What do 57 year old Jewish advertising consultant Steve Stein and 26 year old former biomedical engineer Greg Gillis have in common? Quite a lot actually. Both men are purveyors of highly contentious music based on samples of other artists’ original works that thus far has avoided the clutches of the copyright controllers. Both have recently released albums with the Illegal Art label; Stein better known as Steinski with What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006, a retrospective of his work made available officially for the first time in June and Gillis under the moniker of Girl Talk has released his mash-up album Feed the Animals to acclaim. State talked to both men and their mysterious label owner about the art of making lawless music.

In 1983, Steve Stein and Douglas Di Franco submitted a five minute mini-mix to a Tommy Boy remix competition under the name of Steinski and Double Dee. The end product took its cue from the track it was supposed to remix, ‘Play That Beat, Mr. DJ’ by G.L.O.B.E and Whiz Kid but after that all bets were off. With sample forays into funk, hip-hop, disco, instructional tapdance records and spoken word from Humphrey Bogart films, the remix was one of a kind at the time. In recognition, the judges, which included hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaata, awarded the duo first prize. What followed was a series of five mixes in total; one tackled James Brown, one Hip-Hop, one Jazz and the final one hip-hop originators The Sugar Hill Gang.

Over the course of the last 25 years, New Yorker Stein has created audio collage works with various themes including the Kennedy assassination, sex and 9/11. His work is revered in the hip-hop community and have been shared through bootlegs and radio recordings. He has inspired many a DJ such as DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and to a certain extend The Bomb Squad and Kid Koala. Due to the many copyright infringements contained within his works, Steinski has never made a dime but his work afforded him other opportunities -”‘I’ve gotten a fair amount of notoriety that’s led to interesting advertising work, other records – remixes and related projects, lots of DJ gigs in many great places, and meeting and working with quite a few amazing people.”

The pro-sampling Illinois label Illegal Art decided to release the retrospective last month anyway despite the potential legal problems. Even now, in 2008, Stein is still liable for those recordings should the lawyers wish to pursue him. Not that’s he’s worried. “My work has hardly been high-profile enough to warrant anyone jumping up and down, outraged over the ‘illegality’ of it. I work in collage, the same way as (if I can mightily stretch a comparison to include two truly great visual artists) Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson. The ‘legality’ issues are secondary, and only enter into the discussion because audio work is infinitely reproducible through digital technology, an idea that threatens cultural control.”

The essence of what Stein is getting at, is the very core of filesharing and digital distribution. The internet empowers society to upload and share work. Most of that work happens to be copyrighted. This is either a very good thing or a very bad thing depending on your interests. A leaked Arcade Fire record which was on your computer in the morning could be on thousands of hard-drives by bedtime. On the flipside, such dissemination of material also empowers individuals to create, to express, to remix and re-contextualise for a large audience. The problem arises when business interests are stirred and copyright is infringed.

Re-using portions of recorded sound for another creative purpose is nothing new of course. Hell, The Beatles did it back in the ’60s. Beastie Boys and The Dust Brothers created the 1989 classic hip-hop record Paul’s Boutique which was infused with 105 samples in total. It was the golden age of sampling, allowed to flourish thanks to corporate ignorance of subcultures. Just look at Drum and Bass and Jungle. Entire underground genres of music based on a famous sample known as the Amen Break from a forgotten funk 1969 B-side ‘Amen Brother’ by The Winstons.

When bureaucratic interests realised what was happening, the clampdown began. In 1991, rapper Biz Markie was sued for using a Gilbert O’ Sullivan sample and was forced to withdraw his album from shelves. That case meant the frequency of sampling by artists was curtailed significantly over the ’90s. It’s important to remember the laws that govern sampling were set in stone before internet usage was widespread. Now in this Web 2.0 internet age, we are faced with endless possibilities to contribute to culture; whether it’s uploading a video, blogging, remixing your favourite artists, fan-made videos and more ad infinitum. But current copyright law values property and protection over creativity. Just ask Greg Gillis.

The Pittsburg native’s latest album as Girl Talk, Feed the Animals is made up of over 300 samples from various popular recording artists none of which were cleared. From Beck to Beyoncé, Rihanna to Roy Orbison, Sinéad O’ Connor to Snoop Dogg; the album is made up entirely of sampled recorded work; with a new sample introduced every 10 to 15 seconds. It is of course, under copyright law, legally dubious but in cultural terms, highly creative. Illegal Art also released Feed the Animals online in a pay what you like system a la Radiohead’s In Rainbows in June. It is Girl Talk’s second release to feature that volume of samples (his first was 2006′s Nightripper) yet so far, no cease and desist letters have been received. Illegal Art label owner Philo T. Farnsworth has a theory – “The number of samples protects us to a degree. If we’ve infringed on an artist’s rights, they can only claim a tiny moment within a fairly large project.”

So far Gillis has received nothing but positivity from artists who he has directly sampled. “Big Boi from OutKast came out to one of my shows in Atlanta,” he tells State. “Sophie B. Hawkin’s manager emailed me recently. I heard Mike Patton say that it was an honour to collaborate with Busta Rhymes on my new album!”

While some would claim Girl Talk’s modus operandi is both illegal and unoriginal, Gillis naturally disagrees. “There are no original ideas in pop music. Everything is built upon previous ideas. ‘Originality’ comes with how well you re-contextualise an old idea. I would like to see sampling treated like any other instrument. It’s possible to make transformative work that does not negatively impact the sampled artists’ potential sales, and I think this should be legal. For any album that samples 300 songs, even if you wanted to pay for the samples, it would be impossible,” he continues. “No one could afford it. It’s clearly a case where the law is holding back a certain form of artistic and musical expression.”

Both Girl Talk and Steinski have the moral backing of Illegal Art and its mysterious owner Philo T. Farnsworth who has plenty of experience releasing illicit albums. In 1998, Illegal Art released Deconstructing Beck, a compilation of tracks which used samples from Beck songs. Farnsworth recieved multiple legal threats from Beck’s lawyers on the grounds of copyright infringement. The case went high-profile for a while but as Farnsworth is a pseudonym designed to obscure his real identity (the real Philo T. Farnsworth was an inventor), the lawyers couldn’t find enough real information on himself or the Illegal Art label to prosecute. One wonders what Beck Hansen thought of all this? ‘We’ve never officially heard, but there were rumors that Beck actually liked the CD,’ Farnsworth tells us.

With these releases from Steinski and Girl Talk bringing a decent amount of exposure and success to Illegal Art, Farnsworth sees those releases as ways of encouraging dialogue on the subject of copyright. “It has given us [Illegal Art] a higher profile, and it has also brought a lot of attention to the debate over whether this music should be allowed to exist or not.” Clearly, Girl Talk’s gruelling touring schedule tells us that it should be. Beyond that, take the case of producer Danger Mouse and his Jay-Z /Beatles bootleg mashup album in 2004. EMI attempted to halt the distribution of the record but it only fueled interest in the release. Nowadays Danger Mouse is a much-lauded producer who, as well as being partly responsible for Gnarls Barkley, has also produced records for Gorillaz, Beck and Martina-Topley Bird. His illegal work has allowed him to produce for some of music’s biggest names, thereby contributing significantly to the popular culture canon.

Artists such as Girl Talk, Steinski, Danger Mouse are finding copyright law too restrictive or unrealistic to apply to their creative urges so they just ignore it. Farnsworth says it’s not just artists who see it that way – “The average person now seems to be in opposition to the perceived laws” and taking the Arcade Fire leak as an example of what happens everyday, one might agree. At the same time, Farnsworth and Gillis are aware of what could happen but would hope that their work would fall under the doctrine of Fair Use should they ever have to defend it in court. “We’d consult with the artist and our legal team to decide how far to take things. We’re prepared to go all the way, if needed,” Farnsworth asserts.

That’s not to say they don’t support the protection of art through copyright but are of the opinion that the the balance has shifted too far from protection to restriction. Stein’s view is that any potential changes have been hindered by ‘large corporations pouring enormous amounts of money into the American legislative system for the past 100 years, warping copyright and patent law beyond recognition and original intent.’ Farnsworth agrees. “Entities that have investments in intellectual property are very concerned in tightly controlling their interests. They go too far, though. They do things that are counter-productive to our culture and to the growth of the very interests that they’re trying to protect.” In the US, lobby groups have convinced congress to pass laws extending copyright for 20 years. Here in the Europe, Ireland’s EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevey has proposed an extension of copyright law for a further 45 years. What Illegal Art and their artists are doing is more akin to a silent protest of the shift in the scales. They each have their own wishes for the future.

Steinski would like to see that law “scaled back toward its original time limits and intent, so it could protect creators for a reasonable amount of time. Then let society – which generously gives exclusive licenses to creators through copyright guarantees – have access to the works for which it has already provided protection.” Farnsworth would like to see copyright law “return to its core purpose of encouraging creation and use rather than imposing endless restrictions”, while Gillis’ view is a little more simplistic – “I just want to be treated like any other band. I just want people to be able to hear my music.” Whatever happens, it seems that the 57 year old Jewish advertising consultant and the 26 year old former biomedical engineer will continue to create and inspire scores of copyright-flouting DJs and musicians for some time.

Illustration by Brenb.

Links:
http://illegalart.net/mainindex.html
http://www.myspace.com/girltalkmusic
http://www.steinski.com/

As we stared headlong into the cavernous abyss that is Billy Childish’s part-metal mouth we quickly realised there was no escape. Turning to consider the exit it became clear that this was not an option, considering we were:

A) Stood right under Childish’s moustache;
B) We had already been sussed as the only English speakers there;
C) We were in some random Berliner’s apartment.

This night could not get any worse. Toiling around the darkened backstreets of central Berlin at some ungodly hour was not an ideal situation for two drunken Dublin girls but we were nothing if not determined. Three years previously, we had witnessed an incendiary performance of Billy Childish’s trademark ramshackle garage-rock, belting through The Kinks’ ‘Misty Water’ at such breakneck speed, it was eye-watering, so when we stumbled upon an ad for a gig it looked like the ideal inaugural night out.

Having thoroughly exasperated our taxi driver with our Leaving Cert. German and vague address , he eventually left us stranded in the middle of an empty street clutching our crumpled poster of Our Billy, stupidly pointing at the scrawled street name at the bottom. I began to ruminate ruefully over the fact that if I had concentrated on listening to German rather than trying to learn how to speak it in school we might have had more success and that German streets are long’¦very long, even longer if you are wearing ridiculously uncomfortable cowboy boots that you thought could make you look a bit like Sienna Miller but sadly make you look like a lady-version of Noel Fielding.

After at least an hour of flared tempers and hostile glances, we started coming to terms with the fact that the venue was as made-up as the act’s moniker. Just then, we noticed a ripped A4 page with ‘BILLY CHILDISH’ and an arrow pointing upwards scribbled on it.

‘Upwards’ was not a pub or a club but a towering flat-block beside a fly-over and as we groped our way up the pitch black empty stairwell, I began conjuring up headlines about missing, idiotic Dublin girls, last seen arguing about shoes, and wished I liked bands who weren’t as artistically conceited and played in actual venues.

Still, even these warning signs could not stop us: we were going to have our bloody brilliant Berlin gig and we were going to go home with boring, self-satisfied, you-should-have-been-there stories, even if it killed us. Fuelled by this ridiculous smugness and pints of Staropramen, we thought nothing of the shadowy door marked -Gig’ or the grey-faced weirdo standing outside it. A note for potential attackers: this is the fool-proof indie Hansel and Gretel method to be used liberally on gullible music-loving girls’¦

Swinging the door open, we came face to face with… nothing. Absolutely nothing, save brown and orange carpeted walls, a makeshift ‘bar’ (plywood balancing on chairs with a few bottles of Red Stripe keeping it upright), a couple of spliffed-up locals eye-balling our every move and some sweaty bloke, who looked like a German Johnny Vegas, playing psycho-billy vinyl at an ear splitting volume. When we saw Childish stride up the mound of carpet next to the speakers, I remember thinking, ‘fuck it: it’ll be all worth it in the end’¦’

Two poems about ‘that-Tracy Emin’ later we couldn’t keep it in, like two uncomfortable kids in Mass, we began to laugh, the secret-fart laugh that starts as an under-your-breath giggle and erupts into the full-on cheek-biting shoulder shakes that prompted Childish to snap, ‘ I think artists deserve respect when they are trying to entertain you, I need silence’¦’ Said outburst, thankfully, gave us the impetuous to escape: running down the stairwell, freeing our laughter into the early morning cold, we jumped into our getaway taxi just as we heard a guitar burst into life’¦

‘They were fuckin’ amazing gigs,’ remembers Kilkenny native Captain Moonlight of Scary Éire’s in-famous six-week residency at Barnstormers, a ‘bloody hardcore’ bikers’ bar on Capel Street, known these days as Bleu Note. It was early 1992 and the men of Scary Éire (RíRá Mek, DaDa Sloosh and Mr Browne) were on the cusp of something special. So went the feeling of everyone who was there anyway. Flyers were handed around the city streets in the run-up to the gigs featuring a Kalashnikov-shaped logo for the band. Word of mouth was spread through Mek’s demo tapes, handed from one taken soul to another. Those who heard the band loved them. Those who loved them needed to go to Barnstormers.

