The immortal coil

Given the recent hive of activity in the Future Kings Of Spain camp, any reasonable outsider would expect Joey Wilson, Anton Hegarty and Bryan McMahon’s other band, A Lazarus Soul, to twiddle its thumbs in the sideline until the Kings have some downtime.

Not so – in fact both bands have their comeback gigs in the capital just two weeks apart. Now that’s timing, eh?
Yet living in the shadows of a bigger band isn’t troublesome for the A Lazarus Soul’s creator, frontman and chief songwriter, Brian Branningan.
“Oh I don’t mind at all,” he assures, settled with a cup of coffee in the Library Bar in Dublin. “I consider myself much more of a music fan than a music maker. I’ve been going to gigs and buying albums since I was 14, and I’m the Future Kings’ biggest fan, so no, I don’t mind being associated with them.”
Yet the Future Kings aren’t the only well-known people in the band. Brian himself is ex of Sub Assembly. Fin O’Leary of Mexican Pets lends his tubthumping skills to the project, and the new album, Graveyard Of Burnt Out Cars, as well as their previous LP, alazarussoul record, was overseen by Joe Chester, no less. Get him started on the subject of how they began working together, and Brian’s aforementioned enthusiasm for music shines through.
“I heard Joe’s album On Winter and it was one of the best LPs I’d ever heard; I loved it. I then started working with members of Ten Speed Racer [now-defunct rock band from the early ‘00s] when he joined, so the timing worked out really well. Especially with this album, he has a lot of influence over the way it sounds – it’s incredibly collaborative.”
If that wasn’t enough name-dropping, A Lazarus Soul have also got Headrush director Shimmy to make their video for lead single ‘Icon’.
“He was going to LA, so this was his goodbye project. It was quite fitting as it’s a celebration of old Dublin, but it also meant that it ended up being quite rushed,” he says of the video, which has been picked up by Propeller TV and Channel 6.
The theme of ‘Icon’ runs throughout the album. It paints a picture of the inner-city Dublin in which Brian grew up, where kids played on the street, got ticked off by passing policemen, and given the lack of amenities provided by the council, used their imaginations to cause trouble. And most importantly, there was a sense of community.
“I grew up in Finglas, an area with a lot of social problems, but I find that troubled communities often come together and have a great energy about them – I went to South Africa and went to the townships in Cape Town, and it was the same there. People were playing their boomboxes out on the street for everyone to enjoy; they shared whatever they had. In their extreme poverty, they had an amazing community.”
A secondary angle is how his area has changed over two decades of major social and economic upheaval for Ireland.
“I don’t think the changes that Dublin’s gone through are all bad, but there’s definitely something missing. Areas have lost their sense of character – it’s become one big city where you can’t distinguish between places,” Brian laments.
“The gangland culture’s also ingrained on the area now. The title of the album is a reference to joyriding, and that’s a symbol of how naïve we all were back then – it used to be the bane of everyone’s life, but it’s innocent compared to what goes on now. In the fields where we played, you used to find burnt-out cars. Now you’d find dead bodies.”
Graveyard Of Burnt Out Cars is out on April 13 on Intent To Supply Records. Live dates are 30 March – Crawdaddy, Dublin; 13 April – Whelans, Dublin (supporting Amusement Parks On Fire); 14 April – Whelan’s, Dublin.