Music can sum up a whole period, the feel of what life was like at a particular time. The sound of such bands as A House, Aslan, The Stunning or Something Happens will always remind us of Ireland as it moved from the late 1980s into the 1990s. Many of these bands have since disappeared, some have had revivals, others have kept thrashing on in pathetic obscurity. Only The Stunning managed to bow out gracefully at a high point in its popularity. Now brothers Joe and Steve Wall - principal members of the group - are back and reinvented as The Walls.
It has been quite a journey from the break up of The Stunning in 1994 to The Walls's first album, Hi-Lo, due out next week. It has been a five-year roundabout trip, starting in a warehouse studio in Galway city, then on to a major recording deal with Colombia Records in London. A disenchantment with the corporate music industry followed, and then it was the back-to-basics approach of recording a self-financed album in a Dublin basement. As Steve Wall explains, despite having the backing of a huge recording label, in the end the band decided to keep its self-respect and go it alone.
"Colombia signed us on the strength of our demo. They liked what we were doing - a mixture of loops, live guitars, and that sloppy kind of garage feel, with a groove to it. But then they tried to polish it all up. I mean - we did a session with George Michael's producer, which didn't work. They even wanted us to do a session with the Pet Shop Boys' producer - they completely lost the plot. They tried to impose a name. We were called The Ghosts for a year-and-a-half while we were in London. It was very apt really, because we were invisible for the next two years. In the end, we decided it wouldn't happen and we decided to leave."
The resulting album, Hi-Lo, is that rare thing in the world of pop music - a recording where the artists have had complete creative control of the end product. This is a record with a freshness of sound, produced by the band members themselves and released on a record label set up, managed and owned by the group. That it has taken five years to get the record released means that the sound gestated slowly. Joe Wall explains: "This is a band that has grown out of a period of recording and experimenting, unlike The Stunning, which was very much a live band."
The sound certainly has moved on from the solely guitar-based Stunning material. Club and dance music is an audible influence on Hi-Lo. There is sampling, strings and brass, a heavy use of loops, but still, as Joe explains, the well-crafted song remains centrally important to the sound.
"There's a certain amount of a hip-hop influence on the record, in terms of beats and stuff. It's not a guitar-laden album but at the same time, a lot of the songs would have started out being written on an acoustic guitar. The songs are less precious, looser. We're confident enough now to have less regard for precious lyrics. But there is a diversity about the album. There's sampling and heavy loops, but just as important is to have good songs." Well-crafted pop songs are what The Stunning were famous for. Numbers such as Brewing Up a Storm and Tightrope Walker made the group one of the biggest bands in the country in the early 1990s - a fact which seems to have gone unmarked by the makers of from a whisper to a scream, as they excluded the band from their history of Irish rock. The danger is that with such a high profile for their last group, critics and the public might be loath to let them off the hook of reputation, denying them the space necessary for reinvention. It's a problem that Steve Wall is aware of.
"A lot of people asked us if we were going to do Stunning songs, but we couldn't. We had to start afresh. Go out and play songs that nobody knew. So it was very hard to get gigs and we did gigs for very little money. We had to put up with people shouting out for Brewing Up a Storm and Half Past Two, but we just wouldn't play them because we wanted to establish ourselves as a new band."
While Joe and Steve Wall remain proud of The Stunning and its achievements, it seems clear that The Walls is defined in opposition to the former group. The reason The Stunning broke up was because of their failure to secure international distribution deals, to break that important worldwide market. With The Walls, Joe and Steve are determined to achieve what the former group failed to do and, with their own record label, to help other Irish groups along the way. And this, as Steve points out, is all still without the help of a manager.
"We want to do what The Stunning didn't achieve. Get our records released in other territories, in the US. That's why we need a manager with a bit of clout. Also we'd like to develop Earshot Records to set up avenues for distribution in other territories, for other Irish bands we think are good. We want to develop the label as a company that isn't going to mess you around. We've been there."
They have been there, and there for a long time. Their brush with the corporate record industry has meant they've been out of circulation for a while, and the scene that they're coming back into is one that is quite different from the hey-day of The Stunning. The proliferation of dance and club music has completely changed the music industry. As Steve Wall is well aware, it's no longer a world of guitar-bearing songsters with sincere lyrics.
"Bands in Ireland have kind of gone underground. In the last few years, they've had to rethink their approach to things. Albums are being recorded in bedrooms and basements. It's a good thing that bands have had to re-assess the situation. They can't just be four blokes with guitars, a bass and drums any more, it's just not enough now."
The Walls's debut album, Hi-Lo, is released on May 19th. Website: www.thewalls.ie