‘Those gigs were arranged by our manager at the time, Collie Carty,’ remembers Mek. ‘I think he was mates with one of the owners. It was a mad biker gang joint – a pub at the front with a live venue round the back. They were all really cool people, walkin’ round with their Devil’s Disciples’ jackets and banda-nas and shit.’

RíRá takes up the story, ‘It was like playing in your own gaff with your mates around. I mean half the fuckers were on and off the stage with us. People would stroll on, skin up, and fuck off back to the bar. It was a fuckin’ madhouse. I remember one night the ceiling being torn, and they were jumping up grabbing at it until the fuckin’ thing was literally ripped down.

‘There were punks, bikers, b-boys, ska heads, fuckin’ allsorts. Those gigs were like a release for everyone in there, the band, the crowd, the bouncers. But through all the madness, nobody ever sustained an injury that hadn’t been self-inflicted. It was always positive and well meaning, and a fuckin’ great laugh. All that and the stink of stale beer.’

Many Tullamore natives, friends of Sloosh and RíRá’s, would also populate the crowd, along with Dublin’s nascent hip hop community as it was; most of whom had been drawn from around the country to find some sort of solace in the capital. Cormac Cullinan, formerly known as Cool C in his guise as Captain Moonlight’s DJ, was also present at the Barnstormers’ nights and says that he and Moonlight were ‘the only ones into hip hop in Kilkenny back then’, adding that even when he moved up to Dublin, there were ‘about 40 people in total into it: it’s hard to explain how odd it was at the time.

‘I remember one night, going into the bar in Barnstormers and getting this look of death and thinking -right, in the wrong place then’ and headed into the venue. It was that type of place, a really hard bar.’
The timing and importance of the gigs are still fresh for those who were there. The late ’80s and early ’90s was an age when Public Enemy played the Trinity Ball while it was still light outside, when only a handful of the city’s clubs even played dance music, when the only exposure hip hop got on national airwaves was when Eamonn Carr would hijack Dave Fanning’s 2FM show while the latter was on holidays. Then Scary Éire ‘hit the nail on the head’, says Moonlight.

Along with Marxman, the Oisin Lunny led Anglo-Irish hip hop group, Scary Éire had touched a nerve. By the time of the Barnstormers gigs, Lunny’s band were heading towards the US to record their only album for Talking Loud, where they would have a video shot by a young Spike Jonze and be produced by DJ Premier of the influential east coast Gangstarr rap group.

‘I knew Mek from a long time ago,’ Lunny notes. ‘There was an event a mate of mine was running at McGonagles and we invited Mek along: we’d never seen anything like it. The decks, the beats, he was above everything. Then when I saw Scary Éire I was blown away by them. They really nailed the Irish rap crossover. With Marxman, there were elements of it, but we were certainly broader and there were London elements as well, it was different in focus. Everything was spot on with them and when we were in the States, we thought they would be over after us six months later. I really thought they could go down huge in the States.’

Paul Tarpey, who would photograph the legendary Barnstormers gigs, adds, ‘Mek was always pass-ing out tapes. He operated as a one man Irish radio show for Dublin and beyond, spreading the culture in a way that you had to keep up with the beats and the lyrics. If a new slant appeared, he would work it into his sets and school the audience. At this time, he was the equal of any selector in New York or London. Moments like this just never happened before,’ Tarpey continues. ‘There was no DJ culture in Dublin, certainly nowhere else that had gigs like this on. That’s why people were so loyal, you had a few rock venues but Scary Éire hit on something and people wanted to see it.’

The Barnstormers gigs would see a loyal crowd come back week on week, with assorted randomers and curious ‘old rock heads’ as Moonlight says. RíRá himself says that the band would usually turn up during the day with their gear, set things up, ‘make sure it was all working as well as it could be, scribble down an indefinite set-list, and then drink until it was time to play.

‘Mr Browne didn’t even do soundchecks,’ he laughs. ‘He’d turn up on the night, have a few spliffs and a few beers and ask which mic he was using. I think he felt more in touch with the crowd by not knowing what songs we were gonna play. We never practiced as a band, not properly. Any attempt to practice turned into tireless drinking sessions. But it always came good on the night. We always knew exactly what part we each played, even when it was straight off the cuff.’

Before RíRá took to the stage, the crowd were baying for entertainment and assorted warm up acts, like local legends Dotsie as well as Ghost n’ Jay, would build the atmosphere before what one witness describes as a ‘pure fuckin’ monster’ set from Scary Éire . By the end of 12 songs and with the bar owner shuffling people out the door, their sweat turning to ice in the March breeze, all anyone could think of was the following week.

Mek takes up the story: ‘Every week, the crowd got bigger and louder. Record company dudes started flyin’ over to check us out: Adam Clayton would just stroll in and chill at the back, noddin’ his head. It’s kinda funny, lookin’ back at it now. Rock superstars, b-boys, crusty old rock dudes and hardcore hip hop heads all in the same room. There was somethin’ for everyone – you could walk in and hear Thin Lizzy, Schoolly D, Cutty Ranks, The Clash and Moving Hearts bein’ scratched up. Where the fuck else was that goin’ down in Dublin?’

Producer and DJ, Hazo was another disciple at the Barnstormers nights. He says it’s hard to realise just how cutting edge the whole thing was at the time, ‘There was a huge buzz around Dublin, which was a very different place back then, about these nights. It just sounded so mad, you had to go to them. The thing with Scary Éire was that in the ’80s, trad groups had tried to mess around with black music and it didn’t work, whereas here you had these gigs where Mek would start playing alongside a bodhrán and a flute and it wasn’t gimmicky. It was of its time certainly. House of Pain was gimmicky: this wasn’t.’

‘It was just a melting pot of so many different people,’ says Hazo, ‘the capacity was around 200 to 250 and you’d have skinheads, republicans, and everything else, all the undercurrents of Dublin meeting in this one place and that suited the band and what they were playing: there was just a huge amount of energy’.
Recollection can often be a problem, particularly when alcohol is added into the mix, but with the biker jackets and the human can of baked beans atmosphere, events seem to crystallise for most.

Says RíRá, ‘I think those gigs helped structure the band. We improvised a lot, kind of found our footing, while ironically being legless. I wouldn’t say they were the best performance gigs: but it felt like something really fuckin’ good was going on, even if nobody was sure what it was. You could cut the energy with a hatchet.’

Paul Fingleton of Dublin reggae favourites Firehouse Skank also braved the crush to catch a closer look the band. ‘Barnstormers, because of where it was and the people who would usually be there, it was kind of a step into the unknown. You were never sure what would happen: there was always some kind of ten-sion. Potential violence is one way of putting it, maybe: some people were off their heads. But it was something you had to go to.’ Politics, of course, was an issue that was never far away from Scary Éire, be it the rumour of Mek donning a balaclava during a DJ set in Club 92, the aforementioned tri-colour and the ‘ooh ah up the RA blah, blah, blah vibe’, as Cormac Cullinan puts it, that came from some of the Scary audience.

Cullinan, who now jointly runs the All City label and store in Temple Bar, continues, ‘There was that element alright. You wouldn’t ask somebody what their politics were, put it that way. But beyond the Kalashnikov and whatever else, Scary Éire were just on-the-nose. It wasn’t intimidating on those nights, it was just the best gigs you were gonna see.’

Such moments of course often have a bittersweet taste. While the four February gigs would be repeated the following year (along with other intermittent Barnstormers one-offs) Scary Éire would go on to album release hell with Island Records, then break up for over a decade, only to finally let loose the hulk-ing mammoth of a record that is The Scary Era last year. It was notable that during performances to pro-mote the LP, RíRá would often cite ‘the Barnstormers crew’.

The unique MC thinks back and adds, ‘I’m still in contact with people who were there. To be honest, whenever Barnstormers is mentioned, people make the sign of the cross, I’m not sure if they feel blessed or cursed? It’s kind of like they don’t need to swap stories, it’s a nod of the head, or a thumbs up. I’ve seen it recently: it’s some kind of arty jazz bar now I think’¦ I laugh when I pass it, you can still smell the chaos.’

Photos by Paul Tarpey, photographer and writer based in Limerick. See more of his work at www.cheebah.net.

In more ways than one, No Disco began and ended with a -Cannonball’. As the familiar bass-line of The Breeders’ track of the same name kick-started the programme’s first episode in 1993, little did viewers realise that they were at the mouth of a quiet storm for both Irish broadcasting and the country’s music scene. In the years since the show’s demise in 2003, it has been canonised for its audacious and impassioned music programming, its lo-fi production values imbued with a laissez-faire charm. But scratch the surface of No Disco’s tale, and you’ll find that its journey was much less romantic and more turbulent than first meets the eye.

Contrary to current consensus, No Disco appeared on Irish screens after what had actually been a rather fertile time for Irish music video programming. From 1984-’87, MT USA – fronted by the late Vincent Hanley – was broadcast on RTE, showcasing rock videos from across the US. Although something of an anomaly in the Sunday morning schedule, The Beatbox (later 2TV) was another well-liked series that championed local contenders among more established international acts. Although the show’s singular contribution to Irish music is roundly recognised, it appears that its origins were a little less idealistic than many would like to believe.

‘It was a strategic decision on RTE’s part – a political one more than a financial one – to base more productions outside Dublin,’ recalls Colm O’Callaghan, a one-time music journalist who originally devised the show. ‘Someone thought that the best way to test the waters was to do a music show as it was the cheapest sort of show to do.’ Upon landing the gig as producer/director for the first season, O’Callaghan’s first port of call was to sound out Donal Dineen, an old colleague from DCU’s Bullsheet paper, to present the show.

‘Peter Collins, who was then on The Beatbox, was one of the names bandied about at the time,’ recalls O’Callaghan. ‘But I liked that Donal had a terrific breadth of knowledge.’ Still, many were initially thrown by Dineen’s trademark reticent presenting style. By his own admission, Donal’s smoothly cold on-screen demeanour belied his inward terror.

‘I did a screen test, but I still think there was a palpable sense of panic in every link I ever did,’ he admits. ‘I’d started developing breathing difficulties and found it hard to get the words out on occasion. I didn’t ever -own’ them half the time: I did get better as time went on but that unease never really went away. Knowing what I know now, doing No Disco would have been a lot of fun but I was constantly living in fear of being taken aside or being laughed at.’

In time, his uncompromising and soft-spoken ways would become central to No Disco‘s winning formula. ‘I think it gave him an air of mystique and cut him apart from the pack,’ notes O’Callaghan. ‘When RTE management saw No Disco, they really did not know what to make of it. About four weeks in, people were like, -get this guy off the air, he’s patently not suited to TV’ but I was batting for Donal and there was an unspoken thing that if he goes, we all go. Seven or eight weeks in, the show received a great write-up in The Irish Times, which is the sole critical barometer used by RTE management. It ended up becoming its saving grace.’

With No Disco promptly nailing its colours to the mast, audiences immediately warmed to its mesmeric and enticing stew of little-known indie videos. Referring to itss output, O’Callaghan admits: ‘It was all total subjectivity. Donal liked one thing and I liked another.’ ‘It was an exciting time,’ adds Dineen. ‘It was feasible to produce videos outside of a production suite and it was a great time for music videos aesthetically, as stuff from Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham was coming in to us. My own creativity got ignited after seeing these videos myself.’

To meet Niall McGuirk now, you’d be hard pressed to guess that he was part of something revolutionary, something that helped change the entire music scene in Ireland. As the driving force behind the Hope Collective (although he would modestly claim to have been just a part of it), McGuirk helped some of the finest US and European bands play alongside their Irish counterparts for the best part of 15 years.

‘There were a few venues on the local scene’, he remembered of the pre-Hope days, as State met him last year in a Dublin vegetarian restaurant,’ but they were very well established and as a kid, they were pretty hard to get into because of the licensing laws. Very few bands came over to Ireland, so they were generally used by local bands. The bigger name bands would play places like the SFX and those gigs were expensive enough. The bands that I was into weren’t coming over so I started writing to them saying, why don’t you come to Ireland and they’d say that no-one had asked them before. That was how it started.’

Sounds easy enough, but take into account that McGuirk was 16 at the time. ‘The first band we picked up were The Membranes. They said they’d come, so we took out the Hot Press Yearbook and went through venue after venue, seeing if we could book anywhere where kids could go. We got a place called New Books for a Monday night and that was it. It wasn’t a grand plan, we just started with The Membranes and then people started ringing me for gigs. We didn’t bring bands over, they brought them-selves and we just helped them along the way.’

