Wage Slaves?

“I wanted to have the Good Vibrations name on our first single. It’s a wee bit of history. No matter what, we’ve had a single out on Good Vibes.”

At the end of a week during which Terri Hooley’s legendary Belfast record shop closed its doors for the final time, it seems appropriate to be sitting down for a chat with Phil McCarroll, lead singer with Belfast rockers Pay*Ola. Stick Two Fingers Up, the band’s 1999 debut E.P proved to be the last record to be released bearing the famed imprint, while Phil himself spent two years working behind the counter in Howard St.

“I personally think he should be given a Government grant just to keep the place going,” he says. “It’s a tourist attraction. When I was working there you’d have loads of Germans and Japanese and American tourists coming in just to have their pictures taken with Terri.”

Have any interesting encounters yourself?

“I met Bobby Charlton when I was working there. He came in and I got him to sign a Metallica CD because it was the only thing I had handy. I was well chuffed. But you’d get all the wee trendy bands stopping by whenever they played Belfast to pay homage to Terri and, invariably, he’d tell them all to fuck away off. He completely opened up my eyes to lots of different kinds of music. Terri knows his stuff and he introduced me to loads of brilliant things – country, Dusty Springfield, Love, Reggae, early ’60s psychedelic bands. I owe him that, at least. I don’t owe him anything financially,” laughs Phil. “ The wages were fucking abysmal.”

Pay*Ola’s biog makes for surreal reading. While most local bands highlight in bold their playlisting on Across The Line, in the four years since they first formed, the band have been the subject of a BBC1 documentary (Ferry Tales), they’ve been nominated for a gong at the Orange County Music Awards in California, and have headlined at The Empire in Belfast. Half the band originally played in an outfit called Lazy. Pay*Ola, it seems, are anything but.

“There’s always some wee things going on,” says Phil, ”but you’ve got to get off your backsides to rap on doors, make calls, put yourself in people’s faces. We’re not the kind of people who talk and talk about these kind of things, we prefer to go out and do it ourselves.”
It’s an attitude that has seen the four-piece play more nights at the Odyssey Arena than Oasis. Last year, they found themselves providing the half-time entertainment at Belfast Giants’ ice hockey team’s matches. How did that come about?

“Basically they wanted a local act who could play some tunes and, when you’ve seven thousand people there, you don’t want a shoegazing wee indie band, you want someone who’ll show people a good time. But they’re hard work. Anyone who thinks we waltz in there and play the rock stars has it all wrong. You’re trying to grab people’s attention – people who’re there to watch an ice hockey match, not go to see a band. We didn’t want to mime to a backing track. When you do something like that, there is an element of cheese but we tried to qualify that by at least insisting that we were going to play live.”

And anyone who caught them live (or stumbled across one of their three EPs), would find a band eager to frighten the indie horses with their big riffs, power chords and sing-a-long choruses.

Phil: “Melody has always been the thing that attracted me to music. If there’s a strong melody in a song, that’s me. I think that’s why all this nu metal bollocks just leaves me cold. It’s just so dreary and dirgy. If you offered me 50 quid I wouldn’t go to see Slipknot.”

So we won’t see Pay*ola vomit on stage?

“Well, I’m not going to make any promises. It’s happened before. I just don’t think we did it on purpose.”