Battle's wars

You could say that Wilt's frontman, Cormac Battle, is a tad cynical about the music industry. "People think that the hardest part of being in a band is landing a record deal - which is nonsense," snorts the bespectacled guitarist/ vocalist. "The hard bit is getting people to listen to your music. Ninety per cent of being in a band is about sitting by a phone waiting for something to happen."

Battle should know. Kerbdog, his previous group, were tipped to break the US with a lavishly produced second album, On the The Turn, a minor, quasi-metal masterpiece recorded in Los Angeles on a budget usually reserved for modest Hollywood productions. But it never happened for the Kilkenny three-piece: MTV stayed away, white college America shrugged its shoulders, the bass player quit to study chemical engineering. Ouch.

Battle denies that Kerbdog's messy demise embittered him, but the experience may explain his inclination to talk down the critical brouhaha which greeted Wilt's debut album, Bastadino, this summer. It's a sugar-rush of gloopy guitars and shouty choruses, reminiscent of 1980s US powerpop standard-bearers, Husker Du, at their most accessible.

"I became really fed up with music after Kerbdog fell apart. I just didn't want anything to do with it. We'd done the touring thing, we'd recorded in LA, we'd made expensive videos. Then our bass player went back to college - and I followed soon after. There were times then when I never wanted to pick up a guitar again."

Wilt surfaced as an extra-curricular diversion for Battle and Kerbdog drummer, Darragh Butler, augmented by new bass player, Mick O'Brien. Without quite intending to, they recorded an album's worth of material and found themselves signed to Mushroom Records - the left-of-centre imprint owned, quixotically, by Rupert Murdoch, and best known as home to everyone's favourite purveyors of dance-rock to the Ikea set, Garbage. Battle was sceptical about the deal. He didn't relish the baggage that comes with putting out records: the interviews, the gigs in dingy pub back-rooms, the dashed expectations. He'd been hurt before.

"We were just kids when Kerbdog got signed. We were extremely naive. We started off when we were 18 and what people do at that age is pretty bad. As the band went on we felt that even if we released the Sgt Pepper of our age, nobody would have noticed. So Wilt was more a manifestation of our desire to play music rather than to become full-time musicians again. So, yes, I was initially very cautious about the whole thing. I suppose I still am."

For all his grumblings, Battle has - belatedly - given himself to the cause. An intensive four-week spring tour of Britain paid off when new single, Radio Disco - a bold, bluff, nugget of guitar heroics - secured a Radio One play listing, selling more copies in its first day of release than its predecessor, It's All Over Now, shifted in an entire month. With London's premier style magazines slobbering all over Wilt, and the British record-buying public displaying a fresh appetite for US-tinged rock - witness the success of cliche-purveyers such as Offspring, Filter, Slipknot et al - success may be in the offing.

At home, Wilt have elicited ecstatic reactions from audiences. A January support slot with the heavily-hyped Northern Ireland dance/rock crossovers, Snowpatrol, saw the group blow the headliners off stage, and the same happened when they played with workaday Scottish indie rockers, Idlewild, at Whelan's. Heavy rotation on pirate stations such as Dublin's Phantom FM - where Battle has been known to guest as a DJ - has earned the group a large domestic fan base. There is a real buzz about the band - one not entirely dissimilar to that which surrounded Kerbdog circa On the Turn.

While he acknowledges that Wilt may be set for a fall every bit as inglorious as Kerbdog's, Battle insists that, this time round, he won't be fazed by failure. "We made Bastadino for about 50 pence in Dublin and I'd stand by it more than anything else I've done before. It cost a ridiculously small amount of money to do. We have a different attitude to music from when we were young kids, as you can probably hear."

Wilt play at the Witnness More stage on Sunday at 3.05 p.m. at the Witnness Festival at Fairyhouse Racecourse. Tickets for the festival are available from the Witnness hotline: 1890 30 94866377 and on www.witnness.com.