Hope grew in numbers (including Niall’s future wife Miriam) and their philosophy became more defi-nite. ‘We all paid into the gigs. It meant we didn’t have a guest list but also that we were part of it as well. It seemed the right way to do it, it made sense, there was no expectation of getting something back – you just did it to help out.’ A large part of it was also making sure that Hope was a national concern, not just Dublin. ‘We used to try and get bands over on a Thursday ferry on the weekend special and get them gigs on every day before they went back on Tuesday. We’d try and get them into Trinity College on a Friday lunchtime, pay them some money and try them in other places around the country.’

As their reputation grew, Hope became the Irish promoter of choice for more and more international bands, including Nomeansno, NOFX, Babes In Toyland, MDC and Spermbirds. They also staged Green Day’s Irish debut on a Sunday afternoon gig at The Attic (now The White Horse) in 1991. It wasn’t quite the legendary event it could have been, with Hope losing £50 on the gig. ‘I was in town doing some last minute Christmas shopping’, remembers Pete Murphy, now of EMI. ‘I knew Niall was organising an afternoon gig for this band on Lookout Records, called Green Day. I knew their first couple of records, and I’d always support the Hope gigs when I could, so I took some time out to pop in and catch the show. Armed as ever with my trusty walkman recorder I headed in and, along with, I guess, 25 other people, caught a great gig. I still have that tape somewhere.’

If one band became inexorably linked with Hope, it was Fugazi. ‘People in England were telling us that there wasn’t much in Ireland’, says Ian Mackaye of the band. ‘They said we’d lose money and there weren’t any gigs but we were just blown away. We had such a good time. At that time, Fugazi had come straight out of the DC underground. We did three months touring in Europe with no record out. We existed as part of a community that supported each other based on ideals. We were always looking for like-minded people but it wasn’t hard because they were contacting us. If people came to us, they were on the right wavelength because we weren’t on anybody else’s radar.’

Ian remembers their first visit well, even if it was for dubious reasons. ‘At our first gig in McGonagle’s I was so sick that I had to do the show sitting down. We missed the ferry and had to load all the gear in through the crowd, which was insane. I couldn’t really sing. I think Guy sang -Waiting Room’ that night, which was really unusual. We stayed at Niall’s parents’ house.’ He laughs. ‘I think we missed the ferry three times. I don’t think we made it easy for Niall.’

For McGuirk, the success of bands like Green Day brought a noticeable change, as the US punk they had championed slowly began to move from the underground to the mainstream. ‘It felt for a while that bands had more expectations. The demands were small but they were enough. They wouldn’t get involved in conversations with us, whereas we were trying to create a community that these people were coming into. We wanted them to be involved in it and there were bands coming in who would barely talk to us. That’s not to say that they didn’t deserve the treatment that they were looking for: they just weren’t going to get it from us.’

Well, putting Morrissey on the bill, apparently. In some ways, it was only natural that Madness should ask him to take part; their producers, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley had helmed several Morrissey singles and his 1991 album Kill Uncle (Madness’s Bedders played bass on the record), while Suggs himself had provided guest vocals on Moz’s 1990 single -Piccadilly Palare’. Moreover, Morrissey had enthused at length about the essential -Englishness’ of both acts, making many (this writer included) believe that Madstock was going to be a quaint garden party. It turned out to be anything but.

Morrissey’s 1992 album Your Arsenal had been somewhat of a watershed in his solo renaissance; with his new songwriting partners Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer coming from a rockabilly background, he was quiffed up and rocking out like never before. One particular track had, however, got up the noses of NME – -The National Front Disco’, with appeared to empathise with a young Englishman who felt his country was no longer his. This came in the wake of previously controversial songs of racially-tinged urban alienation, -Bengali In Platforms’ and -Asian Rut’.

Come Madstock, this combined explosively with Madness’s long-ignored, dark secret – the presence of a far-right skinhead element in their audience. Morrissey fans are, by nature and reputation, a peaceable breed – and even more so when they’re being antagonised. I have to confess my utter naïveté in this regard; if I’d had Trinny and Susannah to hand to ask what not to wear to Madstock, they’d probably have frowned upon my choice of a bright red polka-dot shirt, worn open over a t-shirt bearing the somewhat homoerotic sleeve image from Your Arsenal. Of course, I was only through the Park gates for a few moments when a lager-swilling huddle of bovver-booted neo-Nazis spotted my quiff and garb and blew poisoned kisses in my direction, tweeting, ‘ooh, Morrissey, Morrissey!’

Still, the first three acts passed through peacefully from my position at the back. Then, as a swell of scattered quiffs converged into a sea flowing towards the front, the stage backdrop was revealed: two giant, Fred Perry-adorned skinhead girls. Automatic seething ensued from the swastika’d necks of bald giants who’d refused to budge from their positions at the stage front; the wailing strains of Klaus Nomi’s -Wayward Sisters’ only inflamed them further. All of which reached a hate-filled crescendo as the gold lamé-clad Morrissey and his rockabilly boys took to the stage and launched into a growlingly prophetic -You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side’.

In any mosh-pit, you expect at least a degree of jostling; but try being jostled into the back of one of these human Rottweilers for a stomach-churning, never-to-be-forgotten experience. The grimace, the fists like a tiger’s dinner, the threatening eyes, the sudden reminder of a young Paul Weller’s experience down in the tube station at midnight, they all flash before your eyes in an instant. I allowed the jostlers to carry me elsewhere, while hate-filled missiles (oranges and plastic bottles) rained onstage.

Meanwhile, Morrissey, a Liberace shirt slung over his skinny frame, is waving these fascist-spawned monsters’ Union Flag at them while relating the experience of Davey, the young man who went to the -National Front Disco’; if ever there was an sudden irony failure at NME, who’d slated Morrissey’s solo work for not -treading on the taboos of old’, it was right here. Only a couple of years later, they would laud Britpop and the reclaiming of the British flag, yet here, it was Morrissey, and not this foul minority in Madness’s audience, who they cast as the racist.

Morrissey finished his otherwise triumphant set early and failed to show for day two; Suggs never mentioned, nor was he ever quizzed upon, his band’s neo-fascist supporters’ behaviour that day. Meanwhile, me and my fellow Moz heads made our tremulous way to the tube station, well before midnight, in blissful ignorance of just how this story was about to be spun by the popular music press we’d supported for years; so long as we remember exactly what took place that day, the chroniclers and revisionists can simply get on with glossing over the inconvenient truth.

But hey, it was just another job. I had this getaway ride sorted. I had my tape recorder and the name of the road manager. I’d get backstage, let Stapp talk his leather pants off for 30 minutes, help myself to the rider, then endure just enough of the show to write a decent story. Then I had a weekend in DC, thanks to Sony Australia. Sweet. My first truly sickening moment was watching my car burn rubber and vanish at the drop-off point. The second was when I met the aforementioned road manager. “So you’re from Australia?” he asked in a tone uncomfortably close to contempt. “Man, you guys hated us last time we were out there.”

What? I’d only hated them for a few hours! But the die had been cast. Scott Stapp would not be gracing my Australian arse with his presence. Guitarist Mark Tremonti would do the interview. Stifling a “Mark who?”, I was thrust into a pea-green dressing room with two plastic chairs and a tub of ice filled with a famous American soft drink. No beer…..Nobeernobeernobeernobeerno . . .

Tremonti was a nice enough guy, though he was hard to hear over the din greeting a suitably diabolical warm-up band, 3 Doors Down. I remarked that the reception sounded curiously wholesome, quite unlike your average snotty, profane mosh of the new century. “Yeah, I think it’s cool to step into the rock’n'roll scene and be different, not to be somebody that’s here to spread the ‘let’s break stuff’ sort of attitude,” Tremonti replied. “I think that’s one thing that’s different about Creed. We’re very normal, your next-door-neighbour kinda band.”

No fooling. I told him about the array of normal t-shirts I’d seen punters wearing on the way up the highway: more along the lines of “Have A Nice Day” than “Rage Against The Machine”. “Yeah, everybody’s one big, loving family,” he said. “It’s like a Grateful Dead concert, but modern.” Like, without the dope? “Yeah, without the dope. Our fans are very intelligent. They read into all the lyrics and they know exactly what they are. They’re very into the band. It’s like a cult, kinda thing. It’s like a David Koresh concert, you know?”

The glib comparison to the controversially deceased Waco Davidians’ sect leader would have been the most surreal moment of the day were it not for what happened shortly after I left the comically named “Creed hospitality area”. Not wishing to miss a beat of the show, I gave the long lavatory queue a miss and ducked instead into the darkness behind some bushes. Perhaps this is a heathen Australian custom. But the palpable disgust of the Howard County policemen who escorted me from the premises was nearly enough to make me piss myself.

The good news was that I never heard a note of the Creed show. The bad news? No car, no phone, no story – and man, I still needed to pee. See, I hadn’t quite managed to unleash the offending article before being apprehended by the Maryland constabulary. Which probably made me the only man in America who felt more like Jim Morrison than Scott Stapp did.

‘The second gig we ever did was just me and Guggi,’ he recalls, ‘with U2 as our band, when they were The Hype. I worked in a slaughterhouse and I got a load of white coats and mesh which we used to cover them up. We did a 20-minute version of -(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, slowed right down so that it would take a minute and a half to get one sentence out. It was totally provocative. After that gig, Dik Evans, who was Edge’s older brother, left The Hype and came to work with us.’

No matter how inauspicious it might sound, that gig led to a third live outing for the Prunes and a slightly more high profile one at that – supporting The Clash at The Top Hat in Dun Laoghaire in October 1978. For Friday, it was a memorable night. ‘We came on: Guggi was wearing a tiny skirt and I had a plastic suit made out of raincoats, no jocks underneath, and a pair of Docs. We’d only played two little gigs before that. Steve Averill from The Radiators From Space played synthesizer with us. The crowd just went apeshit. They thought Guggi was a chick.”

‘The adrenaline of all these people pogoing kicked in and I started jumping around, the next thing this plastic suit that my ma had made me split completely. I was standing there totally bollock naked, except for a pair of Doc Martins. I turned around and Guggi’s skirt had come off and you could see that he was a bloke. All hell broke loose, there were bottles flying, they were setting the curtains on fire. We were reefed off the stage by The Clash’s tour manager and fucked out the door. We had no money and had to walk with all our gear, back from Dun Laoghaire to Ballymun.’

Such was the world of The Virgin Prunes, a world where art and chaos collided, a world where you would do anything to break the boredom of living in mid–70s Ireland. ‘We were like a Third World country’, Friday remembers. ‘If you go back to parts of the Eastern bloc of Europe now, that’s what Dublin was like in the -60s and -70s. Grey, dull, mass unemployment and complete poverty. Music became a lifeline to escape for kids. Punk gave you a licence to form a band with just an attitude. I turned 16 when punk kicked in and had plenty of attitude.’

There was a fair bit of attitude kicking around Ballymun in those days, as a group of teenage friends formed their own strange society (Lypton Village) and gave each other nicknames – Guggi, Gavin Friday, Bono, The Edge. These guys were a band before they’d even picked up an instrument. ‘The name Virgin Prunes had been hanging around for a while’, says Gavin, ‘since the early -70s. You’d see odd people walking around and we’d call them prunes. Virgin prunes were quite innocent. We always said if we ever had a band, we’d be called that. The name was there. I was a big, big music fan. Guggi was more a visuals person. When punk happened, it was a godsend. It was like we were two bands just waiting to pick up an instrument. We weren’t really into football, we lived in a wasteland, the only release was music.’

That release would lead to the formation of not one but two bands, as has been well documented. Were the Prunes and U2 two sides of the same coin? Friday takes a sip of tea. ‘U2 formed at the same time but there were no similarities whatsoever,’ he muses. ‘There was a link between the two and still is but because they’ve become so successful, the myth has got bigger. There’s nothing weird about a group of mates hanging out together, forming bands, having ideas. It’s when all the ideas become reality, that’s when the myth gets bigger.’

So the story that they made some sort of commercial vs artistic pact isn’t true? He laughs. ‘We didn’t have a fucking clue. It’s down to what people are. Bono’s far more diplomatic, I was far more angry and using music as a way to get through that anger, getting rid of it.’ Plan or no plan, it can’t be denied that The Virgin Prunes were as artistic as they were musical. ‘Guggi painted, I painted; one of the few things I was good at was art. We were always called pretentious pricks simply because we were into the avant garde. I remember when we were 16, it used to be a big deal to come into town and hang out at McDonald’s. One day we walked in and saw the performance artist Nigel Wolf naked with paint all over him and a huge stream coming off his mickey pulling these rocks. We were going, -What the fuck was that?”

Perhaps unexpectedly, The Prunes did start to attract record company interest, although more predictably, they weren’t prepared to play ball. ‘Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis said it was time we made an album but we said no,’ grins Gavin. ‘He said it was time we worked with a producer, we said no. We told him that we wanted to do a 7′, 10′, 12′, cassette, do a gig, release a film and publish a book (the -New Form Of Beauty’ project). This was in 1981 and we had no money. We almost did it. We have the film but it was never released and the book never happened, but we did it. We released something on the first of each month: it was quite a strategy.’

