Inthe game forthe long haul
Extensive tours and a great new album show LGC are…
There is nothing small or naïve about Little Green Cars (as the name might suggest). In fact they’re seasoned hands having rarely been off the road since the release of their excellent debut album over three years ago. They reckon they’ve completed ‘seven or eight’ US tours as well as trips to Australia and the far east since Absolute Zero made them a force in Irish indie rock.
Ephemera, their new album which was released on Friday, is at least the equal of its predecessor and will certainly repay hundreds more listens to deduce if it is superior. While hardly being hard-nosed music business cynics, the members of Little Green Cars knew enough about rock history to prevent the development of Difficult Second Album Syndrome.
‘We really made a conscious effort not to write “tour” songs. No one is going to hear a song about a band being on tour and think, ‘I can identify with that,’ says singer and guitarist Stevie Appleby.
‘The songs can be a soundtrack to a number of situations even if they really were borne out of the American midwest. There can be a level of ambiguity but it will still hit the listener.’
Singer Faye O’Rourke says: ‘ I think it helped that we were writing songs throughout the process of recording the first album so we already had material and it came quite freely.’
Guitarist Adam O’Regan says: ‘It’s been three years since
Absolute Zero came out and a lot has happened in our lives, some of the songs are a response to that.’
Adam channelled the pain of bereavement into one of the most affecting songs on the album. He says: ‘ Just before Absolute Zero came out my father passed away.
‘I was 20. We had to go on our first tour of America straight after that. We were on tour for about a year and doing that was a real solace. I wrote the song Brother for my younger brother Alex, who was going through a tough time, Faye sang it and it has become almost like a prayer for me.’
Another song Good Women Do addresses Faye’s feelings about being a woman in 2016.
‘It was a reflection of what was happening in the lives of women I know and women in general in society. There is such pressure on women to put their best foot forward at all times in terms of the way they look and other things because of social media.
‘Personally, being a woman in a band is like being under a microscope. Should I think about how I want people to perceive me or should I just be myself? Who am I? I’ve been trying to figure all that stuff out and it’s confusing.’
Stevie also confronts people’s expectations on another album highlight, The Garden Of Death.
‘It is about perception and what people actually see when they look at you,’ he says.
‘There is such a marked difference in how your parents look at you and how the rest of the world looks at you. It is actually about my granny, her perception of me as opposed to what everyone else thinks of me.’
The perception of Little Green Cars is that they are one of Ireland’s best bands but one that maybe deserves more commercial success overseas. I spoke to them just as it was revealed that The Coronas, who can sell out the 3Arena, were dropped from an overseas deal with Island Records, home of U2, after less than two years on the label. How did a band, who after all named their new album Ephemera, feel about such things?
‘We signed with Glassnote when we left school (who are distributed by Universal who own Island Records). We met an awful lot of record labels,’ says Adam.
‘They would come over to meet us and made all these false promises telling us that they loved the band that they would be in touch but no one took the leap. When we met Daniel Glass from Glassnote he told us he would give us complete creative control. We signed a small deal but it felt like we were being brought into a family of supportive, encouraging people.’
Faye says: ‘We keep control of the costs of everything. These days you have to know where all the money you make from the band is going.
‘That kind of stuff is awful (The Coronas being dropped) but we’ve had a lot of trust and faith put into us as a band and of course it makes you reflect on your own situation but it can’t let you get deflected in what you’re trying to do.’