From a position at the helm of Irish cult band Rollerskate Skinny, Ken Griffin drifted into obscurity and the beverage service industry in New York. He tells Kevin Courtney how some Philadelphia-based fans tracked him down, how they made beautiful music together and how new band Favourite Sons is a venture rooted in reality
LATE one night, in a bar in New York, two guys are having a heated debate about Irish cult band Rollerskate Skinny. One guy reckons they were more innovative than Oxford indie dons Radiohead; the other guy disagrees. The bartender serves them another drink and listens with mild amusement as the debate becomes a full-on, nose-to-nose argument. Finally, the guys turn to a third person who has just joined them, and ask, what do you think? "I dunno," she replies, "why don't you ask the bartender - he was the singer in the band."
Ken Griffin laughs as he recalls the encounter. "I'm like, Radiohead? They probably did it a little better than us. But there have been a few moments like that."
Griffin was indeed the singer with Rollerskate Skinny, a band who never hit commercial paydirt, but whose 1996 album, Horsedrawn Wishes, is routinely listed as one of the greatest Irish albums of all time by those who claim to know such things. When Rollerskate Skinny fizzled out in 1997, ripped apart by their own studied cool, their legend took on a life of its own; meanwhile, their singer, disillusioned with the very act of making music, slipped quietly away and "disappeared into the New York night", getting a five-to-nine job as a bartender, and meeting and marrying a girl named Meredith, with whom he has a young son. Apart from fronting the short-lived Kid Silver, Griffin had been pursuing a firmly non-musical path. In blues-speak, his mojo just wasn't working anymore.
"I just didn't know what I liked about music anymore," says Griffin. "I didn't even know if I liked music. I didn't listen to music, I didn't pay attention to it. But then I started to pick up the guitar and go, how do you write a song, because I'd never approached it from that side before. I'd always started with a concept, an idea, a keyboard line, maybe a melody line, but I started to realise that what I actually loved was songwriting. So I had to learn how to do that before I could come back out.
"I realised I had sort of demonised it. I was young, and I forgot that there was a tradition there, that it was a form of artistic expression, and that the limitations to it are what make it great, but difficult to do."
You'd think a guy who had a hand in making one of the most acclaimed Irish albums of all time wouldn't need to be taught anything about songwriting, but, by Griffin's own admission, Rollerskate Skinny's abstruse, experimental approach to making records proved their downfall in the end.
"The last few Skinny demos we made, they were great Rollerskate Skinny music, but we were just phoning it in. We could layer in a guitar, do six vocals, do abstract lyrics, and make it crazy, and then I started realising, this is almost thuggish. Like we had taken it from Horsedrawn Wishes as far as it could go. It was all trickery, and actively so. It was all about how clever you could be, and we got hyper-intellectual about it, and had endless discussions about it, but ultimately everyone remembered the melodic stuff. All the other shit legitimises them listening to the tunes, but ultimately they're the bits everyone remembered."
Griffin has a new band now, Favourite Sons, made up of ex-members of Philadelphia band Aspera, and the kind of guys who might have had a heated argument or two about the merits of Rollerskate Skinny.
"We were fans of Skinny in 10th and 11th grade," explains guitarist Justin Tripp. "There's a weird pocket of people in Philadelphia that just had their minds changed by Skinny. And I don't know how or why it happened, but it really affected everyone. I was about 14, 15, 16 when it happened."
Having dumped their singer, the remaining members of Aspera moved to New York, tracked down their Irish hero to his Brooklyn lair and asked him would he like to be their singer. Instead of calling the police, as you would when stalked by four crazed fans from Philadelphia, Griffin said sure, and guess what? I just happen to have written a bunch of new songs.
"I think in Ken we saw a talent that hadn't manifested itself properly," says Tripp. "Anyone who'd seen Rollerskate Skinny knew how great they could be, but they'd never realised that potential. We just started talking and realised we shared a lot of the same ideas about music. We developed a friendship first, and it just worked musically, and it's just great because the band have been playing together for 10 years, and Ken's become part of that friendship, and there's a lot of love amongst all of us, and it's driven by Ken. And everyone is supportive of his vision and just wants him to manifest it."
"Also, I could use words like 'spiritual' around these guys and they wouldn't go, uh-oh," adds Griffin. "But we didn't have to talk about it. When I started writing the lyrics, I tried a couple of abstract and metaphorical things, and then I'd write about something that happened last week, and I realised that it was working, that it was connecting. I became really interested in the idea of actually writing about my life, instead of how I wanted my life to be. And these guys really encouraged me to go that way. I was a bit scared but they were going, come on, Ken, stop pretending that you're not crazy!
"It really did open up a whole new world for me, and I became less crazy because of it. Because I was keeping things in all the time, and exploding, and keeping things in again. And then you realise you're not insane, you're just who you are. I started music because when I saw bands on TV I went, shit, you can actually get away with being yourself, and it's fun and it's interesting."
If Griffin sounds evangelical about his new band, it shouldn't seem so strange, because Favourite Sons bring a spiritual sort of polemic to their root-and-branch rock, and the songs on their debut album, Down Beside Your Beauty, feel like they've travelled a winding road from early blues to 1950s rock'n'roll to 1990s indie, stopping off at various truckstops and gas stations along the way. It's music that celebrates the revelatory power of songwriting, and is, says Griffin, the polar opposite of Skinny's detached, pseudo-intellectual artifice.
"That's exactly what made us come together as a band," says Griffin. "It's a different time in my life, it's a different time in the world, and it seems like songwriting is actually sort of interesting again. But I don't know if anyone is mastering it. I mean, where is this generation's Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, David Bowie? Where are these guys, are they going to pop up sometime?"
"There's definitely a problem when all the best albums are being made by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan," adds Tripp, dryly.
"We've had a lot of people coming up to us at our shows, saying I'm like a crazed preacher," says Ken, who finds that he's enjoying performing on stage more than he ever did with his previous band. "We've had men crying at our shows who've never heard our songs before, coming up and saying, that song really affected my life." "And it's not a concept, which is such a relief," says Justin. "You're not just sitting there trying to craft something - you're being honest. And you're embracing the things that you love and playing the way you play and singing about the things that affect you and make you who you are, and there's no trickery, you're not hiding anything." "Rollerskate Skinny was about what you say," concludes Griffin. "But this is all unsaid. We don't have to say anything - we just know when it happens."
Down Beside Your Beauty is out now on Vice Recordings through Warner Music.