Surprisingly, Rough Trade weren’t put off and still The Virgin Prunes continued to lead them a merry dance. ‘They gave us £10,000 for an overall budget for the album – producers, studio, everything. We went out and spent £6,000 on photographs and they went fucking insane. We were saying, -But it’s really important’. There was a certain amount of shooting ourselves in the foot going on.’

I had mixed feelings when I took the first calls indicating that REM were considering coming to Dublin to rehearse and possibly even do some gigs at the Olympia. If it went ahead, it would be my job to advance all the details with the REM tech guys, tour manager, production assistants and then run the show-days, alongside the band and crew.

I had some previous form with REM. They were one of the seminal bands from my younger days, and I can still remember hearing Chronic Town and Murmur for the first time. Those records changed the way I thought about listening to and making music. I was at the SFX show in (gulp) 1984. I even travelled to London to see them play their first shows at The Marquee. The bands I played in back then developed a neat line in REM covers. In short, I had it bad for them!

However, like many other devotees, I lost touch with them over the years. The ‘Shiny Happy People’ era was a bridge too far for me, and after that, it seemed they had simply lost their way. The albums over the last few years seemed increasingly vague and purposeless, and I suspect even the band themselves thought the same thing.

And there was another reason I had reservations about being closely involved with REM at this time. My experience in working with bands who decide to play back-to-basics shows in venues that are small by their standards, is that while the idea is attractive to them in principle, in practice it does not work so well.

When bands downsize from arena to small theatre scale, many of the things they are used to having around them become impractical; PA systems, lighting rigs, even catering set-ups, all have to revised, simplified to fit the smaller space.

And of course the audience are suddenly up close and personal again, which can be a shock to many acts who have spent years playing across the yawning space of pit barrier/security cordon that goes with the bigger shows. Very few bands and very few technical teams are able to deal well with the limitations of the new smaller environment. In short, they like the idea but not the reality.

I took a deep breath and threw myself in the deep end, expecting a very meticulous and exhausting examination of every minute detail. However, from the start, the advance was not like any other show like this I have looked after. It became clear from early on that there would be a couple of days of set-up time for the REM crew, and then a run of rehearsals, played live in front of sold-out audiences.

The PA would be the house PA, with minimal changes. The sound desk out front would be the band’s own, but apart from that, they were happy to use the house system as is: no additions, no upgrades. The venerable Joe O’Herlihy, who normally looks after sound for local outfit U2, came on board.

The conversation on lighting was almost funny in its brevity; again, house system only. No additions. To put this in context, even the lowliest touring act will usually insist on something being changed or extras being rented in. But this time, nothing extra needed.

With bands of the stature of REM, I can usually expect to be dealing with assistants, aides, more assistants, all of whom generate reams of spreadsheets detailing every possible eventuality: there was none of this.

And so it continued. There was a day of set-up for the crew, who hadn’t seen most of the band’s equipment since the last live shows, so everything needed to be literally dusted off and tested. The band themselves came in on the evening of the first day and, with very little preamble, began to run through the new material. There were frequent stops, sometimes in mid-tune, to discuss changes, revisions, new ideas for parts.

The new stuff sounded like old-school REM to me. All of the band seemed very engaged, and Peter Buck, in particular, was enthusiastic to be driving things along in a much more uptempo guitar-led style than I had heard from this band for years.

On a typical day, the band arrived first, without Michael Stipe, and ran through the ideas for the day. Michael came in during the afternoon and added his vocals, all the time referring to and revising lyrics on a Macbook, which was to remain set-up in the middle of the stage throughout the day and during the shows themselves.

Jacknife Lee, who produced the eventual record, had set up a small studio on stage left. He was monitoring everything as the band played, and I suppose these rough drafts were used quite a bit as sketch notes from which to draw the completed work later on. Lee was an interesting presence, very enthusiastic and very involved with the band. I think he is probably a great guy for the band to have around them during the demoing and final recording stages. He did not display any reticence in terms of pushing the band on that bit further musically.

The most downright entertaining part of each day was watching the band decide on a pretty ad hoc basis what old songs they would play at each gig. They changed the set-list every single day, and played mostly different back catalogue songs each time. The older material they chose to play tended towards earlier album tracks, with nothing too obvious: quite a bit of stuff from Murmur and Reckoning. In fact, over the five shows, I think they played pretty much everything from the Chronic Town EP, their oldest record.

Watching them huddled around the laptop on-stage, listening to iTunes and trying to work out old chords and arrangements, like a young covers band, was quite touching. Michael was funny as he tried to decipher ancient lyrics. which were never too clear to anyone at the best of times, least of all to himself, apparently.

I know a lot of fans came very long distances, sometimes without tickets, to try to see these gigs. All of the band, Michael included, tended to just walk in the stage door each day and it was good to see them deal with the fans in a courteous, no bullshit manner. Quite a few people who had no tickets managed to get themselves guest-listed by collaring individual band members as they arrived for ‘work’. It was amusing as well to see how (for the first few days at least) Michael Stipe could eat next door in Gruel (which he fell in love with) unrecognised.

It is fair to say the shows themselves are part of the REM legend at this stage. Other people have reviewed and discussed them at length, and I will leave that to them. I think everyone who was lucky enough be there got to witness REM taking chances again, which has to be a good thing. More notably, the band were visibly enjoying themselves. They were having fun. I haven’t heard the finished album yet, but I would have high expectations about an REM record for the first time in a long time.
And I can safely say the week spent working with them did not feel like work!

Eamonn Ryan,
Production Manager,
The Olympia Theatre.

Photo by James Goulden – AAA photos.

They may not want to talk about it (more to do with time constraints on interviews than being precious) but been away they have, and as Adrian Utley is the first to admit, absence makes the myths go stronger.

‘There’s been a lot of misinformation rather than a myth really,’ he avows. ‘Speak to different parts of the world and you’ll hear different stories. Since we haven’t been doing stuff for a while, these ideas have grown up about us. I guess that’s what happens though: if you don’t hear from somebody, you make stuff up. It’s just Chinese whispers.’

The last time that Utley, Beth Gibbons and Geoff Barrow were releasing records as Portishead, it was a hugely different landscape. Promos and white labels were flung around with abandon, whereas now the security surrounding virtually every new release is mind boggling. How does Adrian view this brave new world? ‘I can’t really comment on that from our position,’ he says. ‘It’s different for us in that we’ve had this 10-year gap and one hopes that there is a certain amount of expectation from people, which happily there does seem to be. I can imagine that if you were in a new band, it would be very different with the plethora of stuff that’s around. It’s indecipherable sometimes, but things do cut through if they’re good enough, I think. It’s always been difficult for bands but hopefully in the end, the music will speak for them.’

It would be churlish to dismiss the importance of the visual impact of Adam and the Ants. I still remember being confused but strangely drawn to the swashbuckling dandy pirate highwayman. This was an era where Top of The Pops was a weekly appointment and the singular way of seeing what your favourite pop stars looked like. And Adam & The Ants looked odd and otherworldly – an enigmatic vision from a long forgotten past yet also somehow strangely futuristic. At least to a five year old who also enjoyed the music of Shakin’ Stevens and Bucks Fizz.

Adam Ant was aware of the power of the music video (still a novel way of promoting records) and took advantage of using those three minutes to create his own epic mini-films. That is a large part of why Adam & The Ants have left an indelible impression on people of a certain age. However, it wouldn’t have worked if Adam & his Antfriends didn’t have the songs to back it up. And fortunately, the songs were poptastically magnificent – perfect nuggets of pop that shone amidst the shit filling up the charts. -Antmusic‘, ‘Zerox‘, -Stand & Deliver‘, -Prince Charming‘, ‘Dog Eat Dog‘ – all worthy evidence to prove that nothing beats pop at its ludicrous best.

There are so few names in the pantheon of pop music that successfully created stupidly brilliant hit records while looking idiotically tremendous – David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Adam Ant, Prince but little since then. Artists now are too smart, too controlled, too afraid of ridicule and failure to dress up and ignore the naysayers.

Forget the later mentalism, the dodgy Live Aid appearance, the slick Nineties records and the terrible films. Instead, remember Adam Ant freeze-framed, revolvers aloft, all cheekbone and cheeky charm, demanding you hand over your gold and silver.

Adam & The Ants – Stand And Deliver on MUZU.

Best of all was that was only the beginning; there was a whole eight year history to discover. In the days before digital, the combination of finding the albums and the funds meant this was a slow process but gradually it came together – on vinyl, on tape and on copied TDK 90 cassettes (our version of peer to peer file sharing). It was a wonderful journey, as record by record revealed its genius – the perfection of A Night At The Opera and its underated follow-up A Day At The Races, the bombast of Live Killers, the rawness of News Of The World.

At their most extravagant they were a rock band easily the match of Led Zepplin, but Queen were able to do so much more than just bluster. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had already become overplayed but it was evidence of just what they could achieve with virtually every song. The challenge of punk barely bothered them and by the time Greatest Hits arrived, they were untouchable.

Moving forward from that point in time was not so rewarding. Hot Space was a brave but flawed attempt at change, the peerless ‘Under Pressure’ aside. The Works was probably a reaction to that failure, a commercial hit but a mere rehash of their past glories. After that I lost interest, moved on to new musical relationships, although the news of Freddie’s sad demise brought a genuine tear to my eye. This wasn’t the end of course. The albums kept coming, followed by the compilations, West End musicals, TV commercials and the inevitable come back, this time with Paul Rogers at the helm. You can’t help the feeling that this has been one of the most mismanaged legacies in music. Please though, don’t judge Queen on Ben Elton or Brian May playing guitar on top of Buckingham Palace. Go back to the good stuff, listen to the records and you’ll find a band who genuinely did attempt to re-write the book. And after all, we’ll always have Munich…

Queen TV on MUZU.

Pouring tea in his Dublin apartment, Craig remembers how the fledgling band made it out of the rehearsal room to play gigs and one venue in particular. ‘The Underground, which is now a lap dancing club on Dame Street, that used to be brilliant. All the bands of that era used to play there – Something Happens!, A House etc. It was a dingy cellar and the owner didn’t give a shit about underage drinking. We’d play Saturday afternoon gigs in there, we would have been fifteen or sixteen. It used to be us and other bands from school so the place was full of drunk sixteen year old kids who’d pile out onto the street afterwards at six o’clock. We used to do supports at the Baggot Inn as well, but I think because we were so young and had pretty decent songs that we picked up a following pretty quickly.’

Not wanting to lose ground, the band made sure that they got their songs down on tape as quickly as possible. ‘Our first demo was produced by a guy called Stano’, says Craig, ‘who was around at the same time as the Virgin Prunes and ended up working with Colm from My Bloody Valentine. He sent it over to Keith Cullen because he knew he’d just started Setanta Records by putting out an Into Paradise single, another Dublin band. He came to a show, said he wanted to put a record out and invited us over to London.’

If that all sounds suspiciously easy, the band were thinking that way as well. ‘We didn’t really think much of it but we went over and he put is in a studio in Elephant & Castle. We’d never really been to London before and ended up staying in Keith’s squat. The whole experience was fantastic. We recorded the single, went away and didn’t expect anything more. Then I got a call from Keith that we were single of the week in Music Week and Melody Maker. It all went crazy then.’

Power Of Dreams weren’t the only band who had to leave Ireland to get noticed at this time, although as Craig admits, ‘there were ways of doing it. The Stunning had built up a great following for themselves but that required constant work and playing everywhere. That was the only route. Hot Press was all there was for magazines, although The Event Guide had started and was really fresh. There was a little scene but there weren’t any labels, I can’t even think of any. It just fell into our lap with Setanta and from that it moved on.’

And it moved on apace. Following that debut EP, the band found themselves at the centre of a record company bidding war. Craig laughs at the memory of it. ‘My parents’ address was on the back of the sleeve so I was getting letters and postcards from all the top boys, people like Geoff Travis at Rough Trade. I’d Ballyfermot College at the time and every second week I was flying out to England every second week with our manager to meet various people. It was quite amazing, like Jim’ll Fix It. I was getting loads of free records and everyone was really nice to us.’

They weren’t the only ones. ‘It was still all about the post-U2 thing, a lot of bands here got signed – An Emotional Fish, Into Paradise, Blue Heaven. There was a period in the late eighties / early nineties when a lot of bands were signed to major labels but in general there was a lot less money in Dublin, people couldn’t afford to go out and see gigs. There weren’t really that many options as a band – you could go down the route of playing universities but we wanted to play tours, we wanted to make records and we wanted to make money as well.’

