All the pain and joy of being young...
The future of Irish pop is strictly Academic, writes Barry Egan of the Westmeath quartet playing Iveagh Gardens on Friday
‘LIKE its politicians and its war’, JB Priestley once said, ‘society has the teenagers it deserves’. Maybe the late British writer might have had a more positive opinion if he had heard some of the early work of The Academic when they first emerged in 2013.
Although as vocalist/guitarist, Craig Fitzgerald told Hot Press in 2015 when they started to take off, with BBC Radio One et al taking notice of this high-octane combo from Westmeath: “It might seem that we’ve just come out of the woodwork as a band but we have been playing together since we were 13 or 14 years old... You go through the bad to get to the good and as a band we had to play over 200 s**t gigs before we started to find our sound.”
That sound, as evidenced on the Mullingar four-piece’s debut album Tales From The Backseat ,is unsurprisingly marked by a youthful blitzkrieg of ennui that owes as much to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Kooks and The Strokes as it does to early Arctic Monkeys.
In fact, the lyrics on Tales From The Backstreet are as novelistic in parts — and as compelling in their own way — as Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the aforesaid Arctic Monkeys’s debut
album of 2006. It is a Westmeath kitchen-sink drama for post-teens, an edgy look inside the heads of young men from a small town, now in their 20s, gazing out at the big, bad world and finding it not always to their liking, but there is always a girl to fall in love with, who perhaps mightn’t always return that love. I’ve become a fan in recent months of this quartet from the midlands.
You can see why acts like The Kooks, Noel Gallagher, Pixies and The Strokes have taken them on tour with them as a support band.
They have something that is not that easy to define, other than to say they have potential to be playing Madison Square Garden in a few years belting out classics about the peculiar pain/joy of being young in the Noughties. The future of Irish pop is strictly Academic, who knows? As well as the aforementioned Arctic Monkeys, some of The Academic’s lyrics have echoes of Pete Townshend’s writing about youth-findingtheir-way in the heyday of The Who in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
On Permanent Vacation, Craig is singing about waking up on the kitchen floor. He is also asking the big questions. Did you find what you had before? Can you see what you want to ignore? Did you buy what you can’t afford?
This is boiled down to the essence of a young man perhaps wanting to get out of his hometown: “Trying to figure out who you’re supposed to
be/How’d you find yourself if you never leave?”
On Television, he is singing about how “his bed is cold/It’s like you’re al-
ways stoned/Where did it go, where did it go?/Birthday, wearing pink/ When tears weren’t everything.” On Bear Claws, he is singing about “old-fashioned” holding hands and romancing; “Show me all your flaws/ Show me your bear claws” — and then, “Go rip your heart out tonight... “And then, “Your mama says it’s over when you come through the door.”
‘Don’t leave me here — especially not with her...’
On the majestic Why Can’t We Be Friends? he is singing: “Don’t leave me here, especially not with her/ You’ve heard of people getting lost/ Here, we don’t even talk.”
Of the latter song, Craig has said: “Having a love-hate relationship with someone can sometimes create kind of an innate insecurity that ultimately keeps you holding on. The song is kind of about that dynamic, putting up with all imperfections you see in someone for maybe one thing that is so undeniable that it keeps you together.”
On Bite My Tongue, there is yet more talk of romantic imperfections: “I wanna drink lemonade/And never rain on your parade/My dear, what have we become? So I’ ll just bite my tongue.” On Northern Boy, there’s a “trip down to the coastline where lost angels are cursed”.
The Academic play the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin on July 20