The West Awakes

While some bands are impossible to avoid, others are downright evasive.

Take The West Seventies. Their 2002 single ‘Underground’ was one of the year’s undoubted gems but it has taken five years since the band’s inception for them to release the equally striking debut album The Deeper You Go. Given that the band have been together some five years, that does strike you as a long time to wait for a first record.
Pavel Barter agrees that it has been something of a lengthy process. “We started in 2001, a week after September 11th, in Colorado”, he explains. “We were going backwards and forwards and it wasn’t a great time to be flying, but it was a great environment to work in.”
Their reasons for being in that particular place stemmed from a series of lucky chances.
“We were in South By Southwest, just after the band got together in 1999, and we met a guy called Col. Wil Masisak over there. He liked the sound of the band and invited us to his studio for next to nothing.
“Boulder’s quite remote and we were living above the studio. We’ve toured all over America but Boulder was good. We had the countryside all around us, it was the true Americana experience. The album had its debut play in a strip club, which was interesting…”
Although he drops this into the conversation with casual abandon, more details on this are required.
“We met a girl at a party who was a stripper, she’d actually been at school in Columbine at the time of the killings and it had kind of sent her off the rails. She was a sound girl so we gave her a CD and she passed it on to the strip club DJ and that was its debut. It was our first playlist. The interesting thing was we went into that club and they were playing ‘To You I Bestow’ by Mundy.”
Such are the adventures that seem to characterise the West Seventies experience, yet, as we’ve said, you’d be hard pushed to hear much about them. They’re not the kind of band to be seen hanging around at the various Dublin night spots, slapping the backs of their showbiz pals. The reason, as Pavel explains, is simple.
“It’s because we’re working, we’re gigging a lot. We’re out of the country, we play in Holland quite a bit. The thing about this band is it’s very much based on friendship, when we’re not gigging or rehearsing, we’re hanging out. You get bands who don’t really know each other but they never last the course. We always said we wanted it to be more than that.”
Does he think that they’re given less credit than other bands, who perhaps do less but get talked about more?
“Maybe so. We’re busy and that’s the important thing. We get outside of the country. We’ve never restricted ourselves to borders or boundaries. We’ve met numerous people over the years who told us we should go and hang out at Lillies or Reynards and rub shoulders with people and shmooze. But you know the majority of these people end up with a career saying ‘Would you like fries with that?’ If they want to do that good luck to them but we’d much rather be out and about on stage. That’s not to say that there haven’t been a huge amount of people who have helped us: Sinister Pete and Phantom are the life blood of new Irish music and it’s criminal that they haven’t been given a licence, but ultimately we reserve the right to do whatever the fuck we want.”
What they want to do is make beautifully formed guitar music, low on drama but high on harmonious melody. In short, they’ve perfected the art of the sun drenched pop song. “I think that a lot of that comes down to recording in America and working with Wil. I’m sure a lot of the surroundings seeped into what we were doing.”
Of course, The West Seventies are not the only Irish band of late to employ such a West Coast effect to their music so, be honest, what did Pavel think the first time he heard The Thrills?
“We went ‘Brilliant, that’s where we’re at too’. I like them a lot, it’s great to see a band doing catchy harmonic songs. We do hear some of the, ‘You’re not doing the singer songwriter’ type of thing, but what is Irish music? Should we be playing diddly eye stuff with fiddles and mandolins? We can do that if you want us to but it’s not what we’re getting paid to do at the moment.”

The Deeper You Go is out now on Tangent Records. The West Seventies play the Ruby Sessions, Doyles, Dublin on August 3rd.