The Children of Lir

Some people may be a little bit confused by Lir – and that includes the media, yours truly and even, I suspect at times, the band themselves.

Now that their long-threatened debut album Magico Magico has invaded the shops however, the hour has surely come to ask the lads a couple of hard questions, and so l gather with lead guitarist Ronan Byrne, keyboardist David Hopkins and drummer Craig Hutchinson, with a view to dispersing some of the fog that surrounds the band, and their music.

At the start l wonder if we’re speaking the same language, despite all four of us sharing Dublin accents and birth-certs. Having opened by expressing my assumption that Lir are not quite the darlings of the lrish media, l am met with a wall of miscomprehension and bewilderment of the “where did you get that idea from?” school.

Explaining that my comment stems in part from a fairly unambiguous quote in the press-release that accompanied promotional copies of their album, their astonishment increases. Craig doesn’t understand what the word ‘hacks’ means. l show him the press-release. Lir’s press-release. The one THEY gave out at THEIR press-reception for THEIR album. It’s extremely odd. They still don’t seem to know what l’m talking about!

Now we all know how bands like to come over all cool and casual about such matters, but Lir have me convinced already. They just don’t care about these things. Or should that be care enough?

“l suppose it’s because we don’t feel we can have any influence over the media anyway,” David Hopkins reflects. “We do what we do and the media does what they do, so there’s no point in us worrying about it, is there? They’re going to say it anyway, so there’s no point in letting it get to you.”

The fact that putting remarks like that in a press-release suggests that the band actually do let it get to them seems to have been missed. So what kind of relationship do Lir have with the Irish media? “A very shallow one,” reckons Ronan.

Craig interjects that “Every band has a drab relationship with Ireland full stop. You have to make it outside first.” David is more philosophical: “No matter what you do, half the people are going to hate you anyway. That’s how they get their buzz, you know. There seem to be bands who get the Irish media behind them alright, but I think we’re probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t think there’s anyone too bothered about us either way.”

I ask Lir how they themselves would

describe their music. There follows a prolonged silence until Craig decides to go for it. “I’d probably describe our slow songs as very downbeat, moody stuff and our fast songs have more of a groove off them.”

Ronan takes up the running. “We’re a sincere band. Our music is an outlet. We don’t do it because we’ve nothing else to do. In the long run you have to prove to yourself and others that you’re worthwhile by getting a response through the music.”

But here’s Craig again. “Crossover. I’d call it crossover. We’re not rock ‘n’ roll or teddy-boys. But it’s not up to us,” he says.

David admits that Lir might have an element of pop in their make-up bag. Ronan on the other hand seems to regard pop as being synonymous with the charts and you would not need to be Sergeant Lewis to deduce that he’s not best pleased with the notion. So how do they feel about the argument that Lir’s music is too musicianly, too complex, even to qualify as rock?

“For some people,” explains David, “holding your guitar down around your knees is really hip, real ‘rock’. Some play one chord and make a lot of faces and that can be very intense music. That’s rock for some. But there are no rules and nobody’s going to tell me what to play. We have some exceptional players in the band and we all play from here.” (To illustrate this he thumps his chest on the left side.)

“Anyone who tells you I’m a technical guitar player is a liar,” Ronan chimes in modestly but sincerely, adding that anyone else who thinks Lir are a complex, technical band is merely hearing what they want to hear. David recalls watching XTC on MTV recently. “For a lot of people they were a musically complex band, but nobody puts them down for that,” he maintains.

Meanwhile Craig points out that the song is what counts and it either works or it doesn’t. “We use our songs to create our own world, just like The Beatles did, so we’re not retrogressive or musicianly.”

Since he mentioned the word retrogressive, I don’t mind mentioning that repeated listenings to Magico Magico brought back the ghosts of late sixties and seventies bands like Argent or Camel or Supertramp. Surprisingly they don’t nail my head to the bar in the Central Hotel.

“Actually,” says drummer Craig, “that’s the era we most look back to. If you look at the world of music today, you have bands like Pearl Jam ripping off Led Zeppelin wholesale, that bass and drum thing, and look at Neil Young. He’s a huge influence on bands like Pearl Jam. There’s no harm in being influenced by those bands.”

OK, lads, I have to stop you there. Lir were

hardly born when that music was at its peak, so what possible relevance could twenty-year-old music, by bands most people would prefer to banish from their minds forever, have to a young band in the troubled nineties?

“Led Zeppelin are probably the four best individual rock musicians ever to play on-stage together and you can hear John Bonham’s drum sound in to-day’s rap music,” claims the Lir guitarist, while Craig reckons that Led Zeppelin were themselves at the time accused of being retrogressive for using so many blues influences. “Songs like ‘Dazed And Confused’ were totally ripped off the original black writers,” adds David, but I make a mental note never to tell Peter Grant he said that.

In reality, of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having influences, provided you add some ingredients of your own to the stew. So what of their own, if anything, do Lir add to their admittedly obvious influences? Craig says it’s in the lyrics, while Ronan points to their song style for proof. “There’s a song called ‘Zero’ on the album and I can even imagine The Dubliners doing it,” he observes. “It has some of the quality of ‘The Green Fields of France’, it’s that type of song, and yet you have people who’ll turn around and say that we sound like Zeppelin or the seventies! But it’s a good song so they can say what they like. Besides, that era was the most potent musically since the fifties. Those rhythms and those grooves and all, they’re all coming back now. In our band you might get a seventies groove bass line like Shakatak, whereas the keyboard might be more James Brown.”

