Ties Family

Ther was a time when you couldn't simply google The Cast Of Cheers... At least, not without having to wade through a whole lot of tv guide covers an Kirstie Alley chat show appearances from the '80s before getting to the four noisy boys from Swords.
This was before the label signings and the festival shows and the Choice Music Prize nominations and the homemade YouTube covers and the Maida Vale sessions and the BBC playlists and the X-Rated Nick Grimshaw interviews that you have to promise to be over 16 to listen to... It was before The Cast Of Cheers became the go-to success story of the Irish DIY scene, thanks to the jerky, hook-laden sound debuted on their first record, and the decision to make that record free to download for anyone who cared to listen.
“That was literally the first six months,” bassist John Higgins recalls, “Watching Bandcamp and looking at the stats. ‘We have 22 downloads of ‘Tip The Can’ today! Amazing!’” (He was right to be excited – Chariot eventually racked up an unprecedented 150,000 downloads.)
The Cast Of Cheers were already in the middle of recording their second LP when they were courted by School Boy Error, a brand new label set up by Colin Schaverien, manager of tour buddies Two Door Cinema Club. After a head-spinning 18 months with only Richter Collective’s Michael Roe, otherwise known as the busiest man in Irish music, to keep up with the hype, the band were glad to jump on board.
“We’re not business heads,” drummer Kev Curran admits, “we’re really not good at managing that sort of stuff. We just wanna play music.”
“School Boy Error do so much for us that we can’t do for ourselves,” guitarist Neil Adams explains. “Like Kev said, we’re not business heads, we’ve been in bands before and we’ve tried to promote ourselves and we’ve tried to market ourselves and we’re not good at that, so we never got anywhere, whereas with these guys, we’re playing Australia, we’re playing all over Europe, getting on Radio 1 and that’s not by fluke, that’s because these guys know what they’re doing.”
“It’s actually all worked out really well,” guitarist, vocalist and senior Adams brother Conor adds, “the only problem is how long it takes. The process is so long and that can be really...”
Neil interjects. “It’s driving us a bit mad, I think,” he says.
“It does drive you a bit mad,” Conor agrees. “The album’s still not out, and we started recording it a year ago. That’s crazy.”
Work on the record in question, the pulsating, riff-heavy ten-track trip that is Family, began with Foals and We Have Band producer Luke Smith once the band had settled themselves in London.
“We freaked out,” Conor remembers. “We jammed for three weeks first but we didn’t even need to fucking jam, we were ready for it. Then we started changing all the songs, it was like Lego blocks, just sticking bits on for no fucking reason.”
“That was horrible actually,” Neil pains. “We were practising in this room in London and it was so hot in August and this room had no air-conditioning. It had one fan painted black with a red light on it that said, ‘Welcome to Hell’.”
“Two songs in and you were pumping sweat,” John adds. “I hated that time, I didn’t enjoy jamming. It was just gruelling.”
By the sounds of things, recording the album wasn’t exactly bathtime with Elmo, either.
“It was the toughest experience we’ve had as a band,” John admits. “Definitely.”
“We all had a separate day where we melted down!” Neil says. “It’s because Luke was pushing us really hard. There was a time when you’d leave the studio after hours of playing the same riff nonstop and you’d kind of look at the other lads and go, ‘Guys, I think Luke hates me...’ And we actually believed that.”
“We all had a day where we thought Luke hated us!” Conor remembers. “He’d know how to piss you off and he’d know how to make you upset. He’d do it and you’re hating him in the meantime, you’re actually going ‘You fucker!’”
“Luke made you really angry at one point,” Neil reminds him.
“It was for ‘They Call It A Race’. On Chariot there’s a lot more shouty singing in the higher range, but on this album, more of it was in the lower register.”
“Luke was standing beside me when you were doing the take of that,” Neil adds, “and when you were doing the low register he was like, ‘This is great. He was a schoolboy before, but now he’s a man!’”
Of course, Smith did more than provide effective bouts of mental manipulation.
“Luke was really adamant that the lyrics were the most important part,” John says, “like the icing on the cake. Even with repeating lines or having a verse that’s the same throughout, he’d be like, ‘You’re being lazy’.”
“And he was right!” Conor exclaims. “I was being lazy, I was repeating verse two and verse one just ‘cos it was like, ‘I like those lines, what’s the point in expanding?’ He made me expand and it was like, ‘Shit! I can write more about that...’ and it makes it mean more.
“The thing is, I always feel like a bit of a dickhead writing lyrics, I feel like a teenage, angsty dickhead. On Chariot, I was literally scribbling them in the book ten minutes before singing them. This time, if the guys were doing their bits, I’d go out into the park and write ideas. Each song had nearly five sets of lyrics for it, and then I started honing in on the concept of family, because we knew we were calling the album Family at that stage. The songs are all pretty much themed around relationships, and that all starts in the home.”
Apart from the fact that Conor and Neil share a set of parents, these four twentysomethings could easily pass for a group of blood relatives. It’s not because they finish each other’s sentences (they do) or because they agree on everything (they don’t), it’s because every so often, they do something so incredibly synchronised that they start to remind me of Captain Planet’s Planeteers, only without the natural disasters. For example, when I ask what goes through their minds when they’re on stage, they all inexplicably shout, ‘Gleaming the cube!’, a reference, I think, to a Christian Slater movie from 1989 (John eventually explains it as what happens “when you zone out and your body’s just doing what it’s supposed to”).
“I think it’s always felt like this, weirdly enough,” Conor confides. “When the whole thing kicked off with Chariot, we were suddenly doing interviews and all that was new to us, we’d all get nervous together and go, ‘What the hell is this?’ Then the more you do new things together, the more intense it gets, and the only people who actually understand what we’re all doing is us. We’re totally like a little family, but we always kind of have been.”
Tensions are clearly high for Family’s release, with the record finding its way into more than one band member’s subconscious. “I had a dream that we released the CD with a free slice of ham and called it a hamblum,” John laughs, prompting Conor to go into startling detail about a dream he had, in which a certain indie frontman accused him of stealing his songs... “But don’t print that!” he warns, “because if we meet him and for some reason he’s read this, he’ll be like, ‘You big weirdo!’”
So how do the men behind Family feel about it all these months later?
“I really like it,” Conor beams. “I’ve listened to it a lot recently because we got the test pressing of the vinyl. When Chariot was finished I was like, ‘This could have been so much cooler’. This one, I’m actually quite happy with.”
“There’s a lot of depth to it compared to other stuff we’ve recorded,” Neil agrees. “It’s about physical things, it’s not all cloudy, floaty-about lyrics. Like (breaking into song), ‘How do you feel when your roof is shaking?’”
Of course, the reviews are only Stage One; people are going to continue to form opinions about this record for as long as laptops spin CDs.
“That’s terrifying,” John shudders. “Like writing in wet cement.”
“I think that’s a good thing,” Conor adds. “We’ll always have it, forever more, that’s not gonna change.”
Neil chimes in, “It’s cool because if we all fall off a cliff and die tomorrow, we’ll still have our names on an album!”
“Well even still, we were people in this world,” Conor muses, in a rare philosophical moment, “which is a great little thing.”
Adams Sr. looks around to find three unconvinced faces. “It is!” he insists. “Whether people thought we were shit or not, it doesn’t really matter. We’re happy.”

Family is released on June 15 on School Boy Error Records/Co-Operative Music. The Cast Of Cheers play Whelan’s, Dublin ( Sept. 19), The Roisin Dubh, Galway (20), Dolan’s, Limerick (21), The Forum, Waterford (22), The Pavilion, Cork (23) and Limelight, Belfast (24).