Interviews

Hot Press - "The Shock Of The Old"  August 2003

Nevermind the Buckleys, this is the Clancy Brothers: Barry McCormack keeps it real.

"Yeah the No Disco Planxty special," Barry McCormack is saying. "You know, I was listening to Planxty and the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners when I was writing these songs, and I was thinking, 'I'm gonna give these songs to people, and they're gonna go... (facial expression implying proximity to a foul smell) "What... is this? This is like... old-timer... Oirish... rubbish".' I thought people wouldn't really get it. And then there was the No Disco Planxty special. And I thought, Oh, right. I'm not totally separate to what's going on."

Indeed not. It's a a sign of the times when the Kila single is being dropped in the Village, an album by an Irish neo-trad-rapper enters the charts at number 5 and the finest music programme RTE never got behind is making documentaries about Planxty. It's beautifully apposite, then, that the finest acoustic album of 2003 is Barry McCormack's We Drank Our Tears, an album that owes less to this songwriting nation's all too well-thumbed canon of Dylan/Drake/Buckley (junior and senior) and more to the Irish storytelling tradition: timeless and placeless, but at the same time very specifically observed and honestly rendered, universal, local music.

Three things about Tears are remarkable. One, it is that rare thing: an acoustic album in the purest sense, utilising only guitar and voice, where you absolutely would not wish for anything more to be present. Two, it's hard to believe that McCormack has not, as JD Salinger would have it, buried at least one wife in his lifetime: that is, that these tales - ardent love-wishes for an ailing spouse ('A Husband's Prayer'), encouragements to the bereaved and the lost ('Don't Be Afraid Anymore') and maunderings physical, philosophical and romantic ('The Place Where Fortune Hides', On A May Morning') - are coming from one so young, and ring as true as if they were written a hundred years ago. (As well, acutely-drawn stories most definitely set in real-time Ireland = like 'On The Evening Of The Epiphany' - ensures that this is not mere genre-imitation.) Three, it's title - and some of its content - notwithstanding, this is an overwhelmingly positive, uplifting, reassuring album.

So we're a long way from McCormack's previous band, the skewed Americana-with-a-peculiarly-Irish-grudge/hangover of Jubilee Allstars.

"I think, particularly when you get older, and you don't really feel like jumpin' around and kinda screaming, you know, I think you look for something that has a bit more depth, and a bit more humanity," offers Barry. "And around that time, you stop thinking your parents are idiots, and you start thinking, like 'Wow, they're real people'. And y'know, to bring up families, and do it well, is just something that you really start to respect.

"That's been a great thing about this record," Barry says. "The people that have really liked it are my family - like, my father, my brothers, my friends' parents are fans of it. It means a lot that, like, I have an uncle in Wales who listens to it and says, 'Wow, that speaks to me about my life'. Rather than thinking, 'I have a nephew in a rock band'."

Barry McCormack's We Drank Our Tears is out now on Hag's Head. Barry also plays support to Katell Keineg on August 14 at the Sugar Club, and appears at this year's Lisdoonvarna festival on August 30.

Hot Press - June 1998

DUB STARS

Or should that be Pub Stars? Either way, their debut album is soaked in the strong spirit‚ and stronger spirits‚ of their native city. Nick Kelly meets Dublin's JUBILEE ALLSTARS.

"Guinness stains my only shirt I can't wear it into work" - 'The Shaky Man', Jubilee Allstars.

Meet the Jubilee Allstars: not so much the boys from the black stuff as the boys on the black stuff. Stout of heart and weak of liver, the Allstars' darkly humorous musings on this condition we call human situate the band, metaphorically speaking, mid-way between St. James's Gate and the Laughter Lounge.

That would leave them, at a rough estimate, on Capel St. Bridge. For the sake of convenience, however, I meet the band - the brothers Niall, Barry and Fergus McCormack and drummer Lee Casey ‚ in the basement flat of bassist, Fergus, a few miles from Dublin's city centre, just before they rehearse for their (very) brief UK tour (er, three dates in all). After a number of well-received singles and EPs, the Allstars have finally released their debut album, the very fine Sunday Miscellany. A sloshed and enchanted song cycle, there is such a swoosh of alcohol in its grooves the record should probably come with a breathalyser attached.
Even when they throw in an instrumental, they call it 'The Drunken Cyclist' - maybe they were just too fluther'd to remember the lyrics.

"I like to imagine that every copy of the album has been soaked in a vat of stout before it's ready for sale," says Niall. "It's got that pleasantly numb sensation that you feel when you've had a couple of pints of Guinness. The mood, I suppose, is one of melancholy. Melancholy is a mood you get yourself into in order to feel good.

"The lyrics are very reflective: it's the kind of stuff that you think about when you've had a few drinks. They're not really full-scale drinking songs. That's what the Great Western Squares do‚ either 'whoah, more porter!' or 'Christ, too much porter' whereas we just do 'a little bit of porter'. We're Dubliners Lite!"

