Listening this weekend to one of my favourite live bands from the nineties, The Fat Lady Sings. Ten years on from U2's breakthough there was a much touted 'Irish explosion', helped in part by U2 establishing Mother Records to support this. I was fortunate enough at the time to be working with some great Irish girls, one of whom copied me tapes of all sorts of stuff I'd have struggled to get otherwise. For us these were the best, and they kept coming back to where we lived.
Take the best bits from bands like The Script and You Me At Six, add a little more creativity and the most intense, passionate, charismatic vocal imaginable; and you may have some sense of it.
The story goes that singer Nick Kelly took time off from his legal studies to spend some time in New York, and while there discovered the confidence to sing his songs in a bar, getting a good response. Back home in Dublin he put a band together and relocated to London, where they toured intensively and released two albums, Twist and Johnson.
They were just starting to break through to mainstream when Nick quit the band, saying that the lives of family and friends were passing him by while he was away and on the road. He has released a couple of acclaimed solo albums since, but while the quality of his lyrics remain the same, the passion and intensity of his work with the band is missing.
Arguably, in today's climate they would have broken through with the first album and the pressures would have been less. It was so hard to get mainstream radio play then, off playlist material being pigeonholed as the prerogative of John Peel, Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq, with their evening shows. The opportunities and routes to exposure are more open now, though of course more artists are working to exploit them.
On the positive side the songs are still there to listen to and enjoy. There is a wealth of less well known material out there to play with as an 'influence' and to exploit as more obscure covers.
No comments:
Post a Comment