The band eventually signed to Polydor and very quickly found themselves having to become accustomed to the realities of the music business, as Craig recalls. ‘That was the beginning of it. I remember the first time that mid-week chart positions were mentioned, I had no idea what that meant. Immediately we were into this world where we had to sell records. It would be very rare for a young band to go straight into a major deal these days.’ Where they given an indication of what lay ahead? ‘Not entirely, no. They don’t tell you that they’re going to stick you on tour for eighteen months after you’ve written the story of your life on an album. You get into various vices on a level that you’ve never experienced before and it’s all free. It’s very difficult not to come out of a bit wrecked.’

The record that the band produced was a remarkably mature work for ones so young, especially the songwriter Walker. The year was 1990 and their timing was perfect. Immigrants, Emigrants and Me was everywhere, Power Of Dreams were everywhere and their singles especially were all over the radio. ‘That was weird’, laughs Craig, ‘but it was the biggest buzz. We’d done a lot of sessions for Dave Fanning so we’d had a taste of it. He was always a great champion of the band and hammered the album. Then we’d be on a motorway on the M1 in the van on the way to a gig and hear yourself on Radio 1, which was amazing. The first single got a lot of play and we almost scraped into the Top 40. In those days it meant something.’ How was the reaction at home? ‘We had a good fanbase here, even if it did peak with the first album. We played the SFX and the album went top 5. If you’re not here though it’s difficult to keep things going and we didn’t play as much as we should of.

One of the reasons for that neglect was that the band were just do damn busy. UK tour followed UK tour (including a memorable jaunt with The Mission), as well as the rest of the world taking notice. ‘Things started happening in other places, Japan really kicked off as well as Europe. I got to go around the world with my mates at the age of eighteen, doing what I loved doing. It was an absolute blast, I’d recommend it to anybody.’

There was a darker side to it all though, as the teenagers were thrown into a very adult world. ‘Early on it was just drink. I’m glad it wasn’t happening now because the harder drugs are more accessible. I remember in the early nineties to buy a gram of coke in Ireland was a big event, it was so hard to get – even in the music industry. I remember coming back here from London and there was no ecstasy, although it kicked in pretty quick.’

After the success of their debut, spirits in the camp were high. ‘The whole band moved to London’, he says, ‘and we lived liked the Monkees in a house in Finsbury Park, while we were recording the second album. They were crazy times. I was living next door to ecstasy dealer and it was the beginning of the whole warehouse scene in the early nineties. It was a good time to be in London but a strange time for music, it suddenly became really unfashionable to play guitars.’ There was a sea change coming. ‘Everything in music was really unsteady at that time, it was all led by computers and electronics. For the first time you could make music in your bedroom, what we were doing became very unfashionable.’

For Power Of Dreams, the clouds were gathering. ‘To be honest’, admits Craig, ‘we should have taken more time with (second album) 2 Hell With Common Sense. We finished touring, I’d forgotten how to write songs and we were told that we had five or six weeks before we were due to start recording. I started writing but you can’t write songs to order. Some of it I’m still pleased with but I wish I’d had more time.’

Craig is fairly forthright about how the record went down. ‘It bombed. It did alright in Ireland but in the UK it got deleted the day it was released, which was a trick that they had. The guy that had signed us – and you’ll hear this a million times – wasn’t with the company anymore. We were one of those bands that owed quite a bit of money and they decided to cut their losses. Unless you sell an immense amount of records, politics will always come into play.’

On reflection, it was easy to see where the money went. ‘There were six versions of each single, stuff like that. At the time we didn’t realise that it was coming out of our pockets. Everyone has a gung ho attitude when you’re with a record company – the big hit is just around the corner and that’s going to save everything. You’re young and naive but I look back at that time fondly. In the first year in London I never went on the Tube, it was taxis all the way, even to the shops. I’m glad I experienced that.’

Compared to the happy days of just two years before, the process became a grind. ‘We knew that they weren’t interested and we weren’t entirely happy with it. There was a negative vibe around the whole thing, we weren’t the darlings anymore. It was a big change in a very short space of time, you start having to chase after the record company to do things. They lose interest if you don’t have hits. We had meeting after meeting but no-one knew how to take it to the next step, ourselves included. Everything had changed. Altern 8 were on the cover of NME smashing guitars.’

This wasn’t the end of the Power Of Dreams story, although it was the beginning of the end. The band would continue through two more albums on independent labels before finally calling a halt in 1994. ‘My heart wasn’t in it’, says Craig, ‘it was hard getting into the van and going to these gigs that would have been packed once but weren’t any more.’ All involved wasted no time in moving forward. Craig Walker formed Pharmacy with Ian Olney, who had joined after the first album, and Morty McCarthy from Sultans Of Ping before becoming part of trip-hop outfit Archive. Now settled back in Dublin, he has a solo album ready to go. Talk of a Power of Dreams reunion continues and with this year marking the twentieth anniversary of their first release stranger things have happened. As for the past, he remains sanguine about what happened. ‘It’s a common story’, he smiles, ‘ you get your shot and then…boom…’

Still, Orange Juice were a fresh breath of pure-pop air, not only to someone keen to escape the trappings of teenybop hell, but to the whole Scots music scene and beyond. Signed to would-be svengali Alan Horne’s label, Postcard (The Sound Of Young Scotland, also home to Aztec Camera, Josef K and The Go-Betweens), Orange Juice were four young lads with raccoon hats, checked shirts and hearts full of soul. They were led by Edwyn Collins, the Scottish Cole Porter, a man whose iconic hairstyles and witty, ironic, self-deprecating lyrics about doomed romances would inspire devotion amongst an army of young men – preceding the ‘Morrissey effect’ by some three years.

Orange Juice’s four, utterly treasurable, Postcard singles, Falling And Laughing, Blue Boy, Simply Thrilled Honey and Poor Old Soul sounded like nothing else around: scratchy punk with soulful vocals and disco basslines; they were all in the garage but looking at the stars. Orange Juice signed to Polydor and in February 1982 released ‘You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever’, quite the most beautifully ramshackle, lovingly assembled collection of genius pop songs ever released as a debut album, anywhere in the world. Well, in this writer’s humble opinion, anyway. The problem was, the world wasn’t really listening.

OJ may have had a modicum of chart success in 1983 with the seminal Rip It Up, but nowadays Edwyn Collins is only widely known for his 1995 solo smash, A Girl Like You. It’s a huge pity. In 2005, Domino released The Glasgow School, a beautifully-packaged compilation of every brilliant thing Orange Juice ever did for the Postcard label; it’s a timely reminder to all about why me, The Wedding Present, Franz Ferdinand, Belle And Sebastian and even His Purpleness, Prince are eternally grateful for those wet, lovelorn, early -80s Scottish summers.

In honour of Ron and The Stooges legacy, we are republishing the cover interview with the band from State’s July 2008 issue by Paul Byrne which charts the tumultuous relationship that existed between Ron and Iggy.

Nazi S&M photo shoots. Covering Madonna songs. Iggy Pop and lead Stooge Ron Asheton discuss their long strange trip to the top and their often strained relationship.

Ron Asheton has got to be one of the most patient people in the world. Otherwise, Iggy Pop would be dead. Long ago. Today, with The Stooges finally getting the critical acclaim, and even enjoying monetary reward, the band’s two leading lights get on like a house on fire. It’s certainly a far cry from their early troubled history, when the man Rolling Stone voted the 29th Greatest Guitarist Of All Time was banished to bass by his old school friend just as the band released their second album, 1970′s Fun House.

Being the kind of guy he is, Ron accepted his new role and the fact that another old school buddy, James Williamson, was now playing his riffs when The Stooges went out on stage. What Ron Asheton couldn’t accept, however, was what Iggy had to tell him when they ran into one another at a late night party back in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ‘It was my worst moment with the band,’ he says ruefully. ‘I met some friends up-city, and they said they were heading down to the Morgan Sound Studios. Iggy was there with James, and he came up to me and said, -Hey, by the way, James and I are going to England. I got a record deal’. He never told me any of this, and I wasn’t invited or considered. So, for me, that was the worst time. It was more like super-sadness than betrayal. ‘I know that I actually went out to where there were some trees and I just hugged a tree and cried. Then I just walked home in a daze: a serious 10 miles or more walk home, at night. That was the worst time for me.’

It was only last year, when the band were in Dublin to play their headlining gig at The Electric Picnic festival, that Iggy Pop finally got around to apologising to his friend for the pain he had caused, 35 years after the event. ‘We were just talking about stuff,’ continues Asheton. ‘We have our meetings every now and then, and the subject of me being demoted from guitar to bass came up – although, I didn’t see it like that – and Iggy said, -You know, I never thought of it in that way: I’m really sorry’. And he was really sincere. He had never said anything. ‘This was just last summer, in Ireland. He actually apologised. He never understood what it would have been like’¦’

Not that Iggy Pop is about to get all sentimental today over such things. He knows that he’s spent pretty much all of his life looking after number one. Even his son, Eric Benson, grew up seeing his Pop about as frequently as the rest of us. ‘Being in a band is tricky, you know,’ smiles the now-proud grandfather (having visited Eric, and his wife and child, just recently). ‘I always think of that great Young Ones episode about the heavy metal band’¦’ He’s actually referring to the Comic Strip’s Spinal Tap-esque Bad News outings, from the early -80s, featuring many of the Young Ones cast.

‘The bass player gets out of the van on the side of the road, and he says he won’t get back in until they say that they’re a heavy metal band. That’s my favourite rock’n'roll comedy moment.’ Iggy adopts a mockney accent. ”Say we’re a metal band, or I’m not getting back in!’. Well, that’s what being in a band is like. For me, anyway’¦’ Iggy and Ron let out a laugh, and give each other a look. There’s no need for hugs or sharing anything with the group, not when you go this far back. ‘I never hated him,’ is how Asheton decides to wrap this particular subject up. ‘There are no fights between us. We never exchanged angry words or blows. It was never like that. It was just tossed around in life, until it was time to come back and do what we’re doing now.’

The paths of Iggy Pop and Ron Asheton rarely crossed, from The Stooges bloodied and bowed break-up in 1974 to the band’s first tentative reunion for the former’s 2003 solo album Skull Ring. The drug-free Ron played with a series of bands (including The New Order, Destroy All Monsters and The Powertrane) while, due to an almost-constant lack of funds, regularly moving back in with his mum in Ann Arbor. Iggy, meanwhile, headed off on his hedonistic adventures, sleeping on couches, cardboard and silk sheets, whilst constantly looking for new ways to step over the edge. That he managed to give us the mighty fine Bowie-produced albums The Idiot and Lust For Life in 1977 meant Iggy was also capable of creating the odd masterpiece too. During all that time, the legend of the gone-but-not forgotten Stooges just grew and grew. Punk’s two pivotal bands, The Ramones in the US and The Sex Pistols in the UK, included Stooges songs in their sets. And they weren’t the only ones inspired by Detroit’s short-lived wonder. So, how does it feel, to have designed this roaring, magnificent engine, and then see so many other bands shoot across the finishing line with it? ‘It’s kinda hard to keep track of them all,’ says Pop. ‘They tend to come in waves, and sometimes I can see the influence, absolutely, and with others, it’s kinda like, -Eh, okay’¦ great!’.'

Then comes Iggy’s laugh, a demonic chuckle which peppers our conversation frequently. ‘Personally, I always loved it when people came up to me and told me about how we were the inspiration for their band,’ says Asheton. ‘It was flattering, of course, but also, I felt that these bands cheering us on would be a good thing for getting us back together. And it was.’

Having first met up in the Ann Arbor school choir (yep, Iggy was once angelic), it wasn’t until Ron and his brother, Scott – the duo having moved to the Michigan city from Davenport, along with their mum, Ann, and their sister, Kathy, after the death of their father, Ronald – took to hanging outside the local Discount Records store on Liberty Street that the seeds for The Stooges were sown. Inside, the young Jim Osterberg had an after-school job. It was a meeting that Iggy would later immortalise in Dum Dum Boys.

‘There was no great masterplan about the band,’ offers Iggy. ‘We started a group because we thought that would be really cool. And it would be really cool if we got to make a record – wow! And it would be really cool if we could play on a stage, and get girls, and live in a house, and smoke joints, and have enough money to live! And that’s still what we do. ‘That purer attitude probably resides more with the rest of the group than me, though, because I’ve been through 30 years of trickery. So, I kinda know’¦’

Oh why must I toil the lonely wilderness of the renter? Well that’s obvious; I have no money to buy a house, no desire to live back at home and no inclination to get a 100% mortgage. Whenever I think of the latter, I always imagine a broker fixing his stare on my 2,000-page contract, producing a pen made from boiled baby bones and asking me to ‘sign this my pretty, then you shall have your wish’.

Personally, I can’t wait for a property crash; it’ll be nice to meet people of a similar age without the conversation turning to inheritance, with some gimps seemingly counting the days until their parents shuffle off this mortal coil. In the meantime, I rent, taking the risk with random strangers in a house that is barely taken care of by a landlord who always calls me Jim. That’s once I’ve trawled the web, looking for any home that’s within my pay range and doesn’t include the phrase -no time wasters’: hardly a place for a journalist then, is it? This hatred for the renting process – welled up during the four years I have handed over dead money to overlords, sorry, landlords – began with my first -interview’. That’s the ten-minute snippet where you arrive in a home and either (a) realise you’d rather live on a bird sanctuary daubed white in blackbird shit, or (b) want to move in and, therefore, lie about how easy you are to live with.

