The TURNING CORNER

FIRST, AN amendment. In an album review on page 44 of the last issue of Hot Press, the impression may have been conveyed that I was greatly impressed by On The Turn, the recently released opus from Kilkenny noisemongers Kerbdog. When I mused that it was "an excellent second album", I meant it. When I inferred that it was "a winner from pillar to post", I was calling a spade a spade. When I observed that it was an album which "only occasionally threatens to lose the plot", it was no flight of fancy.

Two weeks is a long time in music journalism, however, and now I've changed my mind. Why? Because the music press is a capricious medium and, as a member of the corps, it is in my nature to be erratic. At least that's what Kerbdog would have you believe.

When I ask the three band members if, as its lyrics suggest, the track 'Pledge' is a diatribe against the irrefutable wisdom of sage-like rock hacks the world over, their reply is unanimous. "Yeah, that's exactly it," confirms lead singer and guitarist Cormac Battle, while his colleagues, bassist Colin Fennelly and tub-thumper Darragh Butler, nod in vigorous agreement.

"It's not as a result of any particularly savage mauling we've suffered at the hands of the press though, we just give out about everything," laughs Colin. "It's not even about things that have been written about us. We just read the music papers every week and it's like 'Hold on a fucking minute you bastard, you were writing something totally different about this band a month ago and now look at this for a U-turn.' Journalists seem to change their minds so quickly."

The man has a point. Late last year, I encountered Kerbdog for the first time - a poorly-attended live show in Dublin's Mean Fiddler. It was shit. Now, just a few months on, having heard the exceptional On The Turn, I am moist in anticipation of their next Irish performance. How fickle of me.

"Well, that's not fickle," grins Darragh, "it shows that you've got an open mind. That was one of our worst gigs ever, usually they're great fun. That particular one was a nightmare, everything went wrong - it wasn't publicised properly, the sound was awful, we didn't play well, everything. What you have to remember, though, is that there's a very fine line between being fickle and being open-minded."

Now they are signed to Polygram, how do Kerbdog feel about making leurve to the corporate rock 'n' roll beast?

"Definitely when you're with a major, a band needs to learn how to take control of themselves and to keep their eyes open to see what's going on," Colin opines. "We've been allowed to do that. We look after the artwork on album and single sleeves ourselves and we've tried to supervise our videos as far as we can. We've never been fucked around with the kind of songs we want to write or with the sound of the album.

The only thing we do have problems with is release dates and press. Sometimes Polygram are right about putting things back and sometimes they're wrong, but we just have to deal with this until we're in a position where we're making the money for them, as opposed to asking them for money to go on tour. It's something we have to live with. At the moment we just progress and get on with it. You can complain about something until the cows come home, but if you don't do anything about it you're just running yourself into the ground."

In 1989, such problems were the least of Kerbdog's worries. Having formed and named themselves after a Californian BMX outfit which Cormac and Darragh were "really into", they began plying their trade in their home town. "We were playing indie-rock covers - Dinosaur Jnr, Sonic Youth, that sort of stuff, making a bollocks of them all once a month in our local pub," Colin recalls fondly. Two albums later, with not a cover - prehistoric or otherwise - in sight, things have definitely improved. The band have just finished a 45-date tour of England which, to all intents and purposes, was an unequivocal success.

"It was brilliant," enthuses Darragh. "We've been touring on and off in Britain for the last four years and it's finally starting to happen. Shows are selling out and we're playing really well. We seem to be on the brink of causing a major stir. Hopefully the album will tip us over the edge, and fix a lot of, I dunno if 'damage' is the right word, that was done with the first one. I think people may have got the wrong perception of us with Kerbdog because . . ."

Colin takes it up. "Because On The Turn is a million, million light years ahead of Kerbdog, because we've grown up and got better at writing songs and got more selective about what we take from our influences. Plus we recorded it in LA with GGGarth producing it, and that was a breath of fresh air for us. We actually wrote it in Co. Wexford and recorded it in LA - two totally opposite places. Going to America gave us a burst of energy that might not might have been there otherwise. It was such a great buzz to be out there doing it, it really heightened the mood."

"As Battle says himself, you can hear the sunshine on the album," affirms Darragh.

Coming, as they do, from the celebrated musical hotbed of South Leinster that "talents" as diverse as My Little Funhouse, Engine Alley and Richie Kavanagh call home, it's no surprise to learn that one of the aforementioned acts has left an indelible mark on Kerbdog.

