Web of intrigue

The Internet has shouldered the blame for a great many diabolical things over recent years: for child abductions, for doomsday suicide cults, for the trafficking of weapons’ grade Plutonium. Anyone familiar with the more interesting Northern Irish websites – the one’s prepared to open their message-board doors to the kind of merrily treasonable chat that would have to take place in whispers down at the local – will also be aware of another bogeyman haunting the Net. A bogeyman with a love of Neu and Bowie in Berlin, and a typing finger infected with Tourettes.

In person, David Davis is a petite, quietly spoken, black wearing (“It matches my idiom”) and endlessly polite member of the Belfast-born, but Brighton-based, duo The Feline Dream.

On the web, Feline 1 is a hilarious, irritating, informative, feud-stoking, ego-pricking beast (don’t expect to ever find his band supporting Snow Patrol). Ever wondered what Dorothy Parker would have been like if she’d been a fan of Suicide and krautrock? Well, look no further.

“I do put myself on the line quite a lot and say things that, probably, I should be embarrassed to say,” he admits. “ But I do it anyway because Feline 1 isn’t really me. Feline 1 is quite obviously a persona. I remember when I was a lad and there wasn’t an Internet, I’d just constantly write letters to magazines, radio programmes, and I’d be thrilled whenever anything was published or read out. It’s just something I’ve always done.”

This discursive promiscuity has done more than just eat up his employer’s phone bill. According to Davis, The Feline Dream would not be operating if he had never gone on-line. Since first bonding at school ten years ago over Kraftwerk, he and fellow Feline, Nicholas, have been making music, but once both had moved to different Universities, the band became more of a theoretical conceit than a functional creative unit. This changed when Davis got a job that provided him with access to the Web.

“It somehow got to the stage that in 2000 we were huge in Belfast, despite me not having set foot in the place in five years,” he recounts. “That was purely down to my posting on the Internet. It’s not as if you can call it hype, the band existed as a kind of Internet serial.”

When it comes to playing live, The Feline Dream have been forging quite a reputation as Christmas Party hosts. For the past two years, they’ve thrown a gig at Belfast’s Empire Music Hall at the height of the festive season. Last year’s event, sponsored by the satirical website The Portadown News, was titled ‘Kill A Spyde’.

If you don’t know what a spyde is, lucky you.

“We wanted to do a gig in Belfast and we like to have a concept,” Davis explains. “Why just get onstage and play songs when you can do something a bit more exciting? People seemed to take it as a middle class criticism of the working class but it wasn’t that involved. It was more, ‘Look, this is what’s going on. Apparently a lot of people in Belfast do kill each other’.”

On the release front, there have been a series of playful and provocative EPs, packed with what Davis calls “ punk songs played on our synthesisers.” Best of a good lot is ‘Little Pitbull’, a song from their most recent EP Fashion Music that looks into the murky world of the “typically violent Northern Irish male”. It may not make Top Of The Tops, but there should always be room in your heart for a tune that contains the lyric: “You sat at the back of an Ulsterbus/Shouted ‘flaps’ at the girls in front of us.”

If Howard Devoto had been born posh in Carryduff, I’m sure he’d be proud.

www.felinedream.co.uk