It's no surprise, then, to find that their previous sleeve artwork has contained loving, sepia-tinged photos of the band in the pub (all sleeves, incidentally, were designed by Niall, who until recently led a double life as part of the art department of this very organ). For the album, though, they've chosen a richly cinematic shot of night-time Dublin and there is also an old map of the city in the CD booklet. It is clear that the geographical and historical landscape of their hometown is very important to the brothers McCormack.

"I think we fit into the urban Irish song tradition," says Niall, "as in Dominic Behan songs which were collected over the years and sung by The Dubliners. What we're trying to do is to represent Dublin in music in the same way writers like Flann O'Brien and Sean O'Casey did. There's been so few bands that have done that - 'Widow's Walk' by the Stars Of Heaven is a great song about Dublin, and some of the Blades' stuff . . ."

". . . And maybe The Radiators," continues Fergus, "but most post-U2 Dublin bands could have come from just about anywhere. What we're trying to create is a sort of mythic Dublin ‚ which the literary Dublin is anyway. At heart, I'm an incurable romantic and nostalgist." "There's a lot of fantasy to what we're doing," adds Niall, "which a lot of people haven't really latched on to."

One song on the album in particular, 'The Dying Town', sums up the ambivalent attitude that these native sons have towards the capital city. A heavy-hearted Hammond organ reminiscent of the Bad Seeds at their spookiest lends an almost funereal air to Niall's despairing vocals on the malign effects of the modernisation of our cities.

"The band started in my house when I lived in Phibsboro," explains Fergus, "which to me is one of the great areas of Dublin in that it's largely untouched by the Celtic Tiger. The recommended reading for the album would be Frank McDonald's 'The Destruction Of Dublin' where he documents all that. Having said that, I do feel Dublin is a better place now than it was ten years ago‚ for a start, there's different people coming to the city and there's more money around.

"But the point is that tourists will stop coming if we start to pander to them. If we try to second guess what it is they want, then you're gonna get rid of the very things that attracted them to the city in the first place."

Niall takes up the point. "It's the idea of just demolishing buildings which have a great heritage value just so they can build something that has short-term, monetary payback. There's endless stories of all these listed buildings which mysteriously get fire-damaged and have to get knocked down because they're not safe, when it's obvious that somebody in a position of influence has paid some bunch of head-the-balls to do a job on them."

Jubilee Allstars began life as Jubilee, a three-piece‚ and they admit themselves, a very ragged three-piece‚ who had been known to jokingly announce themselves at gigs as the Australian Stars Of Heaven. In fact, they sounded more like the Hibernian early Beatles. But since an enforced name-change and the arrival of Barry, at 22 the youngest of the three siblings, they have matured into something else entirely. "When we started the band," Niall recalls, "it was more for the sake of being in a band than the music‚ which is the English disease. It was so we could show off our new shoes and snort cheap coke. But now it's the other way 'round. Now we see being in a band as an opportunity to say something, as a vehicle to get our ideas across."

Which they've been doing with increasing success. They were nominated in the Best New Band category at this year's Hot Press awards in Belfast. Strong singles like the bittersweet 'Which Kind' and the stoned 'Keep On Chewing' picked up plenty of radio airplay thanks to the likes of John Kelly and Donal Dineen ‚ yet neither appear on the album. Sunday Miscellany is a downbeat but never deadbeat record that casts a poetic, yet somewhat ironic eye on life, on love, on what it's like waking up in the morning with an Orange Parade marching through your stomach. In the Jubilee Allstars' world, the last bus always pulls out just before you reach the stop and then it starts to rain just as you join the 100-mile queue for the taxi.

The song titles alone are worth the price of admission: 'The Poet Priest', 'Night's Candles Are Burnt Out', 'Sunset And Evening Star'. Musically, it's a subdued, understated affair, though the scratchy, insistent guitars of 'Tonight (I'm Gone)' could be a Velvet Underground out-take while the lyrical 'The Many Roads Home' a-jingle jangles with the best of them, showing its country rock heart on its sleeve.

Recorded in just two weeks, the warm and unfussy feel of the album is down to producer, Stan Erraught, the Allstars's mentor who is something of a living legend down my street.

"It was nothing to do with the fact that he had been in the Stars Of Heaven," protests Fergus. "We got him because we knew that musically he was coming from the same place as us. We didn't want to get in so-called 'name' producers from England or America because then it inevitably ends up being their record."

"Irish people have this inferiority complex," observes Niall. "When we hear a foreign accent, we always think they must know what they're talking about. Yet they usually don't have a clue what the band are about. So it was important to get someone from Dublin. And Stan genuinely understands what we're trying to do."

Barry, whose involvement with the band has increased on an almost daily basis - he sings, writes and plays guitar - is even more emphatic. "Making the album was one of the best things I've done in my whole life - probably the best. Making the album is like conception. Releasing the album is like giving birth - you're emotionally drained and it's a lot of hard work."

"But bands are more like the father," Fergus responds, "all they do is smoke cigars and talk about it."

Sunday Miscellany has received mixed reviews. The main gripe seems to be with the quality of the vocal performances.

Fergus: "Niall's voice has been slagged off a lot recently. But when we played with Come in Dublin and Belfast, they came up to us and said they really thought his singing was amazing. You either get it or you don't."

