THE IN CROWD

"THEY HAVEN'T got any guitars!", exclaimed a col-league of mine who appears to have graduated from college with a degree in stating the bleeding obvious.
This startling observation came as those prime exponents of all things gyratable, Sound Crowd, made their live debut at Dublin's latest so-hip-it-hurts nightspot, The Pod. It was an intriguing affair - deejay Mark Kavanagh mixing up a storm with his Technics SL1200s, his technoboffin accomplice Mr. Fantastic pressing all the right buttons and the lovely Sharon and Tracy strutting their not inconsiderable stuff amidst the sort of dry ice cloud that's liable to have environmental groups picketing Dail Eireann.
"Yeah, there weren't any guitars", agrees Kavanagh a tad sarcastically afterwards, "and that's part the reason we did the show. A lot of people - especially those in the established music industry - have this patronising attitude that, 'oh well, dance is okay but it doesn't work on stage', and we wanted to prove them wrong. You could immediately tell who the hardcore clubbers and the cool rock biz types were. One bunch was going berserk on the floor while the other stood motionless at the bar, nursing their beer and thinking 'what the fuck is this?'."
I'm as likely to run starkers down O'Connell Street humming the 'Dambusters Theme' as wiggle my bottom in public but I have to admit that previously immobile parts of the Clark anatomy were twitching goodo as Mark and his partner in crime - one of the Wicklow Fantastics, by the way - showcased material from their three independently released EPs and forthcoming album.
Although a reasonably well kept secret at home, the duo's reputation across the water is on the up and up.
"It's great the way things are taking off in the UK", enthuses Mr. Fantastic. "When the first EP came out, we didn't say, 'take pity on us, we're Irish', like all the rock bands do. We just sent half a dozen test pressings to the right shops, 'phoned round a couple of days later to see if they wanted copies and got told, 'we'll take 100 or 250'. It was only at the end of the conversation that we mentioned where we were from and they were a bit taken aback. There was no masterplan, as such. The original idea was to press up 500 white labels for our mates and it grew from there.
"The product has to be good but, really, cracking Britain isn't that difficult as long as you know which shops and deejays have influence. You can mail out hundreds and hundreds of promos and get zero response but get the record to the two or three dozen heads that matter and you're laughing. The downside to doing business there is this bigoted, racist attitude that we're all 'stupid Paddies' and don't know our arses from our elbows. I know for a fact that if a local band walk in looking for test pressings they'll get them in seven days whereas we're left waiting five or six weeks - if we're lucky."
They're probably still smarting over that day in Stuttgart when Ray Houghton parted the English defence with Moses-like ease to inflict their most catastrophic defeat since the Battle of Hastings.
"To be fair", butts in Mark trying to be reconciliatory, "they do have a phenomenal workload. I deejay at the Olympic and on DLR and some weeks I get as many as 80 or 90 white labels landing on my mat from acts I've never heard of before. It's a return to the old D-I-Y punk philosophy. You can knock up a track in your home studio, transfer it to disc and get the 12" into the shops for under a grand. It's extremely accessible."
While Sound Crowd are adamant that they don't want to surrender their independence to a major, they've recently signed a distribution deal with Pinnacle which guarantees a full scale UK release for all the product on their Red label.
"The way Pinnacle and other dance distributors tend to operate", explains Mr. Fantastic, "is that they turn up at, say, Eastern Bloc in Manchester on a Saturday afternoon with a van full of new releases and get the guy behind the counter to systematically bung them on the deck. All the deejays are there getting ready for their biggest night of the week - the needle hits the vinyl and within seconds there's either total apathy or a stampede to the cash register.
"If you want to be really clever", he adds with a wicked grin, "you indulge in a spot of creative marketing. There's one British label, Cleveland City, who have an American looking logo and shrink-wrap everything, and their stuff runs out the shops because the snobby section of the dance community reckon they're getting their hands on a rare import. We haven't resorted to such subterfuge...yet!"
Sound Crowd's latest offering, "The Weekend EP", managed a respectable showing in the UK charts thanks to word of mouth and the lads have high hopes for their next Red release, Secret Weapon's "Dream Lover", which will be the first to benefit from Pinnacle's promotional efforts.
"We had brilliant fun making that with Sharon and Tracy. They knew what they wanted but didn't know how to get it, so what we did was take them into our studio and let them run riot with the equipment. They'd spend half an hour pushing the faders on an analogue synthesiser, discover a sound they liked and we pieced it together from there. The 'dumm dumm dumm' sample comes from Dawn's 'Knock Three Times', so if there's a Tony Orlando revival, you'll know who to blame!"
