Now we’re REALLY sucking diesel!
Soda Blonde tell Danny McElhinney there is life after Little Green Cars.. and why fans will love this year’s Night And Day festival
DWHEN OUR NAME WASN’T READ OUT FOR THE AWARD, I WAS LIKE “F***!”
ublin band Soda Blonde are one of the acts playing at the new Night And Day Festival later this year. The group’s lead singer Faye O’Rourke ‘jumped at the chance’ when asked to play at the event that will take place on Saturday, September 24 and Sunday, September 25, in the stunning grounds of Clonalis House near Castlerea in Roscommon.
Even though it is still six months away, Night And Day is well on the way to selling out. That’s really no surprise considering that not only are Soda Blonde playing but also Villagers, John Grant and, in a real coup for the organisers, The Zutons, who return to these shores after an absence of 14 years. Their hits include Valerie (later a hit for Amy Winehouse), You Will You Won’t and the double platinum selling album Who Killed… The Zutons? They have just completed work on their comeback album, which was produced by Chic legend Nile Rodgers and will be released in time for their appearance at Clonalis House.
To be honest, any one of the three named headliners could easily have sold out the 2,000 capacity venue on their own. Yes, that really is 2,000, a true boutique festival in its first year, where a chilled atmosphere is guaranteed and no stampede for the facilities. On the weekend of the autumn equinox, there will be spoken-word areas, quality cuisine and locally brewed craft beers as well as the stellar musical bill.
Faye says Soda Blonde returned to live action properly only recently, with three sell-out shows at Whelan’s in Dublin following these tortuous, stop-start past two years, and they now look forward to a summer of appearances outdoors and under canvas with Night And Day most likely signalling the end of the 2022 festival season.
‘We are actually knuckling down and making a new album at the moment, the 29-year-old singer says. ‘Festivals are a great way of roadtesting new songs and seeing the reaction from people. We are going to plough ahead and make the record ourselves. We are a welloiled machine and we’re control freaks.’
As well as Faye, Soda Blonde’s guitarist Adam O’Regan, drummer Dylan Lynch and bassist Donagh Seaver-O’Leary were in Little Green Cars. They came to a halt with Faye’s co-lead singer Stevie Appleby detouring into the visual arts and finally coming back with a solo EP last November. They initially came together after being introduced to each other as teenagers while attending various schools in south Dublin. Faye and the other members of the band spent many of their first interviews as Soda Blonde fielding questions about the Little Green Cars split. However, with the success of singles such as Swimming Through The Night and Terrible Hands and the release of an excellent debut album, Small Talk, in June of last year, which deservedly received a Choice Music Prize Album of the Year nomination as well as a Choice Song of the Year nod for the title track of the album, it is Little Green Cars which is now receding into the distance of Soda Blonde’s rear-view mirror.
‘The Choice was huge for us. It felt like it was us being accepted again back into the Irish music scene. It was great to be nominated [for Album of the Year] as well for Irish
Song of the Year. I’m not going to lie, I really wanted to win it,’ she laughs.
‘We had read somewhere that we were a good bet for it. So, that kind of screwed me. When our name wasn’t read out, I was like ‘f***!’ But For Those I Love’s album [the eventual winner of Album of the Year] gripped people so much.
‘We are a totally in-house [independent] operation so it would have been good for our morale to win it. But for us, giving the performance we did on the night when we could feel in the room that people were with us was amazing.’
Faye now fronts Soda Blonde after many years of appearing slightly overshadowed by Stevie Appleby in Little Green Cars. She says that she felt she needed to grab people’s attention with Soda Blonde from the off.
‘When we started out with Soda Blonde, I had to find something through my sexuality I think,’ she cites this as the reason for dying her hair platinum blonde – later reverting to her natural dark colour – and some revealing early publicity pictures. It was so far from what I had done with Little Green Cars. I pushed myself out to a bit of an extreme to then be able to come back and be comfortable with myself if that makes sense.
‘Now, with a bit of distance and not to be tooting my own horn, I feel like I’ve come in to my own personally. I enjoy what I do. We have as a band just an incredible way of communicating and respecting each other. I remember when we got nominated for the Choice Prize for the first Little Green Cars album, [Absolute Zero] I wasn’t really sure of the record. I knew it was good but I didn’t have the same understanding or confidence in it as when we got the nod for Soda Blonde. I believed we could win because I think it was one of the best Irish albums of last year.’
Faye says she is two things: ‘I am extremely spontaneous and the other thing is I am extremely anxious.’
This was a contributory factor, she says, in asking her boyfriend to marry her having only been together for two months. She did so, just weeks before the first pandemic lockdown on February 29, 2020 – the extra day in a leap year that tradition held was a day when it was a ‘lady’s privilege’ to do so. She is now engaged to
YOU KNOW, I GOT A REALLY HARD TIME AFTER I GOT ENGAGED TO HIM
award-winning actor, writer and composer Fionn Foley.
‘You know what, I got a really hard time after I got engaged to him,’ Faye says.
‘People didn’t like it because I did it after us only going out together for two months. People, I think, have their own insecurities about these things. You feel so sure about something but they feel they couldn’t feel so sure about someone after such a short space of time. We might break up after a year, who knows, but it’s nobody’s business. We just get on. He is a musician himself too. He writes musicals and I hate musicals. He’s working with Roddy Doyle on an adaptation of [Doyle’s children’s book] The Giggler Treatment. That will be out next year. Fionn helps me a lot with stuff. I’m like, “Can you help me work this software… my mike’s not going through this interface thing”.’
He’s great, but we keep our work quite separate from each other.’
She laughs saying: ‘I was terrified of thinking his musicals are sh*te. I was pleasantly surprised. He had a show called Tonic which was on the Fringe of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. I saw it five times. I thought it was brilliant – I was totally blown away. He is a very talented guy.’
Faye is also part of the Irish Woman In Harmony group that have released tracks such as the Cranberries’ Dreams and Only A Woman, a revised version of Eleanor McEvoy’s Only A Woman’s Heart, for domestic abuse charities. Her unique, sonorous voice was heard on The Late Late Show’s James Bond Special, where she performed a stunning version of Adele’s Skyfall. She also sang the Beatles’ A Day In The Life in December 2020 at the National Concert Hall with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra for John Lennon’s 40th anniversary concert. She dismisses though the idea of a solo career any time soon.
‘I can cover men’s songs very well – I’m not so good at covering women’s songs,’ she laughs.
‘I wouldn’t want to make a career out of doing covers. But I’ll take any opportunity to sing with an orchestra behind me. The guys in Soda Blonde are so unbelievably supportive of anything I do. They’re very proud of me. There isn’t that weird animosity or ego thing about who does what or which thing. When I talk about me and what I’m doing, they are credited and an integral part. We’ve already been chewed up and spat out already as four people through the career that we’ve had.’
‘Never believe your own hype’ is one of her maxims.
‘The music industry machine just keeps rolling,’ she says. ‘You have to just put your head down and keep making good stuff.’
■ Soda Blonde play the Night And Day Festival at Clonalis House, Roscommon, September 24-25. See nightandday.ie for details. Visit sodablonde.com for upcoming Soda Blonde releases and shows.