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.