Their shine has come

The Coronas are tired. Possibly a tad hungover, too. The Dublin band have just completed their second Irish tour and they’re feeling the effects of it. Of course, the fact that they played a pre-Paddy’s Day showcase in the capital’s Jameson Distillery can’t have helped, either.

Still, at least an alcohol-soaked promotional gig provides a degree of respite from the attentions of their rabid, hormonal fanbase. Not since Joe Dolan’s showband heyday has a young, ultra-photogenic male quartet been as fervently worshipped as The Coronas in this country.
“It gets a bit crazy at times,” admits frontman Danny O’Reilly, sipping a cup of restorative tea and munching biscuits at the band’s rehearsal space. “We’ve had to stop playing school gigs because it was getting a bit too uncomfortable hearing 12 and 13 year-old girls screaming inappropriate stuff at us. We were starting to feel a bit like McFly. It’s good to do school gigs. They’re the people who go out and buy the stuff too, so why not? But they’re not something we’d specifically ask to do.”
Guitarist Dave McPhillips is quick to point out that it’s not just the teen market that The Coronas’ radio-friendly pop-rock appeals to.
“When we play down the country, there’s a much older crowd. At the end of the day, we don’t write songs and say, ‘I hope this appeals to 16–year-old girls.’ It’s great to be able to sell-out the Ambassador in Dublin – I don’t give a shit who’s there. When they’re singing the words back to you, it doesn’t really matter if they’re young or old.”
O’Reilly jokingly interjects: “We appeal to everyone. We’re like Dido.”
The Coronas’ rise has been swift since the release of their debut album Heroes Or Ghosts last October. It peaked at #21 and is currently sitting pretty at #29 after 20 weeks, as well as yielding the ubiquitous ode-to-J1 ‘San Diego Song’.
“Having good people around you is very important,” O’Reilly asserts. “Our manager Jim works harder than any of us, and we have other people that work their asses off to get us out there.”
Recent appearances on The Late Late Show and at the Meteor Awards can’t have hindered their plans for world domination, either. Are the likes of the Meteors something to aim towards for next year?
“Not necessarily, but the Meteors really helped us with exposure outside of Dublin. We were talked about more than some of the other bands who were up for three and four awards, just because we played on the night,” attests O’Reilly. “As for being nominated in the same category as Westlife – the whole ‘pop’ thing didn’t really bother us. No matter what people try to tell you, you don’t know what genre you are”.
With the burgeoning indie scene in Dublin possibly stronger than it’s ever been, do The Coronas – signed to independent label 3ú Records themselves – ever worry about not being taken as seriously as the more left-of-centre acts because of their unabashedly mainstream leanings?
McPhillips is unfazed.
“I think setting out with a strategy to fit into a particular scene is a bad idea. It’s not like we write a song and think ‘Who are we going to please with this one?’ We’re still very much developing as a band. We’ve recently written a new song that I think is a lot more mature-sounding and is definitely a step up for us. We undoubtedly have another gear to go.”
“We’ve never really had critical acclaim, and honest to God, it doesn’t bother me”, says O’Reilly. “I thought it would, I thought I’d be the sort of person who’d be hurt by a bad review. But if people still come to the gigs, that’s really what keeps you going. If we got bad reviews and nobody was coming to the gigs, then we’d probably wonder what we were doing wrong.”
But is it a case of knowing your fanbase and knowing what they like, or attempting to prove the naysayers wrong by doing something a bit different for album #2?
“I don’t think we’ll try to do either – we’ll just please ourselves. We just do what we do, and if people like it, it’ll sell itself – if they don’t, they don’t. We won’t pander to either critics or fans.”
McPhillips nods emphatically.
“I can’t imagine what it’d be like if we went down some esoteric direction and tried to be some new artsy band. Especially now – imagine if we decided to try to win over all of the Fight Like Apes fans…”
Are there any Irish bands they’d aspire to emulate at the moment, or think ‘We’d like to be in their position this time next year’?
“Yeah, an Oscar would be nice,” McPhillips laughs. “Seriously, though”, O’Reilly imparts, “bands like The Frames, we’d certainly admire, purely because of their longevity. They’ve been around for years and are still getting good reviews and selling-out gigs. That’d be nice.”
Another potentially touchy subject is O’Reilly’s background. As the son of Irish folk singer Mary Black, does he ever worry that that connection will prove to be something of a burden?
“I’d never deny it or anything, but I used to really try to shy away from it,” he nods. “Journalists used to ask me in interviews ‘Do you mind if we talk about your mam?’ and I’d say, ‘I’d rather not, I’d prefer to just talk about the band.’ But now that we’ve been around for a while and we’ve done well on our own, I don’t mind as much. She’s just like all the rest of the mothers, she’s really supportive. She makes a good fry, too.”
So what’s next for The Coronas? More touring of Heroes Or Ghosts as festival season approaches, or ‘heads down’ for its successor?
“I think one of the advantages of not being with a major label is that we don’t really feel under pressure to rush back to the studio and record the next album”, says McPhillips, “but I don’t think we’ll do a Damien Rice and take five years off before the next one, either.”
“What we do next really depends on whether it happens for us in the UK”, O’Reilly confirms. “We have an agent over there who’s making contact with a few record companies too. We have no problem starting from the ground and working up all over again, playing tiny venues and support slots. It’s great to have such a loyal fanbase in Ireland, but there’s only so many gigs you can do on the Irish circuit. This year is really a make-or-break one for us.”
“Yeah”, McPhillip wryly smiles, “but as long as we don’t have to get a real job, we’re happy for the time being”.
He has a point. There aren’t many bank managers or estate agents who’d take too kindly to their staff having knickers and bras flung at them on a daily basis.