Well, our Spring/Summer soujourn in salubrious County Leitrim is at an end. For the past four months we have been holed up in our country retreat listening to the occasional dog bark, pheasant call or torrential downpour from the outside world. Quiet time would be an understatement for the surrounding activity. Our surrounds looked like this….

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Our neighbours were these nice people….

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We could try and decifer how well we were getting on with a song depending on whether the cows came up close to the house or not. Regularly they would turn en masse and depart for somewhere they found less threatening on their ears.

It’s been a great few months. We went down with a semblance of what we thought the album would be after rehearsing in Dublin for a few months but quickly we found that being there with nothing really to do other than play our instruments our rehearsal time doubled without us really noticing. We were able to explore new textures for the songs and had fun playing around with sounds and vocal ideas. New songs arrived and old ones got pushed to the back. A slow song that had been floating around since last year was fleshed out and finished through us playing it a few times every night until it grew into a monster and possibly one of the best things we’ve done.

Many tea breaks were had and we seriously pushed the boundaries for how many Tesco Value Bourbon Creams any one person can eat in one day. Turn your back for a second and the just opened double pack would be a smattering of brown crumbs and the soggy end of a tea cup.

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This is where we did our work.

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We were all very close together for playing and singing and someone even slept on the ground in this room every night. We were true pilgrims. I’ve heard of a lot of bands doing something like this – heading off to a house somewhere to work on an album. It’s a very rewarding experience. Everyone is there all the time and even if you’re not playing together you might just be hanging out watching twenty four episodes of the U.S. Office in a row. Even then you have the album on your mind and you can toss around ideas about how you think it should sound and what songs people like.

We got pretty good at recording and might have a go at doing some of the B sides for the album completely on our own.

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When no one does the washing up this is what happens.

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Here’s some photos.

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See what I did there…

We were supposed to play an outdoor festival in Bandon, County Cork, about two weeks ago (it takes me this long to realise I have photos on my camera from it).  It was going to be an outdoor gig with Duke Special who we’ve met a good few times now at different gigs we’ve played together.  He’s always an utterly charming man but we got a chance to hang out with him a bit more this time.

It was an early start and a long drive down.  We didn’t mind we were headlining an outdoor festival – it was going to be pretty cool.  Weather was getting pretty bad the whole way down.  We passed the aqueduct outside Bandon where apparently the strongest man in Cork once threw a metal bowl that they play down there over the top.

We got there just in time for our supposed soundcheck but there didn’t seem to be much movement about the place.  It was pissing rain at this stage and had been for the entire day in Cork.  We saw a few people huddled in trailers and eventually a safety guy came and found us and said that they couldn’t let us play with all the electrical stuff on stage.  In fairness we did have that feeling of the little kid at the football match who doesn’t want to go out in the torrential rain to run up and down in the mud.  We also surmised that no one was going to come out and stand in the giant puddle for an hour.

We were staying in Bandon for the night then.  We went and got some food and met Duke Special and his crew who were staying in the same hotel as us.  They were as dissapointed as we were not to be playing but we said we’d check out some of the other bands that were playing in the pubs around the town as part of the festival.

There was a really nice atmosphere around the town for the night with music happening everywhere.  We just sat around drinking pints feeling a little bit stupid that we weren’t playing (especially since it had stopped raining).  We met some cool people who said that everyone was really dissapointed that the outdoor gig was cancelled.

Quite late on in the night Jennifer Lomasney, a Cork singer, was finsihing her set in the hotel where we were staying.  She and her band were very cool and let us use their gear to play a few tunes to all the people in the bar.  It was a really enjoyable night – no stage or lights or soundchecks or any of the usual gig stuff; just get up and play.  There was a real warm, welcoming, special air to the little room.  We did three or four songs and everyone went wild.  Then Peter (Duke Special) who’d been sitting with us went and got his piano and did three or four songs just by himself and everyone went wild again.

It was getting to the part of the night when everyone started playing together.  I remeber we did ‘Oh Darling’ by The Beatles, then Peter, Michael and Shea did some song I didn’t know and from there it got less coherant but more memorable.

