The Right Stuffing

Dublin three-piece Crumb would appear to be at odds with prevailing music business wisdom. Rather than chasing fame, fortune and that ever-elusive record deal, they actually prefer to concentrate on making music – and enjoying themselves into the bargain!

Perhaps it’s down to the fact that all three members of the band - Dez Foley (drums/vocals), Eamonn Davis (bass) and Derrick Dalton (guitar/vocals) have seen long service in a variety of acclaimed outfits over the years, including bands of the calibre of Mexican Pets and Hey Paulette. But despite the band’s veteran status, their debut record, Evenings & Weekends, sparkles with the kind of fresh, urgent, guitar-pop charm usually found in younger outfits chomping at the bit. Songs such as the recent single, ‘Follow Me Home’, positively ooze with jangly textures and classic melody lines.
“For us it’s basically about a love of music and listening to records from great bands like The Go Betweens,” says frontman Dalton. “No band that I’ve ever been in has gone chasing record companies. If you set yourself up for something like that you will probably never get it. It’s just not in our universe. Besides, we all have day jobs and we don’t have a manager or a PR person. We haven’t made our fortune out of music and we’re probably not going to.”
The band formed last year with the sole aim of playing – as they put it – “back-to-basics, short, jangly crunchy, guitar-pop tunes.”
“We just got together, started playing and it seemed to work,” offers Dalton. “I’d been trying to do stuff by myself for a good few years before that. I was going to go out in a solo capacity, maybe in a kind of a David Kitt mode with electric guitar backed by electronics. But having played with Eamonn in a couple of bands we knew we had a lot in common. After we’d had a few of rehearsals there seemed to be something there that was worth pursuing.”
This down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach extended to their working methodology when it came to making the album. Recorded over a week in November 2004, Evenings & Weekends was mixed in three days and mastered in just 24 hours at Crowded House man Nick Seymour’s Dublin studio.
“We made the album as cheap as we possibly could,” says Dalton. “I have a hard disk recorder where we did most of the pre-production. The original backing tracks were recorded with us playing together without headphones. I think it’s probably unheard of for a band to record without using headphones.”
According to Dalton, Crumb have no desire to fit in with any particular local scene.
“There’s this notion out there that if you don’t play Whelan’s you can’t be much good,” he says. “I don’t want to diss bands who are in that scene but we’ve almost avoided playing there – it makes more sense from our point of view. The last place we played was at Mother Redcap’s – which I think is a much better venue than Whelan’s. There are other smaller venues around and they can be much easer to deal with and are less expensive to play. There is a very small underground scene that exists outside that Whelan’s scene. And there are other bands out there, like House of Mexico, who we’d view as someone similar to us.”
Now that the album is finally out, what are the immediate plans for Crumb?
“I’ve no idea – it was such a huge hurdle just to get it out,” replies Derrick. “We’ve been concentrating on press and we’ve had some great reviews. And we’ve some gigs lined up around the country over the next few months. After that we’ll just have to see what happens.”

Evenings & Weekends is available from Road Records, Tower Records, Freebird and City Discs.  Crumb's next gig is on June 16 at The Greyhound.