Niall: "Stan and Edel (the engineer) had a real laugh about the fact that my singing on 'The Shaky Man' was done in one take on a microphone that isn't normally used to do vocals! They thought it was so funny because it's so offensive to the ears of people who want perfectly-produced records from a 48-track studio.

"It's not that we threw out the rulebook. It's that we didn't have one in the first place. A lot of people, I'd say, find us a bit obnoxious or arrogant, the fact that we'd dare to make a record that is out of tune." But either way, Jubilee Allstars say they're oblivious to the ire of their detractors.

Niall: "The attitude of a lot of people of our parents' generation - of the older Ireland ‚ would be that we're a bunch of wasters: 'why would you want to be in a band, you're getting nowhere'. But if our career went ballistic in the morning, their attitude would be 'Hey, look at what the young people are doing. Let's open a rock school with them teaching in it and get their wax figures erected on Grafton St'." I'll drink to that.

Irish Times Interview - "Jubilee Year"

Interview with Fergus McCormack from Jubilee Allstars in The Irish Times on Friday, March 7 1997.

HOT LICKS / Brian Boyd

The Jubilee Allstars do not rock - no, not in the slightest. They're the sort of band who would probably report such "rock" activity to the authorities as being a breach of the peace. What they do is something very slow, introspective, moody, lo-fi, countryish and pretty darn good. Evoking as they do the sort of musical spirit that seeps languidly through the work of Alex Chilton, they're the best possible antidote to the big guitar, lousy lyric sound that threatens to bludgeon people into submission.

Originally on the Dead Elvis label, now with the Sony offshoot, Lakota, the band who used to be known simply as Jubilee, added the Allstars for a variety of boring legal reasons and impressed many with their first Lakota EP, the truly wonderful By The End Of The Night - which received a Melody Maker single of the week accolade.

With a new EP in the shops, titled Which Kind, we frog-marched bass player and singer Fergus McCormack into a small room, shone a very strong light into his eyes and accused him of being a propagator of wilfully lo-fi, country-tinged, melancholy music. He 'fessed up soon enough: "We definitely have country references in our sound, but we're not really a country band in that respect. The lo-fi thing is a bit strange. I think we get called that because we're not very good at playing. We also get a lot of Stars of Heavens-type comparisons, if that's any help." Yes or no on that one? "It's sort of embarrassing because I idolised The Stars of Heaven. I suppose for many people writing about us, it's a sort of vindication, because The Stars were one of the few bands doing anything of worth back in the U2-dominated sound of Irish music in the 1980s."

How do you answer to the charge of shoe-gazing? "That's one I can't understand at all. I remember when we did the John Peel session, the sound engineer turned to us at one stage and said "have you got any songs a little less introspective?" and we didn't. We can't help it, that's the way we write. Our music may be a bit dour at times, but we're not like The Red House Painters or anything. Some people come up to us and say we remind them of The Violent Femmes, a band none of us has ever heard, or else they mention all the 4AD bands. The reality is most of our influences are American, particularly bands like The Replacements and Big Star with Gram Parsons thrown in too." Ever worry about becoming a band for musos? "Yes."

For a band who regard recording on an eight-track as tantamount to over-production and who say they won't be doing many gigs in the near future because "we've done two recently", there's a feeling within the industry that they won't be bothering Bryan Adams on the stadium front this year. The real danger, though, lies in Jubilee becoming that most dreaded and sanctimoniously worthy of entities - a critics' band. "That's the way it's looking at the moment," says Fergus, "and it's not something we can do anything about. But we don't want to be like our heroes and have all the press like us but not sell any records."

The Which Kind EP is currently available on lovely seven-inch vinyl (which plays at 33 r.p.m., but even if you play it at 45 r.p.m. you still won't have any problem keeping up) and also on less lovely Compact Disc.

AT the other end of the spectrum, Creation hopefuls Three Colours Red, one of the better bands on the Brats tour, come back to play Whelans, Dublin on Saturday night . . . On quite the other hand, retro no-hopers Reef are at the Red Box tonight, but the real gig at the venue happens tomorrow night when DJ extraordinaire Carl Cox gets down to business (doors 11 p.m.) . . . By far and away the best new Irish stuff around at the moment is the debut EP by Roscommon band The Marbles. Glam pop a gogo is the order of the day from these excessively talented little urchins. They play The Abbey Inn, Tralee tonight before going off to do something in Paris, after which they'll be at the Virgin Megastore, Dublin on March 20th and Eamon Doran's on March 21st.

Interview with the owners of Lakota Records on No Disco in February 1997.

Owner: "Lakota is actually an Irish company which is entirely owned by myself and Jim, who set up the label with me. We have a licensing deal with Sony, so Sony don't actually own the company as such."

Interviewer: But realistically, because of Sony's involvement, how much control would you and Jim really have?

Jim: "We have a lot of control. We would be allocated budgets to go ahead and just work. We don't have to report back to them at all."

"We talk to Barry McCormack and find out his views on Jubilee Allstars album "Lights of the city". He also talks about the commercial prospects of the band, selling records and folk influences such as Planxty."

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