‘This move to a major label could make us... or destroy us!’
Ireland has been quite spoiled by quality musical trios down through the years. Ash, Two Door Cinema Club, The Frank And Walters, JJ72 and Therapy? were very successful here and all of them cracked the British top ten too. Let’s not forget that Rory Gallagher’s Taste and even Thin Lizzy’s first success came in a three-piece set up. With due respect to another excellent Irish trio, Bitch Falcon, the next one that is set to make a huge impression will surely be Fangclub.
They hail from the north Dublin town of Rush but have little in common with the Canadian band of that name apart from the number of members.
Fangclub owe more of a sonic debt to Therapy? Pixies and Weezer. Although tracks such as Bullet Head and especially Dreamcatcher (the best Irish song of last year in my opinion) made people take notice in the latter part of 2016, Fangclub have been paying their dues for a number of years now.
‘Kevin and I have been playing together since we met at school in St Joseph’s in Rush,’ singer/guitarist Steven King says.
‘Dara (Coleman, drummer) is 25, Kevin (Keane, bassist) is 29 and I’m 27 so we’re not wet behind the ears.
‘We used to skip school with our first drummer and go into Eamonn Doran’s (the much-missed Dublin venue) and hide from about 4 o’clock and then come out on stage and play on the gear of whatever band was set up until one of the bouncers would cop what we were at and kick us out. Other times we would blag our way onto the opening slot and the other bands would just let us play because we were just these three young fellas. It was a good way to learn everything really quickly. A band called The Hitchcock Blondes were really cool to us; they gave us a lot of gigs. I remember I was just overwhelmed by the fact that we were playing in a real venue, not just some pub or bar.’
At that time, influenced by American punk bands such as The Offspring and also by the genre’s much-vaunted DIY ethic, Fangclub wrote songs at a frantic pace and took to the road in traditional rock’n’roll style.
‘We did a DIY tour sleeping in the van, playing all over Ireland,’ he says.
‘That got us enough money to record 25 songs. We weren’t thinking as an album. It was that DIY thing you do. We figured that whatever we were going to achieve was going to come from doing it all ourselves.’
But fate and good fortune took a hand and the band swapped indie-dom for a major record deal.
‘Radio Nova played one of our songs and one of the guys in Universal happened to be listening and heard us,’ Steven says. ‘He wrote down our name when he heard us on another station later. He checked us out at one of our gigs and within two weeks we were in their offices signing up.’
Steven professes to be ‘obsessed’ with making music and what is coming to fruition for Fangclub has been his dream since he was 11. But though Dreamcatcher is an anthemic banger, lyrically it touches on some of Steven’s fears of what happens next.
‘We’ve had an incredible response to Dreamcatcher. It’s a bit of a collage of a song, one of its themes is just about me feeling pressurised through one thing and another,’ he says.
‘It’s like after all these years of hoping things will happen for us, the s**t got real. Perhaps I was thinking being a band on a major label is going to make us – but it could destroy us as well.
‘I have a bit of a habit of walking away from things when they get too serious. I used to be a decent footballer. I played for Shelbourne Youths. Then they started to bring us over to Britain to play these trial matches so scouts could size us up; one of the lads went on to play for West Ham. But then it just seemed like something I was doing for fun was turning into a career so I just stopped playing. ‘But music is different. It’s all I want to do.’
Fangclub play Whelan’s, Dublin, on Saturday, February 4. Their Coma Happy EP ( featuring Dreamcatcher) is on the Virgin EMI label (through Universal)
‘I have a bit of a habit of walking away from things when they get too serious’