Picture House? Sorry, never heard of them. It's a typical response from a public unable to associate a song with a band. Picture House lead singer, Dave Browne - a man so tall and firm-looking he would have little problem waltzing with a grandfather clock - relates a salutary story: "I was in a record shop, trying to tell a girl I was in a rock band, but she wouldn't believe me. I told her the band's name, but she claimed she had never heard of us. Then I sang a few lines from our songs that had been played on the radio for months and months. She was gobsmacked! Then - and this is the punch-line - she bought our album."
Let's call it the iconography-of-rock dilemma. The music industry thrives on many things, one of which is the selling of songs to the public. For many reasons - irrespective of whether the songs are good or not - a large number of songs don't sell. For the songs to sell, they have to be heard - which is where, for the most part, radio play comes in. If people like what they hear, the theory is that they buy it.
Conceivably, people can purchase CDs without buying into the hype, but the hype does help to pin the band's image to the song - and then sell albums. Picture House slowly but surely realised it was all very well having those radio-friendly hit singles, but if their supposed audience couldn't marry the songs with the band, they had a problem. "Things are so fickle in this business," says Browne. "We could disappear off the face of the planet next week. We've heard examples of Irish bands selling about 28,000 copies of a single in Ireland, yet fewer than 100 albums. I put it down to the song, or hit single, being bigger than the band." Picture House are not typical of Irish rock bands. They might have no game plan or mission statement, but they have always had their collective wits about them. They have worked as a covers/wedding band when money was needed, slipping in their own songs to gauge the reaction. "You'd have grannies dancing with their grandchildren to our original songs. Some bands would be appalled by that. We looked at it and thought, people from eight to 80 are into what we do. We have something here."
In their early days as a rock band, they played a gig in a major record chain store in Belfast, as a favour to the store's then marketing manager. The payment for Picture House? Boxes (and I mean boxes) of frozen pizzas. The marketing manager subsequently moved to London, to a bigger and better position within the same company. The payment for Picture House? Full frontal window product displays in the UK. "Being star-struck doesn't apply to us," reasons Browne. "We're too real for that. We've worked too hard for it. We never believe our own press. Every bad thing that happened to us turned out to be good."
Picture House is now at last in the position of having its own identity. Smartly managing to transcend the genre specifics of pop (and by extension a relatively marginal audience), the band have generated an air of unself-consciousness about what they do. Now signed to Warners in Ireland, they were previously with PolyGram Ireland. Band member Duncan Maitland, sitting in on the interview, nods his head in agreement.) Outside Ireland, the band are signed to German-run independent label, Koch. In between Irish record companies, all the band's releases came out on their own cottage-industry label.
The Warners connection has done Picture House nothing but good, with a support slot to The Corrs (also on Warners) generating almost 10,000 sales of their debut Shine Box. Was the jump from working on their own and with an independent label to being part of a major company's roster a frightening one? "It was right for us to do it," maintains Maitland. "Warners provided the glue. We needed to take that step up, anyway. We were intending to do it whether or not we signed with them."
"When we met the people from Warners," says Browne, "we already had a couple of airplay hits, and they realised - as we did - that the only thing missing was relating the name of the band with the songs, through advertising and marketing. That's what they've done. If needs be, we would have independently raised a lot of money for this record, to push it. The push is all that was missing. The songs were there, we just needed everyone to see it - everywhere."
"We were hostile to major record labels," Browne continues. "We didn't really want one. We felt we'd have had to sell all our rights in perpetuity for the whole of the world before we could talk to some people!"
The perception of Picture House as cheeky chaps writing sing-along songs might be strengthened by the cheerful hit singles Heavenly Day and Sunburst, but is actually not a true image. The new album, Karmarama, is full of seriously good pop music. Swathed in a semi-psychedelic swirl of instrumentation, the usual hummable choruses are in place, but there is also a strong thread of social issues and topics weaved throughout the lyrics. "The perception of the band having constant grinning smiles happened completely by accident," says Browne. "I would have seen it the other way, needless to say. Shine Box is not a happy-go-lucky album. The lyrics of Karmarama aren't bubbly. That said, we're also not afraid to not say anything in a song, which is another aspect about us that confuses people. Sometimes, we're not really concerned about having a social message."
The band's new single, All the Time in the World, will definitely broaden their appeal, reckons Browne, while "the perception of us as a fun band will, I hope, change by the time Karmarama's campaign is over".
According to Maitland, the best situation any band can find themselves in is having the best of both worlds: creating pop music that makes people smile as much as ponder. "One thing that we do and many other bands don't, is entertain," remarks Browne. "I don't mean in a cabaret sense. When you go to a gig, you like to feel involved, don't you? There are so many bands out there which don't do that. We made it a priority to make the audience part of our show."