The Kids Are Alright

DON’T ASK Pat Gallagher how his band, Goats Don’t Shave, came up with their mountainy moniker. He’s already been asked that – admittedly obvious – question hundreds of times and judging by the pained expression on his face, he hates explaining it. Here we go . . .

“The story isn’t that interesting anyway,” he sighs. “We were thinking of making up some other yarn to make it sound more fascinating. In fact last year when a UK female journalist asked the question, ‘how did you get your name?’, I went into a long spiel about the fact that in Donegal it’s customary for parents to name the eldest son after the father. ‘My Grandfather was named Patrick’, I told her, ‘and as my father was the eldest son, he too was called Patrick. I’m the eldest son, so they called me Patrick’. She just looked at me blankly and went ‘Oh . . . er, I meant, how did the band get their name?’”

For the record and to avoid further confrontation, Goat’s Don’t Shave were christened – albeit inadvertently – by one of the regular customers of their local, the Atlantic Bar in Dungloe.

“He’s a sort of a well-known character around town,” says Pat. “The kind that everyone knows, drinks a bit and all that. He wanted to join in on our session one night but he was a bit worse for wear. So one of the girls in the hotel said to him, ‘why don’t you go home, have a lie down, clean up a bit, and have a shave’.

‘GOATS DON’T SHAVE’ he snapped back at her and we all said, ‘that’s it – that’s what we’ll call ourselves!’. The guy is famous now – he’s on the cover of two albums and on T-shirts and posters. He’s a real local celebrity.”

That minor matter out of the way, down to the real meat. Goats Don’t Shave recently released their new album Out In The Open, a fine collection of songs that sees their sound expand beyond the raggle-taggle folk rock of their debut, Rusty Old Razor. ‘Coming Home’, the single taken from the new album, has already garnered positive reaction and wide airplay and the band have been on the road during September with a hectic fifteen-date tour in support of it.

It hasn’t been all plain sailing for the Goats since their first flush of success, however, and the second album had an unplanned and rather prolonged gestation period. Herein lies a tale of false starts, delays and expensive but inappropriate producers.

“It was very frustrating,” according to Gallagher. “Everybody was asking us why we hadn’t brought out a follow-up to Rusty Old Razor, and we were getting pissed-off over the whole thing. We had a great year following that album’s release but it’s been tougher for us in the past year. Only for the fact that we have a good live reputation and a strong fan base, both here and in England, we would have gone down the tubes long ago.”

The first album was released on Dino, a label which normally specialises in compilations and part of the delay in bringing out the follow-up resulted from the band’s efforts to extricate themselves from that contractual arrangement. The band had been approached initially by Dino a couple of years back when their own DIY efforts at putting out records had proved a big local success.

“When we started to get a following, we went off and made a five-track demo, made five hundred copies of it and within a week we’d sold them all,” recalls Pat Gallagher. “We ordered more and sold them too, so someone from Dino got word about us and they made an offer we thought we couldn’t refuse at the time.”

Dino released that first demo as an EP – the classic Las Vegas In The Hills Of Donegal, which stayed in the Irish charts for fourteen weeks. The band then went on to record their debut album, Rusty Old Razor, which sold about thirty-four thousand copies in total – a highly respectable figure for a debut album by an Irish band. Another single, ‘Let The World Keep On Turning’ was the second chart success for the Goats’ and the future looked rosy indeed.

Throughout 1993 the band went down a storm at festivals like Glastonbury and the Cambridge Folk Festival and did several successful tours of Universities and concert halls throughout the UK. They even got as far as the States, where they performed in cities like New York, Boston and played alongside Black 47 at a festival in Chicago.

Plans for album number two took their first tentative twist when Alan Cummings, the band’s manager, bumped into producer George De’Angelis at the Fleadh in Finsbury Park. De’Angelis who had worked with pop acts like Mel & Kim in the past, had seen the Goats performance at the Fleadh, was impressed and jumped at the chance to produce them.

“That was mistake number one,” says Gallagher. “He was in a Stock Aitken Waterman mode and he was into taking bits of the songs, sampling them and moving them around. We were wondering what the hell he was doing and he just said, ‘trust me’ – so we did . . . for a while. In the end that trust cost us a lot of money but thanks be to Jesus we copped on.”

Having worked on just three songs with De’Angelis at Sulán studios in Cork, the band then moved to London to team up with producer Kit Wolven. He’d originally made his name as Tony Visconti’s engineer and had also produced Phil Lynott’s solo album. “We did the whole album with him,” says Gallagher, “but it still wasn’t right. You could hear it in the songs. It lacked freshness and vigour and he seemed to have lost what the band were about.”

Three months and two producers later, Goats Don’t Shave made the decision to scrap the whole idea of expensive studios and big name producers and headed up to Homestead in Randalstown, outside Belfast. With producer Al Scott who worked recently with the Levellers, they finally found someone who was sympathetic to their needs.

“We clicked with Al Scott almost immediately,” says Gallagher.” The atmosphere in the studio was great and we finished the whole thing including recording and mixing, in about two weeks.”

Out In The Open is released on the UK label Cooking Vinyl, a company who specialise in quality roots-oriented acts and who number artists like Andy White, Tom Robinson, Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked on their roster. Chrysalis had initially expressed interest in the band but according to Gallagher they had different ideas on how the Goats’ should be marketed.

“They seemed to put too much emphasis on singles and we feel the Goats’ are not a singles band.” he says. “Cooking Vinyl were talking about developing and working with the band and working on the albums and they seemed to know exactly where we were coming from.

“In the end we licensed the album to them for seven years,” he adds. “We set up our own production company, so we own the copyright – we won’t end up like George Michael!”

There might even be a double bonus in store for the band, courtesy of Cooking Vinyl, as they re-mastered the debut album Rusty Old Razor and re-released it in the UK to co-incide with the Goats’ recent British tour.

The band are also currently in negotiation with MCA for the American market and will be heading stateside for a series of gigs in October. “We’ll be bringing plenty of T-shirts over there this time,” laughs Gallagher. “The last time we were there we didn’t realise how much the Americans like to have a souvenir of a band and of a gig, so we won’t be caught out this time around.”

And with potential winners like ‘Children Of The Highway’ and ‘This World’ contained on Out In The Open, Goats Don’t Shave look set to capture even wider audiences over the coming months.

Don’t forget to pack the razors lads!