2FM Session / Monday 23rd November

Our recently recorded 2FM Session will be broadcast on the Dan Hegarty show on 2FM this coming Monday. We tackled recent single 'Align the Seas', live favourite 'For No Man' & one of our recent tunes currently titled 'Time'. You should all be listening to Dan Hegarty anyways but now your reasons are manyfold...

Going Underground

I gotta stop reading my horoscopes, that day (read below) of, how shall I put it, misguided events apparently was my own personal worst day of the year. I know it felt like it for me but Gemini's the world over must have been shitting themselves. It was like a day of someone constantly poking you in the eye & apologising saying it will never happen again & each time you'd believe them as it wasn't deliberate. Anyhow, in case anyone thought that's why there hasn't been any words appearing here in a while, let me put your mind at ease. I don't think it is. Maybe. We've been working quietly & diligently, hopefully & modestly on new materials in the 'TAP' HQ (I don't know). Though we have the fantastic Hard Working Class Heroes festival coming up shortly (Oct 18th / The Button Factory), we're mostly in album mode in our collective head & are happily stocking up on supplies, musically speaking in our underground lair or burrow if you will. If you don't understand that we're writing like mad feckers, developing our sound, ruthlessly discarding songs & jumping fearlessly into newer ones with such vigour that we've frightened ourselves. God knows what will come out of this enthusiasm but for now we're happy with progress so far... The picture below illustrates what it looks like from my point of view in the jam room, though luke is not usually standing there. For now I'll say a brief goodbye...

Alarms & Surprises

I've been meaning to write a little blog post since running into Today FM. Literally. I'm gonna have to attempt somehow to prevent these little meanderings becoming so prophetic. Previously I mentioned something about blindly heading into the Today FM offices. Little did I know. Apart from a little incident with the authorities on the way up to pick up the gear our days direction had already been set in stone by the time we arrived perfectly on time with all our gear at the Today FM offices. It turns out they were the offices they had vacated around March of last year. So off we run gear in hand to find the car to find their not so recently occupied headquarters. Within half an hour or so we had made it across town & were proceeding to vacate the car park closest to the building as I opened to door to the wrong exit & set off the alarm all over the car park. Thankfully we were making a different kind of noise minutes later as we set up in the studio. Thanks to Gavin for making it all so easy once we were in the station building.

Since then we've been focussing on new material & have 2 new songs in the early stages of development, one called 'alligators' & another called 'majesty'. As ever the names may change to protect the innocent, but it's good to be just writing again for a little while, it feeds the soul. Boom.

Circling all round the sun.

So tomorrow we wander blindly into the studios of Today FM to perform for mister Paul Mcloone. I only say blindly because I'm not that sure where the offices are. We rehearsed into the wee hours last night working out our stripped versions of songs using only 2 guitars a keyboard & three sets of vocal cords. We'll be performing 'Align the seas' since our good buddy Paul has been playing it on this show already, new song 'For no man' & a cover of 'Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In the Aeroplane over the sea'. Hopefully we'll get copies of said sessions so we can give you Mp3s or the likes. Tune in tomorrow night for the next episode...

Last night Road Records saved my life...

Round 3, Whelans, 7th August. After just getting our freshly minted 7"s into Road & Tower Records after months of back & forth with test pressings & the like we breathe a collective sigh of relief as our 7"s actually have our tracks on them & not some obscure french jazz, & as cool as it probably is we wouldn't be over the moon about it being on our debut vinyl. In our previous post we mentioned them arriving but we hadn't yet had a chance to listen to them & though Vinyl is on a major comeback these days due to the inherent uncollectability of Mp3s, record players aren't as plentiful in the workplaces of Dublin as you'd imagine. Thank you again Road Records. So onto Whelans...

