The Hot Sprockets – Soul Brother, Where Art Thou?

You might not know it from its Brother Nature title but, on album number two, The Hot Sprockets get in touch with their feminine sides. Here we were thinking the charismatic young bluesy bucks of the Dublin music scene had enlisted the vocal help of a gang of admiring girls.
“There’s actually no female backing singers on the album, it’s us doing it,” reveals guitarist Tim Cullen in a manly register at odds with the high harmonies he was apparently delivering in the studio.
“We were doing all the ‘girly’ kinda tones!” confirms mandolin man Franky Kelly. “Next time we’ll definitely get some girls in to spice it up…”
We expect nothing less of a band that fully embrace the old-school spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. The Dublin quintet want to get their music out there for sure, but at a time when so many young artists are moaning about how tough it is to make this business your livelihood,
the achievement is in the doing for the Sprockets five.
“Money and success is not the aim,” Cullen insists.
“We love making music,” agrees Kelly. “Having albums, stuff out on vinyl... 45s! It is actually amazing. Even if you never make it, you’ve still made loads of amazing music.”
The latest release has been in the back pocket of the band’s trademark flares for quite some time. Still, Brother Nature isn’t ready to go until Tim Cullen has taken it for a test drive.
“As soon as I got the album, I had to jump in the car straight away and press play. I’ve listened to it 1,000 times before. But listening to it on the computer isn’t the same. Even in the way it runs together. It wasn’t final until I did that.”
The verdict?
“It was deadly. I was really impressed with it. I can’t wait to hear it on vinyl.”
Format is a big deal for this Dublin bunch of self-confessed lovers of that stretch of rock ‘n’ roll between Robert Johnson’s crossroads and MC5’s first break. Not that they've gone the full Jack White and put together a LP that plays from the inside out, has three sides or hidden grooves.
“I don’t think he could have done anything more with the format,” Cullen says of Mr. White’s forthcoming solo record, though Franky has other ideas. “He could have made it glow in the dark. He let us down!”
“A lot of people listen in cars, or on little iPod things,” interjects lead singer Wayne Soper, a man fully up on how the kids relate to technology, sagely. “That’s how the people are hearing it.”
What the people will be hearing is an album that moves the band on from quickly-recorded 2010 debut Honey Skippin’. They’ve left the ‘let’s capture live lightning in a bottle’ ethos behind and decided to explore studios Windmill and Grouse. This deliberate approach has extended to how they'll go about promoting it. Brother Nature is nearly two years old, give or take some tinkering, with the rest of the time devoted to working up a head of steam.
“Our main aim was to build our reputation and the amount of people who know us,” says Cullen. “We were really proud of the first one. We thought it would have taken us further. We basically weren’t getting out there enough. We were hitting up a lot of gigs but you’re only hitting up that amount of people at that time. Whereas with the internet, it’s there all the time and you can see it all the time. Our Facebook has doubled in amount since we released ‘Soul Brother’ last year. We’ve basically doubled our audience.”
A large part of the plan has been to trail Brother Nature well in advance with singles.
“’Soul Brother’ got the ball rolling,” says
Kelly. “And then we started banging out really good videos…”
“We couldn’t go back!” laughs Soper. “We’re wrecked from doing videos.”
They certainly set the bar high with the wacky, inventive promo for ‘Soul Brother’, which came complete with rescue plot, nudity and ‘Sabotage’-style '70s swag. When it comes to committing things to tape, be it audio, visual or both, they're becoming quite the perfectionists.
“On the first album,” ventures Kelly, “we only had a week or so to record it in Portugal. It was a really short space so we couldn’t layer it or anything. We didn’t think about it too much. We spent our time making sure the second was perfect and if we didn’t like something, we didn’t settle. We kept going back. That happened so many times!”
For the man that occasionally goes by the moniker Frankie Lips, this could occasionally get a bit much.
“Now, even if the song is pretty good, certain people want to chop and change it loads. Like, 20 versions of one song!”
For Wayne Soper, the sonic diversity on the album is something of which he is particularly proud. He promised this journalist some cool jazz flute back in 2012 and, true to his word, on ‘Heavy On My Mind’ some jazz flute is exactly what
we get.
If there's anything missing, Soper says, it’s “more bongos and congas. Maybe that third album!”
Key to any new experimentation was the collision of influences when the band got together with country-flavoured fellow Dub, Gavin Glass. A possible collaboration had been suspended in mid-air since the musician and producer's Western saloon-style exit following their first meeting in Cork’s Crane Lane.
“His set was great that night, what he was doing with pedals,” recalls Cullen. “You could tell that he was a good producer because of the way he was arranging his songs and making it work with just one person. He loved us too that night, we got on great hanging out backstage. Then we turned around and there was this cloud in the shape of Gav. Doors were banging – they actually were those swinging saloon doors! We didn’t see him after that for years.”
After a Facebook joke from manager Paul Cotterell about the band breaking up, Glass got on the phone to express his regret at having never produced them. The unbroken band were game, so they headed for Windmill Lane. Soper notes how Glass instantly bought into the band’s vibe and outlook, while offering them
something new.
“He comes from that roots area. Then there are some things that he wouldn’t be into – the heavier side of stuff. Whereas I am. He wouldn’t really be into psychedelia either, though he does like a bit of everything, even stuff I wouldn’t know. We learned from him and he from us.”
More tricks of the trade were picked up at a recent trip – or perhaps pilgrimage, given their love for the band – to see the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in Whelan’s.
“It was so rock and roll,” says Kelly. “You’ve never seen anyone rock out so hard.”
“They’d blow anyone off the stage,” says a wide-eyed Soper.
The longevity of the two decade-old New York act is something to which the Sprockets aspire.
“They’ve been rocking for so long,” marvels Cullen. “How are they not massive? They’re just happy to keep their fans happy and that’s a wonderful thing.”
An admirable route to take, particularly if
you keep doubling your number of fans with
each album.
As long as their fellow bandmates are listening, you feel the Sprockets will keep playing regardless. The puntastic Brother Love – which fended off competition from Thick And Juicy at the ‘what do we call the album?’ meeting – is a nod to both their earthy aesthetic and their bond. Old school friends, they refer to each other as 'brother' (Hulk Hogan would be proud). On stage, it means they feel almost psychically linked. “Cosmic”, in their words.
“It’s mad when you’re doing a lead over certain chords in a jam and decide to do something different,” Cullen concludes. “Loads of times when you go to do that, all the others change at the same time and it fits in. Wow! It blows your mind. There’s definitely a cosmic thing there. I don’t know what it is. It’s almost as if the song is meant to have that, and it’s life making you both do it.”

The Hot Sprockets launch Brother Nature with a show in Dublin’s Button Factory on June 7