"Yeah, we've got Richie Kavanagh samples and loops all over the place," laughs Darragh. "Richie Kavanagh, Fudge Tunnel and Helmet - they were our very early influences, more for their sounds and riffs than for their songs. So knock out Richie and you'll have some idea where we're coming from. From the start, when we signed, we deliberately avoided the tired, jangly sound that you get up here in Dublin. We probably wouldn't have been accepted if we'd adopted that style anyway."

Richie Kavanagh remains top-dog in the locale, however, the denizens of Kilkenny seeming nonplussed with Kerbdog's minor triumphs to date. One Top Of The Pops appearance, it seems, does not a superstar make. Colin explains.

"Well, from the day we come home people might say, 'Oh, we saw you on 2TV, fair play to you, by the way, did you see the football last night?'"

Cormac agrees. "We've been on the scene so long that even if we were to get really famous I don't think that would make any difference in Kilkenny."

"It's quite funny actually, because most people find it difficult to visualise what your life is like outside Kilkenny," chuckles Darragh. "That's totally understandable, but the one thing everyone wants to know is 'Who pays for everything?' The classic question is 'Do they pay for that?' It's like there's this big pot of gold in the sky called they."

They didn't have to pay much for Kerbdog's latest effort, the superb video for 'Mexican Wave', which sees the band holding an audience of comely giants in thrall with an impromptu live performance on a compact make-up kit. The highlight of the show comes when a Lilliputian Cormac leaps from the 'stage' and grabs the necklace of one particularly ravishing giant, a manoeuvre which leaves him dangling perilously above the not-altogether-uninviting chasm of her cleavage. And while Tim Burton has been lauded for spending a fortune on his film Mars Attacks in order to make it look cheap, Kerbdog took the opposite route, cutting several fiscal corners in order to achieve the opposite effect. Cormac explains where the big women came from.

"Some of them are ex-girlfriends of mine and the others were sisters and friends. We got them cheap," he laughs.

"Yeah, it's mostly Battle's harem," Darragh expounds, "but we had to break some of them out of a models' prison."

And the wily special effects trickery?

"Well, most of the people were on work experience and it was a first time video producer, so everything came cheap," explains Cormac, sounding for all the world like the overseer of a Malaysian sweatshop.

"We weren't exploiting them though, in case that's what you're thinking," Colin protests. "The people involved liked the band and liked the song so much that they sneaked some of the more expensive bits of the video-making process into other stuff they were doing. They did a bit of moonlighting for us and we're very, very grateful to them for that."

"The guy who made this made the one for 'Sally' as well. He wants to get into music videos, as opposed to the short films that he was doing," Darragh discloses. "The idea came from our manager, you know, taking the piss out of that whole '50s Land Of The Giants type thing."

The future looks bright for Kerbdog; seven years after forming they've definitely grown up. They've a cracking album to promote and the majority of their administrative creases have been ironed out. But if they could start all over again, would they do it any differently?

"It's hard to say," Colin muses. "We've definitely done ourselves damage with things in the past."

"Personally," Darragh volunteers, "I think we were very lazy until a few months ago, until we got our arses kicked by GGGarth. We were very lazy people, the kind of people who'd spend a total of 10 minutes working out of every six hours in the studio."

"We wouldn't be so frivolous in interviews either," Cormac declares. "That was always a problem for us, we never took them seriously. We used to forget that everything we were saying was going to end up in print, and what might have seemed hilarious in the pub on a Tuesday afternoon didn't necessarily translate well into a magazine.

"As well as that we didn't try hard enough to push our own issues. We used to let people over-ride our opinions a lot more when we were young. You have to trust someone though, you know. When you're thrown in at the deep end you assume people know more about what you're doing than you do. That's not always the case."

Half an hour into the interview and this being Cormac's first real contribution of note, I suggest that, for a frontman, he's unusually reticent. He laughs. "Sure, the boys have just as much to say as I have."

"It's a three-way democracy we have here," avers Colin, "we started this band as three friends and thankfully, that's the way it still is. Anyway, you'd probably get us on another day and I'd be the one who's quiet."

"Everyone gets sick of listening to egotistical, asshole fucking singers," counters Cormac. "I know I do, anyway." n

* On The Turn is out now on Polygram.