Our first support 'Little Green Cars' pulled out a couple of days before the gig so our main support was a fantastic band called 'The Murder Clues'. With more energy than a Duracell bunny on some of kind of Coke/Speed & a frontman with a pair of lungs that would fill an air balloon with a sneeze, they hopped & bounced their way through an impressive set. Monsieur Mcloone on Today FM is also a fan of theirs, & he's got good taste (he must do, he plays our stuff***). Anyhoo, with more unfamiliar faces than usual we horsed into our own set playing a few new tunes, 'You're Right, I'm Wrong', 'For No Man' & 'The Bullet' being the three newest ones that have not yet been recorded & thankfully all got a reaction that made our nethers all tingly. Can I say that? Fuck it, it's done now. Whelans always just feels like home for some reason but I guess any band that's ever played there would understand, it's just an amazing venue to play... So horse through the set we did, it's now our official word for playing a set, 'horse', & then sold our first copies of the 7" from the ridiculously small table that housed our records & tees, which was manned beautifully by the lovely Dawn. Thank you Dawn. Out into the world our little babies go after all this time, & the excitement of having our music on vinyl is probably as you'd imagine it to be, a little odd at first but comforting once you've gotten used to the extra weight of carrying it with you everywhere.

We're popping into say Hello to Paul Mcloone next week, or at least to record a Green Room Session with him so keep your ears peeled & tuned to Today FM. We'll be doing 2 of our own songs & a cover version. What will the cover be? We're not entirely sure ourselves yet, but will most likely be one of the 3 songs mentioned in our Rockers Dozen in Hot Press last issue. Until then...

Iconic (!)

So we rocked up into Phantom last night only to discover that had we walked we would have got there quicker. John Caddell was rather calmly hanging around outside having a smoke while his show was continuing upstairs. We proceeded to invade the building with bicycles, electric guitars, acoustic guitars, boomboxes & a newly purchased mini-korg jobby type keyboard fandangly. This is us stripped. The deal is Cathal intros the show, plays a few tunes then calls us in to play a track, though we have a few minutes to set up. So going out live we begin our newest finished tune 'for no man', which must have been mentioned here more than anything else so far, only to be stopped about 10 seconds in due to a mysterious buzzing noise that is taking over everything. One by one plugging things out we trace the source of the disturbance to a Canadian transformer that is attached to a pedal board attached to a guitar attached to a Canadian. So Luke plugs out his effects & we're ready to go again. You learn something new every day ordinarily & in a band I think you learn 10 new things every day, I'm not sure it ever ends. So the one thing we've learned so far today is that being in a band adds 9 new things to learn each day, only 9 more to go so.

On another note our 7"s have arrived, we're all excited as they look like vinyl & smell & taste like vinyl, weird. Vinny got his picture taken with Steve Reddy receiving the first copy & if you're our friend on Facebook you can see the looks of sheer delight & excitement on both their little faces. Beautiful.

Castle Crystalled

I appear to have slowed down on the old updates, but you know the old saying if you've nothing to say etc... blah blah. We've been busy working on the new song 'For No Man' getting it into some semblance of shape for Castlepalooza. Said 'palooza was last Saturday & was rather enjoyable, there's a great vibe in the Castle Grounds for the weekend, no hassle, everyone mostly arsing around with no real set intention, which is the way a festival should be in my mind. It's not really about the music even though the line up was rather good, it seems to be about having a good time, relaxing, hanging (over), & possily getting mashed, though I'm not sure what that means...

It's now Wednesday & due to a chance meeting with mister Cathal Funge at the weekend in Charleville Castle we're popping into Phantom tonight for a quick interview & a lash through one or two songs. Our shortlist for the songs have been the two from the 7" (coming out friday, plug*), which are 'Belong' & 'Align The Seas' & someone suggested our new one 'For No Man', which may end up being played either. It's all wide open people so have a listen in tonight from 10-12 Midnight on http://www.phantom.ie if you fancy The Angel Pier stripped.

We're all geared up for our gig this Friday night in Whelans with The Murder Clues & Little Green Cars, it's been a while & it's still our most fravourite venue to play, can't wait to hit that stage again. Bring it on...

