Girl Band: Dublin indie-rockers with revolution in their heads

Here are the young men – albeit slightly distracted young men. Girl Band singer Dara Kiely is hobbling on crutches due to torn ligaments, while guitarist Alan Duggan looks a little preoccupied as he has to get to his job once the interview ends.

Around about a year ago, the same duo talked a decent game in an interview with The Ticket about the debut album they were planning to work on. Today, they've brought Holding Hands With Jamie with them.

It’s an album which underlines just why Girl Band are the most fascinating act out of these parts at present. The thumbprints on the cover, as well as the name in the title, may be the handiwork of their engineer Jamie Hyland, but the thrilling, menacing, exciting noise inside is very much of their own making.

Many things went into making Holding Hands With Jamie such an enthralling proposition. One is the amount of live shows which the band have done in the last few years.

“We’ve done so many different shows now that we kind of know what to expect when we walk into a room,” notes Duggan. “The first time we played a festival, it was a bit mad because there was a huge gap between the stage and the crowd compared to a club show and it was hard to get used to that and the sound. But you still feed off the energy, you still get a reaction.

"Some of the tracks developed from gigging too, like Pears for Lunch changed the more often we played it live. But we've been playing Fucking Butter since 2013 and we literally finished it in the studio. 'Is it done? Is it done?' Well, it is now."

The aim of the album was to capture what was going on with the band and their lives at a particular time, says Kiely. "There was no huge group decision to go 'this is our sound, this is why six songs sound like this'. It was more about documenting what was going on at the time, which is what we've done since the very start. France 98 was the sound of us at 21."

Bipolar empire
Documenting what was going on has led Kiely to talk about the mental health issues which caused him to have a breakdown in 2013 and which made their way obliquely into the album's lyrics.

“It’s normal, the mental health thing”, he says. “Everyone knows someone. When I was growing up, my dad was bipolar and I was really ashamed of talking about it. Now, since I first talked about it, it’s like I’ve come out as being gay or something. It was very liberating because it used to be a big shame thing for me because I didn’t know how to deal with it growing up. If people come up to me now and want to talk about that, I’ve no issue with it.

“I’ve thought about it so much because every line on the whole album has some sort of meaning to do with it. There are no throwaway lyrics – though it might sound that way – and I didn’t plan to write about it, but it just happened to be what was going on. The whole meltdown thing is the best thing to happen to me because I really appreciate things now and I feel I’ve caught that moment on the record. I’m looking forward to not writing about mental illness for a while, though, maybe write a love song or something for a change.”

After the breakdown, Kiely found himself unable to write lyrics for ages. “I hated music at the time”, he remembers. “I thought I was crap and that I didn’t deserve to write music and it had all these bad connotations for me. My mam is a big Leonard Cohen fan and she used to listen to him all the time and it was really cool. It’s kind of funny how he talks about depression in his songs, if you listen in a certain way. When you see him in interviews, he can also be quite funny in a certain way with their undercurrents which are not direct jokes or direct anything. I felt really buzzed about that .

“My mam said to write something every day and, if I couldn’t write anything, to write down the first thing to come to mind and keep doing that. It was a long process. I’d no intention of using depression as a way to write lyrics, it was more a way to occupy my mind. I knew there was an album to do so I had to write. I was on medication so I was slow and all my wit went and I was very serious.

"Then I wrote Pears For Lunch and I showed Al the lyric "I look crap with my top off", which I saw as a really serious lyric, and he laughed, so I went with that."

Paranoid visions
As Kiely recovered, the band continued. Duggan notes they still had rehearsals twice a week. "That really helped", says Kiely. "It was horrible going in because I thought everyone hated me. The music was really aggressive and I was really paranoid and I thought some of it was an attack on me because they were really frustrated."

Aside from his own experiences, Kiely talks about a wide palette of influences.

“You can be influenced by anything”, he believes. “I’m influenced by comedians like Stewart Lee and their subject matter and delivery. Punk for me is gathering all your influences from all sources and saying what you don’t like and loving what do you like and being quite militant and quite fascist with your art. With us, it all gets amalgamated.”

Funny girl
"There are little aspects of humour in our music that are not very direct but they're there", adds Duggan. "Like the drumfill in Lawman or the very unnecessary but very intentional D chord at the start of The Last Riddler which I play every time."

“I don’t think we come across as very angry”, says Kiely. “Funny things can be very intense. I don’t think we’re, you know, ‘hilarious’. But we’re funny.”

Ghetto blasters: Girl Band on tour

Over the next few months, Girl Band will tour the United States and Europe.

“Mainland Europe is better”, notes Alan Duggan. “You get better fees because a lot of the venues are subsidised by their governments, there’s no withholding tax like there is in the States because we’re part of the EU, all the venues will sort you out with accommodation, the food is better and you’re treated with a lot of respect.”

The band can also see they've building an audience there. "The first time we played in France was in Perpignan and it was like the ghetto in The Wire", says Duggan.

“We played to the other band on the bill who fell asleep watching us. There were these seven year old kids milling around smoking and we were terrified our stuff was going to get robbed. There was blood on the wall, smashed glass everywhere and a van had its windows broken across the road. Really dodgy.

“The last show we played in France was at Route de Rock. We played at 12.30 at night to 3,000 people. That was a festival show rather than a club show, but it shows what has happened. It’s nothing crazy, it’s all relative, but it is ticking along.”

[ girlband.ie ]