs are definitly set to take over the rock world!!!”

Stephanie Cremen, Fermoy
“What gives The Revs their Suck appeal is that they don’t care what people think of them really, they’re doing it because they love music and that’s the way to be. In some ways they’re more like the fans than the musicians, happy people indeed, what more could you ask from a band? There is also the fact that the lads’ infectious punk rock music mix is quite brilliant and going to one of their gigs you see that they love their jobs and love performing and will keep going until Pinky and The Brain take over the world!”

Nicola Cosgrove, Sligo
“The Revs, three Donegal lads with an explosive energetic live show, songs laden with fizzy, melodic hooks and catchy infectious lyrics. In three words – a deadly band. I remember the first time I saw The Revs, them – unplugged in a record shop doorway; me – packed like a sardine among the CD racks watching them. A kinetic showcasing of ‘Alone With You’ had and has had me hooked ever since. So, they have talent, their music is hard hitting, a wave of catchy choruses and boy do they have personality! Never have I met such a group of down-to-earth, appreciative, hardworking, determined, funny, sound lads.

Cookie, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway
“The Revs... What can I say? They're young, Irish, funny, energetic and most importantly PUNK! They can actually play their instruments. They're amazing live, and finally, they just plain ROCK! Oh and they certainly put Louis Walsh in his place! 'Coz if rock and roll was dead... The Revs definitely brought it back to life!”

Úna, Tipperary
“Try standing still at a Revs gig. Try not moving to the beat of the music that's not only played with amazing energy, but with sheer JOY. Try not getting carried away on the wave of euphoria that emanates from the crowd as they sing and move with the music. I challenge you to. If you can do that then you don't have a musical cell in your body. The most amazing thing about The Revs isn't their obvious love of the music, their time for the fans, or their incredibly fresh talent. It's the fact that they're real guys who got to where they are through hard graft. And not a single word of praise they receive is undeserved. They are the epitome of what good music should be.”