Still, playing seventies progressive rock twenty years later could be regarded as retrogressive, which is not quite the same as retro, is it? I don’t know about you, but it has me confused as hell, particularly when you recall that many of the original Progressive Rock bands were regarded as a major step backwards first time around, never mind two decades on! “All you can do,” claims Craig, “is be half progressive and half retrogressive anyway. There’s nothing that’s totally original. Everything’s been done.”

David claims that Nirvana are retrogressive because they sound like the Sex Pistols. I don’t agree. A Nirvana record is quite clearly not a product of the punk era whereas to my ears the Lir album could have been recorded in the early seventies, except for the giveaway nineties drum sound.

Rather than interpret this as a criticism, Ronan Byrne acknowledges that some of the songs on Magico Magico might have that seventies feel to them and David explains that those influences could well originate from his childhood when the musical diet in the Hopkins household was heavily spiced with The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell and their ilk.

“It’s all subliminal,” says Ronan, “you grow up with that music on the radio when you’re having your dinner or you’re having your porridge before going to school and on comes Harry Chapin or that song ‘Convoy’ by C W McCall. They’re big influences on us.”

“There are so many colours in the rainbow,” philosophises Craig and the subject is put to bed with some worshipful words about The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and his contention that real music ended in 1986 with The Police, The Smiths and the split of Thin Lizzy.

After that, according to the Lir canon, music became unacceptably contrived and the constant looking over the collective music shoulder to the styles of the past and the relentless procession of revivals that suggest that a nineties revival could be on the cards by Christmas.

Turning again to the band’s press-release, I refer them to a line describing their bassist as “the whitest black-sounding bass-player in the country”. Ronan responds promptly with a chuckle.

“We didn’t write any of this. This is just people saying things about us,” he argues dismissively, but when I repeat that the quote is in their press-release and is not attributed to anyone else, he shrugs it off with a “Press-releases? They don’t really mean too much to me.”

Now I don’t mean to be pedantic but if written information is given out on behalf of a band with their new album it is a logical assumption that the band have at least read it and approve its content and that failure to do so renders any complaints about that band suffering media misrepresentation null and void.

“All I care about is getting played and letting people hear the album rather than reading press-releases,” avers David before Craig enigmatically announces “Once you like something the less you see wrong with it, know what I mean?” I’ll think about it.

Lir’s debut album has been a long time a-coming, so long that industry insiders reckoned that their window of opportunity might have slipped out of sight several times. Lir still have no record deal outside Ireland, although they did secure a well-publicised publishing deal after some astute work by their shrewd and energetic manager David Reilly. Their stated philosophy is that they prefer no deal to a bad one.

Given the increasingly ruthless manner in which the major record companies regularly cleanse their rosters, often simply because a new A&R Hitler has taken over, this could be a smart move. But what kind of deal are Lir holding out for and with what kind of company?

They say that the album will be released in the USA early ’94 but express a healthy realism about record companies. Ronan is particularly aware of the danger of being championed by an A&R man who is flavour of the month within his company and whose utterances and promises should be, (and usually are), taken with a large grain of cocaine. They point to the worryingly high number of Irish bands who get signed and dropped and want to see a company make a real collective show of confidence rather than Lir being the pet band of one in-house individual.

Ronan is convinced that “a lot of Irish bands were signed but they weren’t up to scratch.” When I press him to be more specific he cites An Emotional Fish as a band whom he believes got a deal and weren’t up to it.

“To have got the hype that they got and then to be thrown into a world of critics, to be pushed out of Ireland as THE new band, I don’t think they were up to what they had to encounter,” he says. “They had to impress so many people. There was a backlash too, because you had U2 making it so big. I think there’s better bands out now and they’re getting the backlash of what happened then, like The Frames and Sack Dragonfly are a great band. Engine Alley. The Pale. I think they’re all better bands. They’re more quirky and more interesting and they’ve suffered in a way. A lot of Irish bands got raw deals.”

Ronan argues that with the tradition of music in Ireland more Irish acts should have been successful internationally and at home, but there’s a prejudice against them.

So who’s prejudiced against Irish bands at home? According to Craig it’s the people in general. ”They’re not as open-minded here as they are elsewhere. It’s a known fact. It’s the Irish people’s way. Look,we played this great gig in Texas. Not a single person in the audience knew who we were but we went down a bomb. Here they would tell you that a gig was a bit iffy but over there they’ll tell you it was ’totally awesome, man’. U2 only made it here when they conquered America. Thin Lizzy had to move to Europe.”

Ronan goes on to recall a guy they met after a gig in New York. “He told me,” says Ronan, “that our songs were nursery rhymes without being dandelion.” Not being too far advanced in horticultural lore, I ask for an explanation of the the dandelion reference. “He meant,” says Ronan,”that the songs had that effect that they went into your head and they stayed there, and that’s the way I’d look at the songs of Nick Drake. I thought what this guy said was a brilliant compliment. Actually I think that one day everybody will like at least one of Nick Drake’s songs, and that’s credibility, like.”

Craig goes on the offensive. “I can’t believe people think we’re manufactured. We’re 100% street cred. Ronan and Hoppo went to the Rock School. They hung out and met friends and they learned one or two things there and we met our manager David Reilly because he came there to make speeches.”

So what else came of their stint at the Rock School? “I didn’t learn one thing at Rock School, but I had a good time. It has nothing to do with making music. You can either play or you can’t,” says David.

“And anyway,” Ronan asks, “who cares? Let people judge us on our music, not how we met or whether we have good management or not, or what we wear. Who cares about the business end of, say, The Smiths, if you’re making great music?”

So do Lir make great music? Some say they do, and, inevitably, some say they don’t. Either way the answer to such momentous questions are unlikely to emerge from a casual meeting in a Dublin hotel on a nondescript Autumn evening. Maybe the band themselves suggest the best approach of all – listen to the music and judge for yourself.