They might be points

The Spikes are relaxing, post-soundcheck, pre-gig, in a cold, dungeon-like dressing room, downstairs at the Temple Bar Music Centre.

Their Welsh guitarist Gareth Lewis is recalling the band’s conception, which did not, as it turns out, take place in Ireland (or Wales, for that matter). Rather, it occurred while Lewis and frontman Tom Dunne were holidaying in New Zealand – though there was a Celtic connection that brought the two together.
“There was an Irish song contest, and we were both pretty skint at the time,” Lewis recalls. “It was a thousand bucks prize, and I won. Tom came up to me, and found out that I wasn’t an Irishman. He demanded his ransom back!”
To make matters even more international, Lewis was living in Sweden at the time, but was lured to Ireland by Dunne (who was putting together a band) and by the possibility of sampling Dublin’s thriving rock scene. “It’s a bit of a Mecca for music, isn’t it?” Lewis asks, rhetorically.
Bassist Peter Redmond and sticksmith Aaron Mulhall completed the group – a defiantly traditional, vocal-guitar-bass-drums unit. The band are Dublin-based, but none of the members have their origins here, and they do not consider themselves part of any scene within the city.
Dunne comments: “I hope not. We have done everything on our own. There are pockets of bands that gig together and have a similar sound, like Humanzi, The Urges and The Things. We’d know them, but we would not be associated with them.”
Indeed, after watching the group in soundcheck, it is tempting to say that their tastes are as far away from the leftfield as possible – a contrast with much on the Dublin indie scene. The Spikes’ sound is soaked in American classic rock: pure, heads-down Southern-fried boogie. The Kings Of Leon would be their closest contemporary reference point, but such comparisons are dangerous; The Spikes have already received some misleading labels, once being described as sounding like “Sonic Youth auditioning for an Oasis covers band,” to the general bemusement of the group’s members.
“It’s always gonna be up to someone else how they think you sound, and it’s always impossible for you to define it,” Lewis explains. “We’re just taking the elements of our influences, mixing them together, and this is what comes out. I don’t think you could put your finger on one.”
The band’s ethos would appear to be to make music free of the influence of contemporary fashion, but without losing a sense of pop immediacy, and retaining a flair for crowd-pleasing. “We’re very much a straightforward guitar band, with classic rock influences,” Dunne explains. “That always has a pretty broad appeal.”
During the group’s soundcheck, their manager explains to me that it was the group’s employment of a frontman (rather than merely letting a musician take vocal duties, or having a lead singer devoid of energy and charisma) that attracted him to The Spikes in the first place. Indeed, it is difficult to think of many contemporary Irish groups whose stage figurehead is unencumbered by instrumental responsibilities, or who really ‘goes for it’ in the live setting. The band agree that this is an important part of their makeup.
“When we came back to Dublin and started the band, myself and Gareth went to a few gigs,” Dunne explains. “We noticed that everyone had a guy singing with a guitar – there was none of that classic, frontman type thing. There’s a lot of serious music going on, and a lot of serious people who need to play a guitar, stare at the ground and shuffle back and forth. It takes that sense of fun out of the music. When we play live, we put on a show. It’s very boring to stand in an audience and just see people playing music, but not really expressing themselves.”
Of course, the challenge for the group now is to channel that live energy into a consistently engaging full-length debut album – something that is not always easy for a young band to achieve. Lewis promises that the album will be “less loose” than their stage show, and says that all the group’s energies will be devoted to completing the record in the early stages of 2007.