Considering that the latter tactic won me a place in several homes, it’s odd that it’s always a surprise to me when I’m the one offering a room and somebody lies to me. There was the Kafka fan who was a -clean freak’ and -loved to cook’. He now heats microwaveable ready meals every night and gives monosyllabic answers to questions about bills, while staring at Championship Manager’¦ in his pants. Meanwhile, the snail that escaped our pathway, dragging hints of dust from our front door on his back, has done more to keep the house in good nick.

What about the -easy-going Tipperary fitness freak’ who picks his nose and eats the contents while talking to you, or the couple who fight daily, resulting in the male playing the K-Pax soundtrack at top volume and telling me ‘I’ve broken up with her once and for all’ for the fourteenth night on the trot? Meanwhile, she’s making his dinner, using my wok, my olive oil and drinking my beer.

‘I’ll pay ya back’ is one of the dirtiest phrases when sharing a house with the collection of fuckwits, child-men and raving lunatrons that I’ve ended up with in the past. Instead, they occasionally leave you half a bottle of wine that was going to go off anyway and believe this somehow means they’re contributing. You tiptoe past the cigarette butts left outside the back door. You ignore the clump of hair at the bottom of the shower. You empty the dishwasher, again. You try and end up in the home of that one-night stand instead of your dingy gaff, which is two nights of Guinness abuse away from becoming a fart academy. You learn to survive.

Has the easy road from university squalor to highly paid jobs left a workforce that is too stupid to take care of itself and too rich not to leave home? It certainly would explain the mammy’s boy who left his room in a smelly heap for three months before his mother visited to clean it up.

Daft? It’s a fuckin’ valley of lunatics out there. Do I sound anal? Come on, you know you’d live with me. One ten-minute interview where I lie about how easy-going I am and I’ll be in that boxroom of yours before you can say -is it alright if I have one of your beers?’ Your move motherfucker.

‘It’s weird, it does give you a buzz, like the first time on radio,’ continues Simon, younger brother of lead singer and La Rocca’s main creative force Bjørn. His tired looking sibling then tells of a One Tree Hill scene set in a record store where the band was actually mentioned: ‘some writer put it in the script and a character said to check us out. It’s bizarre but it can have an effect.’ Sitting in a quiet Dublin hotel bar with a by-now cold coffee in front of him, the band’s custom-suited drummer Alan Redmond chimes in, ‘Yeah, because of our MySpace page as well, it’s kinda weird that we know if The OC was on in the Czech Republic the night before. You get 20 mails from Prague about how people liked -The Truth’.'

The Truth is both the name of their debut album, released last year on Dangerbird Records in the US and this year in Ireland, as well as the title of the long player’s most accomplished tune. The band’s style – pop melodies, early-seventies Stones keyboards and pumping drums – has been honed in Los Angeles for the past few years. Think The Replacements gatecrashing a decent Supergrass recording session and you’ll get an idea of their tunes.

It was back in 2001 that La Rocca first came together at Cardiff University, when Dublin-born journalism student Bjørn, and sociology-studying-general piss-taking Burnley keyboardist Nick Haworth met Redmond. With Simon arriving from Bristol University soon after to play bass, things began to move for the band named after a dank, downstairs bar in Bristol ‘with this massive hole you crawl through to get to the dance floor’ as Haworth puts it.

A year of playing the UK followed, before heading over to Dublin, where 18 months of toil brought a well-received EP with Wet Clay in 2004, as well as ‘Irish tours that lasted about five days’, according to Bjørn. Record company advice saw them circling the wagons for a trip to the 2005 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

‘I think even then it was turning into something different,’ Bjørn says of the phenomenon that has become the Texas event. ‘It used to be a reputable place for acts to go: that was the whole idea of it. To a certain extent it still is, but now you’ve got major labels that use it to showcase signed bands. It’s becoming something different.’

It was in Austin that La Rocca inked a deal with an LA-based publishing company and took the decision to relocate Stateside. Redmond, who by his own admission has something of a -band manager head’, explains, ‘There was no point in going over for three weeks of the year. The intention was that we wanted to concentrate on America and we had to get out there and tour. It chose us rather than anything else.’

In an eventful few jaunts across the US, La Rocca ended up with a host of tour tales to tell. Like the time their tourbus broke down in the infamous Eminem-spawning hole that is Eight Mile in Detroit and promptly had its windows smashed in. Or the time when all their equipment got stolen in Philadelphia, when they gambled in ‘a big B&B for five days’ on the Nevada border; and out of nowhere one of their first singles – -Sing Song Sung’ – became a hit in Australia.

All the while, though, they were building up a solid fan base, who they soon found out included super-producer Tony Hoffer, whose credits include Beck, Belle and Sebastian, The Kooks and Dave Gahan. Hoffer subsequently came on board to record The Truth and for two months, the band deconstructed songs that had been the cornerstone of a live set for the guts of three years. Hoffer was instrumental in this process, his vast experience recognising that not everything that sounds great on stage works in a studio setting. ‘You could be banging at a drum or keyboard and it sounds like shit, then it suddenly comes through the desk and he can make sense of it,’ recalls Haworth, who looks a bit like Mani without the years of overindulgence.

‘Tony would say -okay I like that take, but this time we’re gonna take that guitar and record it up in the toilet’,' smiles Redmond. ‘There was a particular sound, apparently, which was much warmer, and a particular type of mic that suited. When you know what mic suits the sound of the toilet, there’s got to be something there.’

The result is anthemic; with three minute blasts like -Sketches’ (which was recently a heavily-rotated Phantom favourite) sitting between loving laments like -Non Believer’ and -Goodnight’. In the nicest way possible, Bjørn’s voice sometimes dips into drunken singalong, which adds to the sense of warmth. The ‘sketches of a twentysomething life’ that Bjørn sings about on this debut album will continue on a new record ‘towards the end of the year’ says the lead singer, adding that next time out they wouldn’t mind George Martin to produce. ‘Fuck it,’ he grins. ‘You may as well try.’

In person, Dev – Devonte Hynes to his mum – is as excitable as a young child, switching between subjects at breakneck pace, equally at home discussing racism in Britain and video game characters or comics (the band’s name allegedly comes from his self-penned comic strips). Musically, too, he flitters around like a butterfly: he has a fully fledged hip-hop album in the bag and is already planning the follow-up to Lavender Bridge.

‘I have songwriting phases and the albums I release capture that particular phase,’ he enthuses. ‘The versions of these songs that I play live are different from the album: they’re heavier, more like a classic rock band style.’ The country influences on his debut are writ large, however, with the pedal-steel and string-driven sound more akin to Badly Drawn Boy or Elvis Costello than the screeching riffs we may have expected.

‘When I was younger, I’d have Gram Parsons playing in the house,’ he recalls, before admitting that his musical love affairs took him to ‘a really uncool point. When I was 12, I was a really big Dixie Chicks fan’. Unfortunately, Dev has never heard of the horrible hybrid that is country -n’ Irish, but when State explains its inherent ugliness to him, he promises to look it up – expect the Big Dev and the Mainliners album in 2009.

For the moment, however, he’s happy to tour Lavender Bridge, a wonderfully accessible smorgasbord of melancholic whimsy, with a pointed sense of humour bubbling under a thin crust of sweepingly anthemic folk-pop.

‘Most of it [the album] is about my ex-girlfriend,’ he confesses. ‘We were together when I wrote the album but we were breaking up: we were friends afterwards but we’re not friends now.’ The wonderfully fragile -Everyone I Know Is Listening To Crunk’ was written an hour after the split, so it’s fair to say that Dev isn’t afraid of excorcising (or at least exercising) his demons through his art. That said, it’s not all po-faced soul-searching, with enough knowing humour for a Stephen Fry novel.

‘I can’t ever do anything completely seriously,’ he admits. ‘Even -Everyone I Know Is Listening To Crunk’, which was a really intense moment, is ridiculous.’ Indeed it is, as he tries to entice his ex around with the promise of the new season of The OC. ‘Ah, the amazingly out-of-date OC reference,’ he guffaws. Indeed, Dev’s not afraid of namechecking all types of pop culture in his songs: the epic -Midnight Surprise’ references classic video game The Legend Of Zelda. The album has a more serious side, though, with Dev describing his first-hand experiences of racism in London (-Devil Tricks For A Bitch’, -Tell Me What It’s Worth’): ‘The interesting thing about racism and me is that I’ve only ever encountered racism from black people,’ he explains.’ The last time I suffered racial abuse from someone who’s white, I was probably seven. Black people seem to have a big problem with me, especially in the area where I live.’

Any idea why?

‘Probably because I’m not dressing in tracksuits. It’s funny, because if only they knew, I’m really big into hip-hop: I wrote the Tupac entry on Wikipedia,’ he smiles ruefully. ‘But there were periods when I wouldn’t leave the house for a month because I couldn’t deal with seeing rude-boys or anyone like that.

‘I guess in school in Britain, unless you choose to, you don’t learn about slavery, about Malcolm X, about racism in the 70s,’ he continues. ‘Racism exists in London but it’s never been a huge problem. It’s almost like they’ve had it too easy, because if they did ever have to fight for certain things, the last thing they’d think of is picking on another black person.In America, there is so much racism still active that the last thing they’ll consider doing is picking on a black person walking down the street.’

Unfortunately, the problem is so bad that Dev’s planning to move. He’s considering uprooting to New York, a far cry from London or the country-tinged surrounds of Omaha, Nebraska, where he recorded Lavender Bridge with resident Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis, in the home studio which Mogis co-owns with that label’s most famous son, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, who he describes as misunderstood: ‘People have this perception of a moody, serious, slightly crazy dude, and he’s the guy in a group of friends who is always making a joke or doing something silly: he’s not as guarded as he should be.’

Oberst’s bandmate Nate Walcott played most of the piano on Lavender Bridge, and other musical guests include The Faint’s sticksmith Clark Baechle, stunning vocalist Emmy the Great, as well as various members of Cursive and Tilly and the Wall: ‘I didn’t really ask anyone to do it, people just offered their services. It would just be a case of late one night deciding to do group vocals.’

Most of 2008 is going to be spent on the road promoting the result, which Dev is looking forward to and dreading in equal measure. He’s delighted that his songs are going to reach a wider audience, while feeling slightly uncomfortable at being the focal point on stage instead the relative anonymity of just playing guitar: ‘I’m never going to get used to that. I get really nervous and I say stupid stuff on stage.’ Disarmingly honest, refreshingly scatterbrained, by year’s end he could be a household name.

Photo by Lili Forberg.

If this combination of personalities wasn’t enough, putting them together in a small County Meath town was another thing altogether, especially Podge. ‘It brought out a bit of a perversion in me,’ he enthuses. ‘Most people in Kells are really shy. It’s such a small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business, so there’s a lot of shame in being noticed. I thought, screw that. I felt that I could express myself, I enjoyed people talking about me. It’s crazy that people care what you do. I never gave a crap.’

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Podge should end up in a band, even if he himself wasn’t quite sure of the route he wanted to take. ‘It was kind of strange. I used to annoy Johnny about being in a group,’ he muses. ‘ I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I just wanted to be in one for some reason. I showed up at our first rehearsals with a guitar I didn’t really know how to play and they asked me to try singing. It seemed to work. I was a kind of a Bez figure who learned how to sing.’

It was when Podge and Niamh started to sing together that the character of Ham Sandwich began to develop, imbuing their songs of love and loss with extra drama. ‘There’s an underlying tension in a lot of our songs,’ agrees Niamh, ‘almost like we’re singing to each other. Even when we’re singing the lyrics together, there’s that relationship going on. I think people like that.’ ‘I can’t think of an awful lot of strong male/female vocal bands,’ says Podge, ‘who are well known anyway. There’s the Magic Numbers but that’s just harmonies really. It gives us a slight uniqueness, especially in Ireland. We’re not ashamed of it. There’s no ego involved: it’s whatever works best for the song.’

Johnny picks up on the idea: ‘The album itself is built on the whole theme of heartbreak and there are lots of different things going on. When you listen through it, it makes sense where it’s going. It’s never, -you sing this line, you sing this line etc’. The male and female vocal makes sense in our songs because in a relationship, both sides feel the same thing: they’re just not saying it.’

It’s early February and the three have joined State in advance of the release of their debut album Carry The Meek. Anticipation for the record is high, buoyed by a Meteor Award and reams of positive press, but it’s actually the result of a far longer process that has seen the band develop their craft gradually, all under the banner of their own record label, Route 109. This, as Niamh explains, was always a conscious decision. ‘At the back of your mind, when you start a band, you probably think it would be great to get a record deal,’ she muses, ‘but as you see all your friends around you getting picked up and fucked around by labels, you grow to realise that it’s not the best idea. Doing it yourself is harder but it’s worth it in the long run. You own everything yourself.’

