DISCOMFORT ZONE:Business Editor JOHN MCMANUSinterviews electropop band Dark Room Notes, without quite knowing what electropop is
IT WOULD be fair to say that I am not musical. My career as a performer started and finished one sweltering afternoon in the early 1970s with an audition for the opera at St Mary’s School in Nairobi, Kenya, which lasted half-way through the first scale.
It was inevitable, then, that my meeting with Dublin band Dark Room Notes would not throw up any fresh musical insights. It would, however, offer me the chance to indulge my curiosity as to how exactly you get to live the rock’n’roll lifestyle.
We meet in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel in Dublin – somewhere my career in business journalism has never taken me.
I feel obliged to talk about the music before we get to the good stuff. My opening gambit is that I liked the CD their record company sent me, and that this must be a source of concern for them, given that I am in my mid-40s and a father of three.
“You are our key demographic. You are the sort of person who buys CDs,” comes the (one suspects) deeply ironic response from drummer Darragh Shanahan.
It’s clear my subjects have been warned that this is not a standard interview, and Shanahan seems keen to get across to The Irish Times Business Editor that somewhere in the Dark Room Notes mix is a well-thought-out business plan. Arran Murphy, who plays “synths” and does “vocals”, seems happy to take a back seat, while Shanahan establishes his and the band’s business credentials.
And Shanahan – who, like the rest of the band, is in his late 20s or early 30s – seems to know what he is about. He got involved around three years ago having founded a record company, Gonzo Records, with Martin Bradley, who is now the band’s manager.
“The band had been touring and working for a few years. They were respected in a cult way,” he explains. “We had a plan to flex our musical powers in business. We had been around a little bit.” It is all starting to sound a bit Simon Cowellesque; but it shouldn’t.
“It was more about being creative and paying the bills at the same time. It’s not like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s not that easy in this city to go out and find a band you want to work with,” he clarifies. The way Shanahan sees it, and Murphy nods in agreement, the creative process expanded to include the business side of it.
“The whole process is actually six creative individuals trying to do something together. The musical side of it is part of it,” offers Murphy by way of amplification – which brings us neatly back to the music. Before I left the office to meet the band, a colleague more knowledgable than I in such things told me Dark Room Notes’s music harked back to the electropop of the 1980s.
This sounded like a fruitful line of inquiry, but one to be handled delicately. No one, particularly someone sporting a Stranglers T-shirt such as Shanahan’s, wants to be told that they sound like Duran Duran.
“It actually has a whole lot more in it,” counters Murphy. There is, I am told, a considerable difference between making a deliberate decision to sound like a band from an earlier time (ie retro) and the concept of influences. “Everything you like is an influence,” she explains.
The music bit is not going well. My ignorance has been cruelly exposed, and the chance of giving offence is escalating. In any case, I haven’t got to the bit that interests me most: why do they do what they do?
The temptation is to give in to my prejudices and crassly ask when they think they will have to get real jobs. But given that both have already explained that they have other jobs, the more sensible approach is ask what plan B is.
The answer is disarmingly frank. “This is the plan B,” responds Shanahan. What was plan A? “To win the lottery like everyone else,” he says with a smile, before going on: “Plan B is just to work for the rest of your life and if you are lucky you will work in something you like to work in . . . Plan A would have been the 1970s . . . when you got a big advance to be a doped-out rockstar.”
