JOHN HOLDEN of Hoarsebox explains his band's stint on The Raw Sessions

THE RULES of The Raw Sessionsare simple. Eight acts must try to write an original song in a set time. In the first round there's a time limit of 12 hours to write, record and mix the new tune (the clock is stopped for breaks).

Hoarsebox joined the programme quite late, and only found out about the show a couple of weeks before we went into the studio. The producers explained to us at that point how the show was going to work in relation to the competition.

We didn’t have a problem with the competitive thing at all, and learning of it made no difference. For us, the competition was secondary to the opportunity to get some TV exposure.

The four of us arrived at Sun Studios in Dublin’s Temple Bar on a Sunday morning. It felt weird to be playing that early without being awake from the night before, but we knew what was needed.

Our guitar player had a riff, which the rest of the band hadn’t heard, and it was used as a starting point. Two hours later we’d got no further musically and the only lyric written down was, “Je t’aime gratin dauphinoise”. It was agreed we should start over.

Ordinarily we could just walk away from the situation until someone had another idea. We’ve written several songs in a matter of hours before, but never with an actual time restriction.

All the while the camera rolls, which was quite annoying at first. You can’t help thinking about what to say or do. Should I be smiling? Do I normally smile when I’m playing? Stop smiling; you look like an idiot. No wait, you don’t want to look too serious.

Six or seven merry hours passed before we came up with the instrumentation and a melody line for the main vocal of a “song”.

We were left with one hour to mix. I suddenly realised why the show is called The Raw Sessions. With more time we would have made changes to our parts, but that is the nature of the beast. As mixing was left – literally – to the eleventh hour, we had to make due with a pretty unrefined recording, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

• Hoarsebox appear on The Raw Sessionson RTÉ on June 2nd on RTÉ2