‘Everyone we knew who was in a band from back home who got signed, got burned,’ agrees Johnny. ‘We started to ask ourselves what the benefit was. It’s like a bank loan, except that at the end of it, the bank treats you really mean and fucks you around. Five people can get a good bit of capital together. If we’d been signed, we’d have been dropped by now. Any band needs to develop. You can’t expect to be able to do stuff immediately. When things go wrong, at least you know why they’ve gone wrong. I know so many people who were kept in the dark and when they do get dropped, someone tells them what happened. If they’d known, they could have done something.’

If this part of their approach was very now, the other strand was decidedly traditional – releasing a series of singles, five in fact, before Carry The Meek had even surfaced. Part of the reason may have been pure financial logic, but for Niamh it made sense on other levels.

‘Every single was a definite progression for us,’ she explains. ‘You could see more and more people buying them, more and more people getting interested as we went down the line. They were coming to the gigs and collecting the records that they’d missed when they hadn’t heard of us. It was much better than releasing one single and then going straight in and making an album. It would go straight into the bargain bin.’

‘It was like giving ourselves little exams in how we were doing,’ smiles Johnny. ‘You learn something with first one, something more with the second one and by the fifth, you know what it’ll take to put out the album. Everybody knows what they have to do. It’s like we served a little internship with our own label.’

The development of Ham Sandwich has been quite remarkable, transforming them from quirky outsiders to one of the names to drop by those in the know. Yet this is no case of hype over substance, as the likes of -Words’ and -Click..Click..Boom!’ have established their credentials as a barbed pop band -par excellence’. It’s gone hand-in-hand with the development of their own, definite style. ‘We’ve stuck with our designer Laura from the beginning,’ stresses Niamh, ‘because if you chop and change your artwork, you may as well change your name. From the very start, we had a certain style that we wanted to stick with, the photos and the doodles. It gives people a sense of association with us in their mind: they look at a CD and know it’s Ham Sandwich. Podge is equally adamant. ‘From my experience of buying albums and singles, the artwork is incredibly important,’ he enthuses. ‘I completely hound the shit out of Laura: I’m surprised she still gets on with me. Nothing gets by unless I OK it.’ Despite the dark and sometimes off-the-wall nature of their public image, the mainstream media has been queuing up to make use of Ham Sandwich’s time, particularly TV. Not that some of the offers have impressed Johnny.

‘We were offered a famous Irish talent show and we turned it down on principle,’ he reveals. ‘Some shows you have to do and they’re great to do, but to do something where you’re supposed to be held up as something to be admired and the show itself is about to treat people like shit, it wasn’t the situation we wanted to put ourselves in. I don’t think it’s right for a band who’ve earned it to go on TV and tell those people that they’ll get a dream out of it.’

A far more successful, yet unavoidably bizarre, experience was their visit to The Late Late Show. These particular fish felt a touch out of water that night. ‘I wasn’t nervous,’ professes Podge, ‘but I did feel slightly uncomfortable and I think that reflected in my performance.’ Niamh is more forthright. ‘You looked out into the crowd and it was all older people. We sat there, thinking -how the hell are they going to take us?’ They had Dickie Rock’s son on doing the showband thing, which all the people would know. At first, you’re like -bollocks’. It’s scary going in. You’ve watched it for years and you wonder what it’ll be like. You assume that everybody would be highly strung and give out to you all the time. When you go out there, though, everybody’s so nice to you.’ ‘Afterwards you go into a pub in Kells and you get pints for free,’ laughs Johnny. ‘It’s like a milestone for bands in Ireland. Once you’ve done that, it proves that you’ve achieved an awful lot of what you want to do.’ ‘It gives you cut-throat experience,’ says Podge. ‘You can go back and see what you did wrong. So by the time we did Podge & Rodge, we were completely comfortable.’ What’s perhaps most surprising is that the Ham Sandwich experience seemed equally at home with Pat Kenny as it did with the foul-mouthed puppet brothers from Ballydung, despite the pretty vast differences in their audiences. Niamh, for one, sees no problem.

‘You have to give everybody a chance. It’s a really bad idea to try and isolate your audience to your own age group, try and get in on a scene and stay there,’ she notes. ‘You have to do these things because there are a lot of different people who like your music.’ Johnny sees it the same way: ‘If you’re in a band and don’t want as many people as possible to hear your music, that’s ridiculous. We’ve come from that Irish background of trying to spread the music, entertain people and tell stories. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t tell those stories to other generations. Your music should be presented so it’s accessible to everybody.’

Two weeks later and the evidence that desire is working is clear. In a single day, their debut album is released, they play an in-store at HMV in Dublin and later that evening, pick up the Meteor Award for Hope of 2008, voted for by 2FM listeners. Their surprise and delight is evident, in contrast to the response of some other winners. They head off to the official party, get refused entry because they have the wrong coloured wristbands and end up entering an indie club at Whelan’s to a heroes’ welcome. The mainstream may be beckoning but Ham Sandwich aren’t quite ready to give up their independence just yet.

Photography by Rich Gilligan.

Rollie hails from Edmonton, Canada, which he describes as ‘a weird place, full of creativity and hope’, blighted by spasmodic weather patterns not unlike Ireland. Rollie is fond of his birthplace and its people, and much of Afterparty Babies concerns his experiences in his home-town. The name Pemberton carries weight in the city, thanks to Rollie’s father Teddy, a local radio DJ who gained notoriety for being the first to bring hip-hop, funk and black electro music to Edmonton.

Growing up, Rollie buried his head in video games and didn’t take part in usual childhood rituals such as riding a bike (he only acquired that skill last year). His interest in music, however, flared after stealing copies of Nas’ Illmatic and Brand Nubian’s One For All from his dad’s record collection, and he started to rap at age 13. As he continued to work on his rap skills, Rollie travelled to the US to enrol in a journalism course in all-black college in Virginia, yet he found himself unable to relate to fellow-students. ‘I felt I was quite stifled there,’ he confesses. ‘There weren’t a lot of people who were into the kind of music I was into. I would be jamming Aphex Twin in my dorm and people would be like, what the fuck is this?’

He began to write reviews of rap albums for a little website called Pitchfork, which taught him a significant lesson:’I heard so many shitty rap albums, I learned how not to make an album!’. With that admonition in the bag and with inspiration to create something different, he moved back to Edmonton after a year to focus on music. ‘I felt like I was wasting my time not putting out a record,’ he notes. ‘I figured I got to put out this record before anybody else does, or somebody does some shit exactly like it. Then, I’ve lost my shot, y’know? ‘ Rollie’s self-produced mixtape Cadence Weapon Is The Black Hand was released in January 2005 and featured on one of the first popular music blogs, Fluxblog, leading to a record deal with Upper Class Recordings in North America and Big Dada in Europe. Rollie’s debut Breaking Kayfabe received a 2006 Polaris Music Prize nomination for its attention- grabbing electro-fused hip-hop style.

With the release of Afterparty Babies, Rollie has left behind the ‘aggressive, slower, dissonant tones’ of Kayfabe for more danceorientated bounce tracks. When broached on this distinction, he cites Basement Jaxx and dance music in general as a major influence.

‘I was getting more into DJing myself, listening to dance music, kind of realising that all music is inter-connected, everything is 4/4: you can mix everything together,’ he explains. ‘It was a real awakening for me musically. I’d never really thought about music in such an intimate way. Just the idea of seeing a couple of thousand people freaking out because of one song is unbelievable. I find it extremely fascinating and it’s something I’d like to work on.’

Lyrically, the new album differentiates itself from Kayfabe by encasing the songs with stories of the people of Edmonton; friends, girlfriends, hairdressers, tattoo-artists and under-age youth cliques. Drawing on case studies of friends he hung out with during the summer of 2006, Rollie was inspired by the story-telling nature of Bob Dylan records and the dynamics of the individual, exemplified in album opener -Do I Miss My Friends?’, a folk-hop lament Rollie admits is ‘a song about being gone all the time, feeling like I’m losing my interpersonal relationships and wondering if it’s such a big deal anyway.’ Original ideas for the album concerned housing and urban sprawl and that notion was the kernel for -Real Estate’, which is also a metaphor for music industry success set to a bumping sample-heavy instrumental: ‘Just bought a house / Can’t deal with the space / Just bought a beat / Can’t deal with the bass.’

Rollie paints a vibrant picture of life for Edmonton’s minors, like the Youth Crew, an enthusiastic gang of sprightly risk-takers. ‘The Youth Crew specifically is what me and my friend Jan used to call this group of kids who were slightly younger than us, getting into the scene, showing up at shows,’ he smiles. ‘If I was DJing and it was looking kind of slow, Jan would get a call letting her know -The Youth Crew’s coming’ and I’m like… great! That means there’s going to be 30 kids sneaking into this bar or who have fake IDs and are going to come and make this party turn out!’

The recurring theme of inter-personal relationships is cemented by the album cover, with Rollie front and centre on a stool, while behind him are a multitude of his acquaintances, including his current and ex-girlfriend, fellow rappers and ‘characters’ like his touring DJ, Weasel, in pimped-out garb. The picture was taken in the basement of a bar called The Black Dog, which Rollie reveals burned down recently, leaving the photograph as the last remnant of the basement, just as Afterparty Babies serves as a lasting document of Rollie and his Edmonton allies.

‘We could’ve quit school early but we realised that being in a pop band isn’t going to last forever. We wanted to have something to fall back on if it goes wrong. We’re realists,’ Gareth Campesinos!, the band’s soft-spoken frontman nods with an earnestness that instantly clears any doubt about whether or not the band’s modest success has gone to anyone’s head’”an easy proposition in theory but much harder to implement when you’re the darling of every swooning Sarah Records type on the Internet, rocking shows from Toronto to Tokyo, with a Dave -Broken Social Scene’ Newfeld-produced debut LP having dropped in February on the ultra-hip Wichita label.

The band have been barnstorming across North America for the past week and today’s their first in the City of Angels. Thanks to a last-minute decision by Carol King and James Taylor to hold a graying yuppie celebration of career mediocrity at the famed Troubadour, where Los Campesinos! had originally been booked, the nightclub has put the band up at a posh Hollywood hotel as a consolation prize. A twisted crook of fate that’s deposited them from small-world Wales into the bug-eyed vortex of spook central: down the street from the Scientology Celebrity Centre, a handful of blocks from the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Mann’s Chinese Theatre, where cheesy costumed superheroes and movie star imitators stalk the concrete, mugging for dizzied tourists.

‘Nothing here feels like reality,’ Aleksandra Campesinos!, the band’s other main vocalist, says with a bit of astonishment in her voice. ‘We walked by Mann’s Chinese and there was a guy who was supposed to look like Michael Jackson but instead he looked like Freddy Krueger. It was kind of scary.’

But this warped reality is binary; the band also still seems a little shell-shocked at how easy it’s all been. Their first gig wasn’t even two years ago, but from moment one, this rag-tag lot, who were recruited piecemeal from Cardiff’s close-knit musical community, have been a sensation. Soon after debuting, a rough demo was cut and uploaded to Myspace and Drowned in Sound. By August, they were opening for Broken Social Scene. Three months later, a record deal was in place and their career had been shot into the strato’¦er, blogosphere.

‘We’re aware of the fact that we haven’t had to toil for it. We didn’t have a manager when we started and the idea of getting signed hadn’t even crossed our minds,’ Gareth says, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Too many bands start with the intention of getting rich and famous and it’s sad to see people constantly seeking new and better managers and booking agents. That’s the wrong way to do it. We turned down record deals before we even had a manager.’

When the noise got too loud, Los Campesinos! wisely selected the same management as fellow Cardiff legends, Super Furry Animals, a collective who they’d quite like to model their career on. Of course, the pre-internet Super Furries were allowed a quiet gestation, unlike Los Campesinos, whose brief existence has been met with deafening hype, one that makes it initially tempting to unleash your inner cynic. Granted, if you listen with a jaded ear, it’s easy to point out the possibility that Los Campesinos! may have merely stumbled onto the secret formula to winning music critics’ hearts’”a touch of Arcade Fire, a pinch of Architecture in Helsinki, a dash of Pavement, mixed with wry wit and a sharp sense of irony. Heat. Serve.

But when you see the band live, you can’t deny their ability to distill the ephemeral, drunken glow of youth, that aura of invincibility, that fated narrative of you against the world, flying and fading in a clean dramatic arc. It could come off as childish melodrama, but it doesn’t. Los Campesinos!’ precociousness is tempered by a keen self-awareness. Most importantly, they’re fun. This is nervous, jittery punk-rock fury, softened by melting, gorgeous harmonies and an array of children’s instruments: glockenspiels, xylophones, melodicas, and a little violin thrown in for good measure.
Their first LP, Hold on There, Youngster, successfully taps into a similar vein. It’s the sort of record that could only have been written by someone on the verge of adulthood, adolescent memories still vivid and sober-eyed. Gareth, who writes all the band’s lyrics, charmingly bleats about old K Records t-shirts, live journal entries, giving your life to literature (just don’t read Jane Eyre) and blotting out life with a pair of headphones.