Reports that The Orb are, as we speak, working on an ambient house version of "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" have yet to be confirmed although Alex Patterson has been spotted on several occasions indulging in intimate conversation with an old oak tree. Nothing out of the ordinary there but it might have some bearing on the matter.
"We're continually running into people like the girls", resumes Mark, "with great ideas and enthusiasm but not necessarily the expertise to get them onto vinyl. That's part the motivation behind Red - we've created a flexible framework within which we can make our own records, produce other acts and generally do the hell what we want. If a major label comes in and offers to fund the operation, brilliant, but we'd insist on retaining artistic control."
"Yuh", nods Mr. Fantastic in agreement, "we'd give them the masters and they'd sign the cheques! I don't think Dublin's ever going to witness the same massive dance explosion that's occurred in the UK or the States - mainly because of the population base - but we've already got the bones of a self-supportive scene that can function independently of the rock establishment.
"RTE and the local stations won't play dance records, so in Dublin you've got DLR and Sunset broadcasting illegally and getting a regular audience of god knows how many thousand. We'll spin a track on the radio which we know no one else in the country has and the next day get told by Billy in Abbey Discs that he's had 50 or 60 customers in looking for it."
While in its infant stage the genre was pretty much ignored by the mainstream media, the success of Marxman and the signing of Scary Eire to Island, means that Irish dance has become headline news. Has this interest trickled down to Sound Crowd yet?
"We're not exactly fighting journalists off", laughs Mr. Fantastic, "but we are getting coverage and magazines, such as your's, are starting to accept that homegrown dance music isn't a fad. It's here, it's credible and it's constantly evolving. "What's around now is merely the tip of the iceberg. There's a guy called Mr. Bass who needs a bit of spit and polish but otherwise is ready to roll and there's a bunch in Tullamore, Mainframe, who are very good and very commercial. We did a demo with them 12 months ago and I know they've come up with a load of new material since then."
That old adage about 'no publicity being bad publicity' certainly doesn't extend to the tacky 'killer drug' stories that the tabloids delighted in running last year when they discovered Ecstasy. Sound Crowd started their Pod show with an anti-chemical rant - are they genuinely opposed to 'E' or merely trying to hammer home the point that you don't have to be mind-altered to enjoy clubbing?
"All those papers - and you know the ones I mean - hoped there'd be a nice little epidemic like there was with heroin during the eighties and they'd be able to report kids dropping dead left, right and centre. That didn't happen, so now they've lost interest in 'raves' and started putting the boot into the church instead. I'm not on an anti-drugs crusade but this thing whereby you need 'E' or Ketamine to have a good time is bullshit. Sure, you get a buzz out of them but you get a buzz out of slamming your bollocks in a door and I wouldn't want to do that.
"You don't have a clue what you're getting. Dealers cut their merchandise with bleach and rat poison and that doesn't do your insides much good."
"You don't have to trip your face off or gurn like a madman to enjoy yourself at a club", insists Mark. "If you're at a good gig, there's such a natural high that you don't even need to go to the bar. Dance has never received the credit it deserves here for bringing people together. "Go into the Olympic on a Saturday night and you get kids from Kilbarrack and Coolock mixing with kids from Malahide and Killiney. There's never any trouble but stick 'em in a normal pub and they'd beat crap out of each other."
Mmmm, that's going to keep Shooting Gallery in letters for at least the next couple of issues. Before we sail off into the sunset, perhaps Mark and Mr. Fantastic would like to take turns in summing up the opposition?
Okay, your starter for ten - Bumble?
"'West In Motion' should have been a huge hit on the basis that it was a very good novelty record but after creating a buzz with the white, they held off for Weatherall to do the remix and it got lost. I'm not sure what they're up to now but they certainly blew that one."
D:Ream?
"'Things Can Only Get Better' was probably the happiest record of 1992 but they do go a bit overboard with the mixes, don't they? There must have been five or six versions of their last single which I wasn't particularly into."
Marxman?
"Horrible. Truly horrendous."
Scary Eire?
"Not personally my cup of tea but, at what they do, they're definitely the best in the country."
Disco Evangelists?
"Their first 12" was a waste of studio time but 'De Niro' was brilliant."
"The great thing", concludes Mark, "is that three or four years ago we wouldn't have been having this conversation because there wasn't any 'Irish dance scene'. Now there are half a dozen acts to talk and bitch about which is one in the eye for the cynics and brilliant for the rest of us."
Not for the first time tonight, I have to agree with him.