This Mogul Coil

“We used to rehearse in an industrial estate off Sheriff Street,” recalls Last Tycoons frontman Stephen Fanning in a coffee shop in his native Dun Laoghaire. “There was an African church in one of the units, and you’d wander in on a Sunday, and it was weird to hear all these African people going crazy and chanting back and forth in the North Side of Dublin.”

Here’s the metaphor we were looking for: an integration of gospel roots music with urban Dublinia. Which is pretty much the gist of the Last Tycoons’ excellent eponymous debut album.
Slovenly rather than sloppy, The Last Tycoons is a cavalier party of Stonesy electric blues, Poguesy bacchanalia and that old-timey Band-like hootenanny vibe. Halfway between the Harry Smith Anthology and the band’s mucker the Mighty Stef, these songs exist in a speculative historical loop where Ireland has been annexed to the southern states of the USA. Not a million miles from the scene in I’m Not There where Jim James and the boys from Calexico do ‘Going To Acapulco’.
“My dad (Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning) is a big muso, and from a very young age I’ve been hearing jazz and old blues, Leadbelly, even stuff like Lonnie Donegan,” recalls Stephen. “And when I was in my teens I got into a lot of Appalachian stuff, the Carter Family. I think when you hear the quality of the old recordings, they don’t jump out at people the way a modern recording does, but I was used to hearing scratchy old jazz records, Bessie Smith and stuff, so it didn’t seem like such a struggle to get past it and hear what was actually there. There’s amazing melody and stories in that music. It’s amazing, I got the Harry Smith Anthology and was listening to that song ‘Drunkard’s Special’, which is word for word the Dubliners’ ‘Seven Drunken Nights’.”
Which mightn’t be as 21st Century Anomalous as it sounds. The Stones at the height of their pop stardom were playing faithful interpretations of 60-year-old bluesmen’s music and selling it to the kids. The White Stripes and Kings of Leon have pulled off similar feats over the last decade.
“I don’t think that music’s ever really in or out of fashion,” says Stephen. “There’s always bands that do that, and sometimes they have something that catches people’s eye. When we started as Porn Trauma, we used to get compared to Kings of Leon a lot and it used to infuriate me, ‘cos it was like, ‘Would you not give us credit for knowing Creedence Clearwater Revival?’’”
More than anything, The Last Tycoons is steeped with a sense of sinner’s guilt and a hunger for redemption in gospel waters.
“We came close to putting a few little snippets of gospel songs on the record,” Stephen admits. “We do acapella intros to our own songs, doing old gospel songs like ‘Anyhow’ by the Golden Gate Quartet, one of those great sad sounding gospel tunes that says, ‘I’m on my way to heaven anyhow.’ We actually do ‘John the Revelator’ too. We were over in America last week and we heard that it would’ve been Son House’s 108th birthday, so we did it as a tribute to him. We were at South By Southwest – three of us play with The Mighty Stef as well. That’s the third time we’ve been in the states with Stef. We’re big fans of each other.”
And how do Americans audiences take to having their indigenous music exported back to them, once removed?
“We were playing a gig over there at some real trendy bar where it cost about nine dollars for a bottle of beer and all the girls looked like porn stars, and they turned off the hip hop music and we played our set and people were actually getting into it, then the same people turned around and started grinding against each other when the DJ came back on. It was fun.”
Well, who says a rock band can’t have funk. Songs like ‘Who Needs Radio’ and ‘The Alaska Hotel’ bump and grind like Doctor John trapped on a bad ferry crossing to Fishguard. David Briggs might have had fun recording this mob.
“It’s a conscious thing to let a song be lazy,” Stephen says. “You get the feel. I was reading those two biographies Last Train To Memphis and Careless Love (by Peter Guralnick) and it’s amazing the way Elvis worked in the studio. He’d do fifty takes and 30 of them would be note for note perfect and he’d spend hours listening to all of them and pick one with loads of mistakes because that’s the one that felt right, no matter if the sound engineer or musicians would be cursing him for doing it.
“We don’t use any metronomes or anything. If the drummer feels right, then it’s good. You hear about engineers recording drums separate to cymbals and all that sort of shit. Let alone not having two musicians playing together, they don’t even have one musician playing his instrument. What it’s all about is musicians playing music together in a room. The songwriting is important as well, not trying to be Woody Guthrie, but writing songs about drinking and meeting girls and whatever. Even ‘The Dry Law’ is a song about me giving up drinking, with a story attached to it.”