By the time this article runs, the band will have already released their first record, won even more converts and will be well on their way to fame, fortune, and the Fleetwood Mac-style turmoil that’s bound to occur when you have this many cute girls in one band. But at this split second, Los Campesinos! have it all figured out.

Jeff Weiss is from LA and runs The Passion of the Weiss blog.

In Adele’s case, the situation is no different. On her debut album 19, her tribulations largely concern a topic familiar to most late-teen females: the ex-boyfriend. Her timbre is mournful, mature, brash, and boisterous. It possesses all the attributes of a classical soul voice, yet Adele considers herself an autodidact, though she admits she had some help along the way. When State greets her, she’s applying make-up in the mirror without a stylist in sight. She is jaunty, immediately likeable and extremely confident, with a mischievous cackle that befits her singing voice.

Adele is an only child, born in Tottenham, North London but later moving south to Brixton. She harboured early aspirations of being a heart surgeon: ‘My grandpa died when I was 10 and I think in a childish way, I wanted to fix people, make people’s hearts better’. From there, she developed ambitions of being a tour manager, a fashion journalist, a photographer and even to get involved in A&R. Singing was the only thing she pursued with any vigour, her listening habits including a diet of Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child and a live Jill Scott album. She later ‘accidentally’ bought albums from Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald in a two-for-a-fiver deal, admitting she had no idea who they were: ‘I liked their hair on the front cover’.

With her early influences cemented, she started playing guitar and singing when she was 14. It was then she heard about the Brit School in Selhurst, Kent: a free independent, state funded vocational school specialising in performing arts and technology. The school has been knocking out famous graduates of late, such as Amy Winehouse, Luke Pritchard of The Kooks and Kate Nash, but is keen to stress that it’s no stage school or fame academy. When State asks Adele about her time there, she says it didn’t shape her music as such but helped her nurture her style of songwriting. ‘When I started, I wasn’t writing my own songs, but I was impersonating the singers I had been listening to up to that point. I hadn’t found my own voice. My voice just kind of appeared,’ she confesses.

And what an appearance it was. A sultry yet sorrowful instrument, it’s no surprise that the comparisons to Amy Winehouse were plentiful, especially as they both attended the Brit School. She does count Winehouse as an influence, yet not an inspiration, perhaps alluding to lessons learned from the recent public tabloid-fuelled meltdown of the troubled singer. She’s happy with the comparisons, however. ‘I’d rather be compared to Kate Nash or Amy Winehouse than someone like Joss Stone’, she says bitingly.

The first song she wrote was -Hometown Glory’, an ode to London, the city she loves so much. ‘I like it in the city when the air is so thick and opaque / I love to see everybody in short skirts, shorts and shades / I like it in the city when two worlds collide / You get the people and the government/ Everybody taking different sides’. She was only 16 when she wrote the song. A wonderfully emotive piano-led tune, it was released as her first single in October 2007 on Jamie T’s label, Pacemaker, fulfilling a promise she made to him before signing to XL recordings.

Even before she had any releases, Adele garnered enough attention on the London live circuit for a producer to book her to appear on Jools Holland’s BBC Later show. She has been watching the show since she was four with her mum so they were both ecstatic that it was to be her debut TV appearance. ‘It was really hard work doing that, but in a good way,’ she admits. ‘Paul McCartney was on it and it was really difficult singing in front of him.’.

The plaudits have been growing exponentially since then. Firstly, Adele was the inaugural winner of the Brits Critics Choice Award in December: a new award bestowed upon an emerging British talent yet to release a debut album. The 19-year-old topped a list of new bands and artists tipped for success in 2008 picked by 1,000 music-industry associates and critics. Subsequently, she was top of the pile for the BBC’s annual Sound of 2008 poll. All before the album was even released. She’s not fazed by the expectations placed upon her, though. ‘It’s amazing and it’s lovely to get support from people in the industry, but it’s just people’s opinion. I don’t feel any pressure. I haven’t actually sold any records yet! If I sell a million records, I’ll be way up on my high horse. I’ll be a right little diva!’ she laughs.

Her debut album, 19, is an assured release which may just bring such acclaim. It begins with the sparse guitar-picked -Daydreamer’, led by Adele’s whopping voice. It’s the song she played solo on Jools Holland about her bisexual friend of the opposite sex and her infatuation with him around the time of her 18th birthday. Inevitably, it didn’t end with unicorns and rainbows. -Best For Last’ arrives in a similar vein, replacing the guitar with a double bass, lending the tune a jazzy feel. Then the song explodes into an understated polychromatic wonderland, with gospel-tinged backing vocals and hammered piano for the duration of the chorus. It’s a beautiful song but make no mistake, Adele is the star here.

Recent single -Chasing Pavements’ builds on that foundation, with sweeping string arrangements, while that voice is melancholic and reaching, perfectly accentuating the doomed nature of the relationship with the boy she is singing about. Much of the album is sombre, yet it’s far from depressing. This is arguably thanks to the simplicity of the arrangements, which is down to the way Adele writes the songs, showing them to her mum and then playing them live the same way. Most of the album was recorded with the highly sought-after producer Jim Abiss, whose previous credits include the phenomenal first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, as well as Ladytron’s Witching Hour and both Kasabian albums.

The even more in-demand Mark Ronson also got to turn knobs on one track, -Cold Shoulder’. His trademark retro style is all over the song. ‘I wrote that song on a Wurlitzer,’ Adele explains. ‘XL said it should stay, -just you and the Wurlitzer’. I decided it was a fast song so it needs a beat.’ She sought Ronson out after hearing his album Here Comes the Fuzz, a sort of hip-hop mixtape featuring Sean Paul, Q-Tip, Nate Dogg, Tweet and Mos Def. They hit it off immmediately and the track was born.

This precociousness perfectly illustrates how Adele has no problem fighting her corner or taking care of herself in a maledominated music industry. ‘All the girls complain about this [referring to Lily Allen and Kate Nash], I haven’t experienced any problems at all. I’m quite mouthy so if I don’t get my own way, I can be a stubborn little girl,’ she grins. It’s this obstinate attitude that will serve her well in the future, as she has firm ambitions in mind. ‘I want the album to do well here [Ireland], America, Japan, Europe. I want people to come and see me live because that’s where I started.’

Adele’s already thinking about the next album, for which she intends to fly the coop to live and write in Brooklyn. She’s not planning on sitting still, however, as she reveals her aspirations to write for other artists and maybe one day, get involved in A&R. ‘I’ve got loads of pop songs that I’d love [acts] like Pussycat Dolls to sing because I couldn’t get away with that! I want five girls dancing in their bikinis, which I would never do!’

Photography by Marcelo Biglia

Welcome to !Kaboogie, an alternative music night which currently takes place in the basement of Traffic on Abbey Street in Dublin city centre. With the tagline ‘bass that will make your granny cry’, !Kaboogie put on regular gigs featuring bass-heavy music like breakcore, dubstep, grime, reggae, drum -n’ bass and electronica, which have become the best off-the-radar nights Dublin has to offer, bringing over a range of headline international acts such as Aaron Spectre, Benga, Alec Empire, The Bug and Drop the Lime, to play alongside the best of Irish electronic talent like Herv, Prince Kong, T-Woc, Lakker, Ed Devane and Major Grave.

!Kaboogie’s aim is to encourage and nurture the talent in the local scene, while throwing damn good parties in the process. The atmosphere is always friendly and welcoming, and always about the tunes. They also encourage visual artists to enhance the night, such as the Pussy Krew – three Polish blokes living in Ireland, who regularly do live visuals armed with an old vision mixer acquired from the former West Germany, DVD mixers, two laptops, two open VCRs and a suitcase brimming with 400 battered VHS tapes. The crowd are definitely non-discriminatory, a !Kaboogie promoter tells State: ‘We organised the recent Scotch Egg gig with GZ, a punk promoter. We like the idea of mixing it up, Band/DJ/Band/DJ. It was a really good buzz, and cool to see !Kaboogie regulars getting into the punk stuff and vice versa.’

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No-doubt !Kaboogie and other Dublin collectives such as the Alphabet Set, Bodytonic and Reach are helping to foster upcoming electronic musicians, while other promoters such as Electric Underground in Cork, Backtobasskicks in Galway and Diston in Belfast are representing this thriving alternative scene throughout the country.

The scene is now so healthy that it features prominently at summer festivals. The Alphabet Set tent at Mantua Festival in Roscommon is due its third year and is one of the main draws of the festival, which had an attendance of 3,000 people last year, a huge jump from 2006′s 500 capacity crowd. Sai Festival, which takes place in early August in Drumshambo, Co. Leitrim, run by the Leechrum collective, ran its third year of festival shindiggery in 2007. DEAF (Dublin Electronic Arts Festival) takes place at the end of October with the aim of promoting ‘an ethic of genuine inclusiveness in their approach to showcasing electronic art to new audiences’. DEAF celebrated its sixth birthday last year with an all-Asian affair, while 2005′s event featured an all-Irish programme, a huge statement of confidence in the quality of the work offered by Irish-based artists.

An interesting facet of the electronic scene, which has its roots in the history of illegal raves, is a willingness for promoters to think outside the box when organising gigs: ‘We had a gig last year with the Leechrum folks in Taylor’s Hall in the city centre. There were about three or four times more people there than we expected, and there ended up being a real festival buzz, despite the reality of it being a cold winter night in Dublin. There were no bouncers, everyone brought their own drink, and no-one asking -have you no homes to go to?’ at only 2:30am!’ Both !Kaboogie and Alphabet Set cite Seomra Spraoi, an autonomous social centre based in Dublin (but currently homeless) as an important and encouraging collective for such events. Mick Alphabet Set explains, ‘We got sick of the whole bar, venue, soundsystem thing. Around that time, Seomra Spraoi were getting a new venue. Along with Raidio na Life, we did two floors of Seomra Spraoi with electronica upstairs and more DJ-orientated stuff downstairs. It went off like a bomb; absolutely rammed; so of course, the cops showed up. That was one of my favourite gigs to play in Dublin. There were no bouncers, we just worked together with the people from Seomra Spraoi.’

This sense of community has extended to promoters jointly-organising shows, playing each others’ events and helping to source gigs around the country. Alphabet Set and the net-label wing of Diston, Acroplane, have recently released a free online compilation of Irish artists, entitled Disambiguation, while members of !Kaboogie, Alphabet Set and Bassbin run a regular dubstep night called Wobble, also in Traffic.

One thing that a scene like this needs in order to make its mark on the Irish musical landscape is defining releases. D1 recordings (and organisers of DEAF) have been releasing Irish electronic music since 1994, including seminal releases from Eamonn Doyle and Donnacha Costello. !Kaboogie’s upcoming plans include a series of vinyl releases, pairing international names with Irish artists on the flip-side. Alphabet Set had a great year in 2007 with the release of Sarsparilla’s Karahee and the Choice Music Prize nominated self-titled debut LP from Super Extra Bonus Party, an inventive mix of electronic, indie and hip-hop which has the potential to capture audiences outside the realm of electronica.

Another artist who breaks out of the mould is Herv, who has also released one of Ireland’s better electronic albums in the shape of 2006′s Customer, informed by Gameboy sounds, classical elements and innovative phrases that loop and morph into something wholly unique. Though his music is largely laptop-based, live he’s a joy to watch, contorting his body to each break and beat in his music, and when the genre you play is breakcore, that’s a smorgasbord of breaks and beats to gesture to.

Dubstep is still a fledgling genre worldwide but it already has an Irish gem in its ranks with Barry Lynn aka Boxcutter. Barry released Oneiric (2006) and Glyphic (2007), exhilarating grime-y, bass-heavy albums flourished with sampled flutes and catchy dub sounds, on the pioneering London label Planet Mu and received attention of Radio One’s Annie Mac, who played his tunes regularly, garnering welcome attention throughout Europe.

Other notable Irish electronic albums include ChequerBoard‘s Gothica, Ambulance‘s Curse of Vale Do Lobo, Decal‘s Brightest Star and Somadrone’s Of Pattern and Purpose. There is no shortage of upcoming artists with the potential to expand Irish electronica’s boundaries, such as Nouveaunoise, Ikeaboy, Deep Burial, The Vinny Club, Colz, Fringe and Major Grave. Of course, there is always a chance some kid is making a defining album on a laptop in their bedroom with some cracked music software in some monotonous dreary town. !Kaboogie are optimistic about the future: ‘I think its a really good time for electronic music here. It seems like every week, we come across original, interesting stuff. There are heaps of productive heads out there. DJs, producers, bands and visual artists are really getting it together these days.’

Photo by James Goulden. This article originally appeared in Issue 01 of State back in March so some things may be out of date.