Winter wonderland

It’s a funny old world. Almost exactly a week prior to our meeting with Niall Breslin and Justin Ryan of the Blizzards, the pair were playing to a couple of thousand punters at Oxegen, a hit single stuffed in their back pockets and sharing showers with a wealth of rock stars. This particular Sunday, however, finds them anonymously nursing post-Oasis hangovers at a Dublin pavement café.
The way things are going for the Mullingar band, though, days like the former look set to become more the norm. The past six months have certainly seen a rapid upturn in their fortunes.
“When we started off things moved pretty quickly for us as well,” says singer and songwriter Breslin, “then we decided to re-write a lot of our tracks before we went out and played them again live. When we started gigging again, that’s when everything really started. I can’t put my finger on how it happened, it just did. The venues we were playing were getting packed out and the media started picking up on that. We hadn’t even released anything on that stage”.
The next step was to hook up with the nationwide Faction tour, something that the pair agree really helped them.
“It was good to actually see other bands like ourselves,” agrees guitarist Ryan. “The quality of all the bands was really good”.
Breslin adds: “If a band had a bad gig it stuck out like a sore thumb. We all became good friends, but there was always that competition as to who could get the better reaction of the crowd. We always did really well.
“Our songs are pop tracks, that’s what they are – no excuses. If there’s a crowd there that don’t know us that’s what attracts them”.
And then there was Oxegen, still obviously fresh in Breslin’s memory if his broad smile is anything to go by.
“The day couldn’t have been too long, so there was so much I wanted to pack in. The gig itself was quite emotional, all the hard work boiled down to one moment. If we’d got even one percent of the festival audience we’d have been happy but we got well over 2,000 people. That was unbelievable. We were on third on the second day and it was just the right time for a band like us, the crowd was just heaving. It couldn’t really have gone any better”.
The thing with the Blizzards, though, is that this hasn’t come out of nowhere. Formed in 2003, the band have worked hard to put themselves into such a position.
The greatest evidence of this came when their debut single ‘First Girl To Leave Town’ went into the charts earlier this year. “I knew our song was a radio track,” says Breslin. “It’s a global pop track. None of it was conscious. A lot of Irish bands who release a single don’t give themselves enough time. We knew maybe four months beforehand what we were going to do.
“We toured it, we did instores, we worked hard for it and we hit number 11. We were 15 on the midweek and we had two days to really push it so we just kept working”.
Not that the glamour of it all went to his head. “I was doing part time work on a farm and was driving a tractor, literally pushing 25 foot of shit, when I got a call saying we’d charted. It was hard to get too excited when you’ve got 25 foot of shit in front of you but I sat there for 40 minutes taking it in.
“We thought that we’d automatically get played on the radio all the time, but we’re still only half way there”.
“The strange thing,” says Ryan, “was looking at the charts and seeing all these other acts on major labels that we were up against and there was us. It’s like a pat on the back and that was what got us the Oxegen gig”.
Although many would question the validity and importance of the singles charts these days, Breslin knows that it can only benefit a band like themselves. “The chances are that if we release a second single we’ve profiled ourselves enough to get people to listen to it.
“We know that if they listen to it they’ll play and that was our issue with ‘First Girl To Leave Town’, getting them to listen to it. A couple of DJs started playing it and then others got on the bandwagon. Even so I was a bit disappointed it didn’t get played more than it did.”
So the Blizzards would seem to have it all. A burgeoning media profile, a growing live reputation and, if the demos that they slip us are anything to go buy, a forthcoming album full of punk-pop gems that the likes of Kaiser Chiefs would kill for.
Plus they’re achieving the holy grail of mainstream popularity. “I don’t mean to be patronising but it was the people who don’t have long hair and leather jackets who bought the single,” says Breslin. “It was just normal people. That sounds wrong but you know what I mean”.
Ryan knows what his singer means. “The one thing I can say about our music is that it’s accessible to everybody, it’s not just targeted to the 18 to 30 market. Our songs are for everyone”.