Two become one

Whose idea was this anyway? I’m sure there was more than one Hot Press staffer who – as the week rolled on – was thinking that the arsehole who’d dreamt it up should be hung, drawn and quartered. If they were, they’d have had a point.

I hold my hand up. If it had happened a week earlier, everything would have been hunky dory. But you can’t stage-manage the moment when a light bulb appears above your head. It was about 10 days before this issue of hotpress was due to hit the streets that two separate ruminations collided, and I had what I thought might just be a very interesting idea indeed.
Kíla and The Thrills have been around for a while. Hot Press has interviewed both outfits on a number of occasions and we have explored what makes them – and their music – tick in reasonable depth. That doesn’t mean that there’s no more left to discover. But the passage of time often makes it harder to know what’s the right thing to do, when bands of this calibre – but also famililarity – plonk a new album in front of you and say “let’s talk”.
As Van Morrison has been wont to ask: “What’s the angle?”
The Thrills have been on the cover of Hot Press a few times. Kíla never have. I happen to rate them as one of the most original, idiosyncratic, brave, brilliant and downright admirable bands to have come out of Ireland in years. They have a commitment to making great art without compromising either their roots or their vision. They are kinda special.
So I wanted to accommodate them on the cover of the magazine in a way that would draw people into their world to a greater extent – and would also work for Hot Press.
The Thrills, meanwhile, are in a curious place. The wait for their third album has been a long one, during which time their profile has dipped. The world has moved on too and in the current climate, anyway, there’s no guarantee that a new record even by an established artist is going to burn chart rubber.
As a genuinely ambitious, creative force with a track record of making hugely infectious classic West Coast-influenced pop records, we wanted to do them justice too. What happened over the weekend was that I came up with a plan – some would argue that it was not very cunning at all – that might satisfy both impulses and provide a real talking point into the bargain.
Kíla Vs The Thrills. The Thrills Vs Kíla. Whichever way you came at it, it had a nice ring. Two outstanding Irish groups, they have approached the process of making great records from radically different positions, and based on similarly divergent assumptions.
Kíla have stayed close to the roots of Irish music. They use traditional instruments. They write their songs, for the most part, as gaeilge. They are fiercely committed to the place from which they came. The Thrills, by contrast, made a leap of the imagination to locate the songs on their first album in a different time zone. It was as if they were running a mile from their Irish suburban background, as if they wished they all could be California boys. Their sole tribute to Ireland on that startlingly good debut record was ‘One Horse Town’.
What I wondered, would they have to say to, or about, one another? As a round-table style interview, it would throw up a few surprises, of that I was sure. The team back at HP Central liked it: there was a mad kind of logic to it. It would, at the very least, challenge a whole slew of preconceptions.
But the potential clincher was this. What would happen if each of them selected a track for remixing by the other? Could we get them to agree to it? And more importantly, would they – and we – be able to pull it off in time to do it as a free CD with the issue of Hot Press, which we were now thinking of putting them on the cover of?
Sometimes you float an idea and it’s dead in the water within five minutes. Not this one. In fact people hardly needed even to be prodded to get on board. Once we got a hold of the chief suspects, the ‘go’ buttons were being pushed. We left it to the bands to decide on the tracks. Between us, we had to find available studios. We had to make sure there’d be engineers who’d be up to the job. Karl Odlum was reeled in – one of the best in the business, he’d work with Kíla. Dave Geraghty from Bell X1 was excited by the idea too – he’d man the decks for The Thrills.
The Thrills offered ‘Nothing Changes Around Here’ for Kíla to work on. Kíla suggested a couple of possibilities, ‘Cabhraigi Léi’ among them. That was the one The Thrills homed in on.
The story of the remixing is told inside by Peter Murphy in a piece that gives a real insight into the recording process and captures the level of commitment and energy that goes into trying to make records great. But much more comes through in the piece. When these two bands, with their very different histories and philosophies and music, come together, meet, talk, exchange ideas, work on each other’s songs and records, a different kind of alchemy takes place.
It is one based on generosity and a shared sense that, in the end, it is all music, the purpose of which is to reach into people’s hearts and, hopefully, to stir resonances and emotions that are beyond mere reason – that are, at their finest, truly transcendent and magical.
There was a whole other ocean that had to be navigated which involved designers, production plants, printers, record companies, legal affairs people, other legal affairs people, couriers, emails, further emails – and it was in the middle of all of this in particular that the arsehole who dreamed it up was doubtless cursed from a height. But it was, I think, worth the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. I hope you agree.
When I heard the remixes, they seemed to me to carry a different, unexpected emotional heft. As they wafted from the speakers, I thought, boy haven’t they done a good job – both of them. And I felt proud for everyone at Hot Press that – for our part – we had pulled it off. It is an amazing gift to our readers from two remarkable bands.
But more than that, it captures the great adventure that music can open up to all of us when it is approached in a spirit of shared openness and commitment.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.