I hope everyone there had as good a time as we did; it was definitely a night to remember.  Heading off to bed around five or so I took this photo out my bedroom window.  All the pubs were closed and it was just a deserted street except for this one guy who was sound asleep across the road on some beer kegs.  Perfectly Irish…

It’s hard to give these things exciting titles like TOUR UPDATE!!! DAY 44 when you’re not actually on tour, let alone day 44 of a tour.  So suffice it to say we’re still working away doing non tour acitivities and this is what’s been going on for the last while.

We went to the Meteor Awards – a bizzare and actually excruciatingly boring ceremony that is considerably edited down for TV purposes.  As we were ‘performing’ we had a dressing room to keep running to for refreshments as they also don’t let you bring any drinks into the hall – I assume for fear that the boredom will take a back seat and people might actually start enjoying themselves.  The whole thing is about four and a half hours long with Deirdre O Kane stopping every so often for a commercial break while everyone just waits for that bit to be over.  Then there’s a set up for a performance…a performance…filming the crowd for applause etc.  If ever there’s a way of sucking the life out of something that’s it.  Highlights did include winning an award of course – a very nice thing to happen, being shepparded down the red carpet as quickly as possible so that everyone had time to get a good shot of the Pussycat Dolls for the next day’s papers (apparently photos of four guys in coats just don’t really do it for the front page of the Star), Shayne Ward’s backing track cutting out halfway through his song and him starting again, and Amy Winehouse missing the intro to her song and starting again because, according to her, she doesn’t usually play to a backing track.  Why Ireland is the only place that live music and television don’t go together I really don’t understand.  Everywhere else it would be unheard of to mime but In Ireland it’s ‘ah no it’s tv…can’t do it live…takes too long to set up…what if something doesn’t work on the night.’

There was a great atmosphere with all the performers and nominees on the night; everyone hanging out and chatting and having a few drinks and this carried over as well to the Choice Prize which was on last week.  Mr Hannon walked away with the money on the night but the whole thing was a complete contrast to the Meteor evening with everyone performing and playing their songs, everything running smoothly and a real jolly atmosphere backstage.  Here’s lots of people (eight bands) hanging out in the tiny area made for one band.

There was a great community atmosphere at the whole thing as all the bands have seen each other lots over the last year at festivals and gigs and tours it’s something that hopefully we’ll be involved in again.

We did a couple of gigs with Razorlight – one in the R.D.S. which is a giant barn of a place but was a great gig.  Everyone was pretty nice to us; we didn’t really see any of Razorlight over the three days.  They seem to keep themselves to themselves which is fair enough.  We did get to play in Waterfront Hall in Belfast which isn’t really used for rock gigs I dont’ think.  It’s where Ash and U2 played before the Good Friday agreement was voted on and it’s an amazing place; a real concert hall with seats all the way to the roof but where every seat has a great view of the stage.

The first night was a little frosty (possibly not helped by the fact that everyone was x-rayed on the way in because there was a police conference on next door – bit of an atmosphere killer) but the second night was a brilliant gig which we all really enjoyed and hopefully we’ll be back in Belfast very soon.

I always say it but I’m definitely gonna do these more often so I don’t have to remember what we’ve been doing over a long space of time.  Most recently it’s been back to the studio with Stefano our long suffering friend and engineer.

Here he is working, probably while we make his life difficult in the background by taking his picture etc.  We recorded a few songs, one in particular turned out really well – so much so that, heaven forbid, it may be both the next Irish single and first UK single.  I know I hate it when albums have an extra song on them but seeing as the album hasn’t been released yet in the UK our label really want it to go on the album over there.  It hasn’t been mixed yet so it’s just a heads up but it looks like a likely outcome.  By the way the song is great so we would like it to be a single.  Here’s Michael playing a piano in the studio that we managed to get recently that used to belong to U2.  No one else thinks it’s cool but I do.  They used it on their Unforgettable Fire tour.

That about wraps it up.  Our friends Delorentos were finshing their album upstairs while we were working downstairs.  Congratulations to them on a fine job which I think is out soon enough.  Here’s everyone celebrating as they were drunkenly blaring it out the window to random passers by.

We’re off on tour in Ireland again in May and UK dates will hopefully start in April.  Full details should be out later on this week so hopefully see you soon.

Eoin

P.S. thank you to Rowan for showing me how to put picures in the blog because I was getting nowhere with it….