What A Fiasco

Gotcha.

It’s taken a while for us to lasso General Fiasco. Each time we thought we had them in range, an awards show would call, or a showcase gig, or a last minute recording session – and woosh: they’d gallop off – faster than a chorus from their first batch of songs.
But with Belfast Music Week now safely consigned to the archives, and the lads’ role as unofficial ring-masters similarly retired, here we are, three years on from our last chat – corralled around a table full of coffee mugs.
A quick roll-call finds that the core unit of Owen and Enda Strathern and their pal, Stephen Leacock are still here, while – since the recording of their debut album, Buildings, and its subsequent tour – Stuart Bell has arrived on a free transfer from Panama Kings.
However, if the easy wit that we’d always associated with the guys remains, there’s also now a visible wariness that speaks of a testing initial jaunt on the industry ferris wheel.
“Buildings doesn’t really feel like us at the moment,” reveals drummer, Stephen. “We’re still very proud of it, but it was never meant to be an album. It was a collection of demos that everyone – including us – got very excited about and said was good enough to be released, so that’s what we did. We probably should have worked on it more – made sure it had the same aggression that the live shows had. We’ve learned from that.”
“We’ve been misrepresented a bit,” adds frontman Owen, “even the photos from around the time turned us into something that wasn’t us. People want to sell you – represent you in a certain way. Which is fair enough. We were never forced into doing anything. But we were easily swayed. That’s not going to happen from now on.”
In the white-rapids plunge that passes as a career these days for most new indie bands, where a loss of balance can spell instant disaster (“It’s the X-Factor mentality,” says Owen. “No-one’s given a chance”), it would have come as no surprise if General Fiasco had been fatally damaged for the ‘crime’ of releasing a big, rather than massive first album.
Thankfully, we instead find them refocused and keen to apply all the hard-won lessons of the last three years to the production of a new record.
“We’re making it with Rocky (Robinson) at Start Together,” says Stuart. “It’s a great place and they’re brilliant people there. I mean we’re being produced by the guy who produced (ASIWYFA’s noisenik masterclass) Gangs, and it couldn’t sound more different. There’s so little ego involved. If you work with a big name producer, there can be a danger that you end up sounding more like the producer than yourself. Rocky’s as good as anyone you’ll find, but he’ll not impose anything – he’s interested in bringing the music out of you.”
And the first results of this relationship couldn’t sound more promising.
‘The Age You Start Losing Friends’, their recent single, is a brilliant re-statement of everything that made General Fiasco such a fascinating early prospect. Lean, wiry, magnificently melodic – and blessed with a sussed lyric about the problems of reconnecting with old pals.
“It was written just before we were due to go back into the studio,” Owen reveals. “It was a little line that I saved on my phone.”
Is it about coming back home after being on tour?
“No, actually. It’s not,” he says. “It’s not about being in a band. It’s hopefully a bit more universal than that. I don’t think we had that problem of not being able to integrate back. I don’t think any of us felt that. It’s about something that everyone feels, I reckon. You meet up with old friends who you haven’t seen for a while, and time has moved on. It happens to everyone, doesn’t it?”
Which, if a hint of the lyrical direction in which the new material is travelling, suggests General Fiasco have made a significant evolutionary leap.
“We were all so young when we wrote Buildings,” says Owen. “I know we’re still all in our early 20s, but we’ve grown a lot. The new songs all feel very relevant to my life at the moment. I’ve chosen a topic – me. So, there’s a lot of relationship stuff there.
“We’re really excited about it,” he continues. “If you thought you’d written the best song you were ever going to write at 19, you’d retire at 20, wouldn’t you?”
You would.
But thankfully for General Fiasco, promotion seems a more likely outcome.