Around the world

Since we last conversed in this odd one way conversation type situation we've been working like mad yokes on the new song which is still called 'for no man'. There's a bit of a reference there in the title, if anyone can guess i'll give you a promo copy of the new single or shout your name out during the next gig, or some other weird request of your choice... who knows. Anyhoo, the song appears to be coming along nicely, we've been stretching our harmony muscles a bit so all going well it'll get it's live debut in Whelans on the 7th August in glorious technisound. We've also had a little chat with Martin Byrnes from the News of the World so go buy a copy this coming Sunday & read the interview before we do (not fond of early rises of a sunday). You could also invest in the next issue of Hot Press to hear our take on the Rockers Dozen. I would recommend all of the above, but I'm biased. That is all for now, until the next blurt.

Windmills of your mind...

The boys at Souljacker sent us a few grabs of the Oxegen video so we could show you what it looked like if you weren't there on Saturday weathering the torrential storm to catch a moment in the IMRO tent. In order it's - us on stage (Mark is the shrouded figure behind me in the red), the view of the crowd from the stage (beauty if ever I saw it) & Luke slapping the crowd at the front five each after he realised the drop from the stage was also a climb (who'd have thunk it). One major omission from my previous ramblings is this: We couldn't have done the gig without the generosity & amazing help from our buddy Jamie from The Ambience Affair who also happens to be one of our favourite Irish artists. Well he's my favourite anyway, if ever there was talent to watch, it would be them...

So far this week we've dived headfirst into writing again & though it was a little slow to take off it was just a matter of playing the cobwebs off our collective creative sparring. There's a mouthful. Anyhoo, we started back into a tune we were vibing off not so long ago with the temporary title of 'for no man' (it may remain, time & fate will tell), an intense mellow builder. Again, it's early days but we'll keep you up to date, if it makes it to demo stage then it has a chance...

Darragh

After the storm...

So calling the blog post 'the calm' was a self fulfilling prophecy in more ways than one. Our habit of playing gigs in the stormiest of weather continues, so much so that mister Steve Reddy has renamed us 'Raingel Pier'... We'll let him away with leaving out the 'The'. Apparently from the time we went on stage to the time we left the stage the weather went from slightly rainy to unbelievably stormy, so much there was talk of shutting Oxegen down around 9PM, not sure how true that is. The tent was at capacity before we went on so anyone trying to get in out of the weather wouldn't have had much chance. The gig itself went really well from our point of view & we got an incredible reaction from the hugely enthusiastic crowd. The picture above is a pic that Luke took in the middle of the set, requesting that the lights go up to document the moment. The pic was taken about a millisecond before the lights went up, hence the alien footage like quality... We've filmed the whole thing so we plan to have snippets appearing online on our various sites in the coming weeks, keep an ould eye out for that. The crowd were amazing, if you were there & you're now reading this, thank you from the bottom of our collective hearts... hmmm 'collective hearts' could be a good song name, maybe not, anyways, tired as all hell today after said storm. The adrenalin comedown after a gig like that can only be combatted with copious amounts of alcohol & playing pool with big stars (ahem, luke). The upshot is we loved playing Oxegen & are now gonna be preparing for our next set of shows (Castlepalooza, Tower Instore & Whelans). All going well we'll be playing a couple of completely new numbers in Whelans. Brain melting now, transmission over... Darragh.

Holy fuck!

The whole Oxegen experience has been shit cool, from dining with TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party & David Pajo to playing to the coolest crowd in the world. Thanks to everyone who was there for our set, you know who you are & you all blew our minds... The Angel Pier fellas...

The Calm

Our first major music festival tomorrow & we're feeling calm, collected & little anxious. RTE are going to be recording the set & we're also going to be filming the set so expect snippets to appear online from time to time. Hoping to catch some great bands as well, but you know how these things go. If you're going, seeya there, if you're at home take solice in the comfort of your sitting room. It's all good...

Little thoughts

So we've been rehearsing for this Saturday at Oxegen, moving the set around, making little arrangement changes to songs etc. The general feeling seems to be of slightly nervous excitement, so we'll either be jumping or puking if you see us wandering around on the Saturday, only time will tell... Seeyas there... Darragh

WTF?

we've decided our home page area is now for general news of the band etc... & this area is going to be for our general ramblings & thoughts, experiments, music listened to & happenings that might not necessarily be frontpage news in a band sense. so now...