Julian Gough's 'high self-esteem' may have cost Toasted Heretic fans, but the Galway band was always true to itself, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
What are we going to do about Julian Gough? The Galway-based writer, singer and songwriter seems to have never experienced low self-esteem, and at various points in his life has surely only blithely realised how irritating his persona can be to those who think that smart-arse pop star/writer ingenues should be seen and not heard.
In the late 1980s/early 1990s heyday of Toasted Heretic (the Galway-based band whose first two cassette-only releases, Songs for Swinging Celibates and Charm & Arrogance, have recently been reissued on CD for the first time), lead singer Gough was thought of as the west Brit antithesis of the likes of Dublin-based Aslan, Something Happens!, A House, Into Paradise et al. Witty and clever he might have been (and, indeed, still is), but back then Gough was never going to align himself with the equal parts rough and smooth, plain-talking laddish element. If a straight Noel Coward could have been transported from Belgravia and set down in Salthill with a gentle thud and a canny pop music sensibility, then it's odds on he would have mutated into Julian Gough.
"I wasn't helpful to Toasted Heretic," says Julian. "I needed an enormous amount of arrogance just to get up in the morning. I signed on the dole for a decade, and I was doing creative work that I knew was really good. You need an immense level of arrogance when nobody agrees with you, in order to keep going. Of course, that puts a lot of people off, and I can understand that.
"I don't blame anyone for disregarding us because I happened to shout too loudly on our behalf, but no one else was shouting for us. But I believed in what we did, and I couldn't understand why people couldn't see that there was something to us. We should have been cherished and helped, rather than ignored or sneered at, or put down as 'quirky band with an arrogant singer'. So I certainly didn't help the band, but the virtues I had meant that we recorded albums when everyone else just listened to them. But, yes, if you could suffer from high self-esteem, then I certainly suffered."
The Galway band faded into Irish rock memory in the mid-1990s. After the two cassette-only releases, two further albums (Another Day, Another Riot, and Mindless Optimism) were recorded and released - all under the financial eye of the dole office. They were, claims Gough, big in France; they once headlined a gig in Toulouse in front of 8,000 people.
"It's hard to go back from that to signing on the dole, and trying to make a fifth album, still eating baked beans. We didn't break up, but we ended up doing odd things."
Indeed they did. Bass player and band photographer Aengus McMahon went on to become an award-winning photographer; drummer Neil Farrell forged a career in writing software, selling it, and making moderate amounts of money; lead guitarist Declan Collins couldn't bear to leave his instrument behind, and so still plays and teaches; rhythm guitarist Breffni O'Rourke now lectures in applied linguistics in Trinity College Dublin.
As for Gough - well, he fecked around a bit writing movie reviews for NME, co-writing Peig: the Musical! (with Galway-based Flying Pig Comedy Troupe), and contributing to Galway "what's on" magazine, The List. Then he confounded everyone by writing a book that pulled in enough advance money from publishing houses in the UK (Harper Collins) and the US (Random House) to enable him to live on something other than baked beans for a few years. "In Westlife terms, it wasn't a substantial sum of money, but in living-on-the dole terms, it was," he says.
The book, Juno and Juliet, picked up positive reviews, and was translated into Japanese, Swedish and German. The past several years have seen Gough beaver away on his second novel, which he has recently completed, and which is with several publishers, awaiting appraisal.
The success of Juno and Juliet validated his sense of self-belief. At last, he mugs, here was objective evidence that he was doing something that people liked. In the down-time between finishing the book and changing literary agencies, Gough cast his glance towards the mottled legacy of Toasted Heretic, and in particular the first two cassette albums.
"They never received radio play, they didn't have proper distribution, and because we were broke we couldn't take out any advertising," he says.
Gough is clearly proud of the recordings, but is realistic enough to temper his enthusiasm with perspective. He says he and the other band members owed it to the songs and their youthful selves to once again give the songs a chance to breathe, rather than have the cassettes fall apart. The results are patchy, if almost always engaging; for every slight and trite track there is a counterpart that is smart, concise, strong. Although viewed as lightweight by some at the time, with the re-issues Gough and the other members of Toasted Heretic take issue with critical evaluations.
Does Gough adhere to the idea that, occasionally, the memories are greater than the songs, the movies, the books, the art?
"Sometimes it's true; what is also true is that sometimes the things you dismissed as lightweight or 'quirky' have a lot more in them than you thought. With Toasted Heretic music, there's a little bit of both. Ultimately, it's for people to decide, and that's why we brought the records out again. It's for people, having taken over 10 years off from us, to spend some time thinking about us again."
Now in his late 30s, married (to Salthill-born visual artist Anne-Marie Fives), and a father to Sophie, it seems that a certain level of maturity has descended upon Gough's once obstreperous shoulders. Yet it's likely that one of Irish rock's most wilful Wildean contrarians ("if rock stars drank lots of alcohol and took loads of drugs, then I wouldn't - I'd drink milk and eat nuts") isn't going to look conformity squarely in the face just yet.
"In many ways I'm stupid to live the way I do," he says, towards the close of our chat. Why do you, then?
"I love being free to do exactly what I want. I don't like feeling employed. I won't do work I don't want to do."
But you're a father, aren't you? Don't fathers do as much as they can to provide for their family? "I'm very happy being responsible for my kid. I'd do anything for her and my family, my wife. We're a gang, and we look after each other."
So how much would you compromise to look after them? "I won't compromise my work. At all."
Are you sure? "I'll find out; I haven't so far. I don't want anyone telling me what to do, which has a downside, because if Toasted Heretic had been much more prepared to do what we had been told or advised to do, then it's possible we'd have made some money."
That kind of youthful exuberance is, of course, far more appealing than all the strategy, calculation, and planning in the world. Gough thinks so, too.
"Looking back, I'm very proud of how idealistic we managed to stay," he says. "I love what we did; we didn't imitate what was fashionable at the time, which was probably some bad sub-U2 band getting money thrown at them."
We leave Gough in anecdotal form. "We sent the first tape, Songs for Swinging Celibates, to [ one-time U2-owned] Mother Records, with a letter asking for £500 so that we could bring the album out on vinyl. We told them we didn't want a record deal, just a helping hand - I mean, U2 set the label up to help Irish bands, didn't they? We received a letter back saying that we were too original and that they didn't know what to do with us. We put 'Too Original' on posters after that."
Now in New Nostalgia Flavour is out now. Toasted Heretic play Dolan's, Limerick, tonight; Róisín Dubh, Galway (Oct 14 and 15); and Half Moon, Cork (Oct 21)