Mark Cullen tells Brian Boyd that Pony Club's new album is a kick in the teeth for an industry that tried to chew him up and spit him out.
Dubliner Mark Cullen is sitting in a conference room beside the woman who writes most of the singles charts - Cathy Dennis. She wrote Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head - the one that goes "La, la, la . . .". Also present is Andy McCloskey, ex-Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who "does" - or rather "did" - for Atomic Kitten and various other poppets. Alongside him are all the other faceless hit-factory types who produce the tunes and words that dominate the airwaves and pop television programmes. Cullen has just been dropped by his major label - in the process owing them the best part of a million pounds. His publishing company, eager to avoid a similar loss on his songwriting talent, have sent him to this "hit workshop" so he might listen and learn and then, very quickly, write a Number 1 for Kylie, or Britney, or Christina - it doesn't really matter who.
"I could safely say that up until that meeting, I had no illusions about the music industry at all, I knew very well it wasn't a romantic business. But what I saw and heard that day . . . I mean, they were playing the top-selling singles that week and the songwriters were sitting there, quite blatantly going: 'I like that melody line - I'm going to use that' and talking openly about 'taking this bit' and 'taking that bit' to make a new song. It actually made me sick. When it's put straight into your face like that, how chart music is made, it is sickening. I just sat there thinking about betrayal - the betrayal of my own songs, the betrayal of all those great artists I loved through the years and the betrayal of all the reasons why I got into music in the first place."
He left the meeting sometime after the words "love song for Sophie Ellis Bextor" were directed at him. Soon afterwards, he fetched up on Setanta Records, a small London-Irish indie. One of the first records he wrote for Setanta began with the lines: "Unfortunate whores, corner-stores/minor parts for major stars/the bleeding hearts and retards/battered wives, paedophiles/the unknown spouse in her council house . . . the last thing that I'll sing about is love". Everything was OK again.
It's been a mighty long way down rock 'n' roll for the man from Finglas - and he's still only 29. He first surfaced with Dublin band Bawl, who were given the fast-track A&R treatment. It's the mid-1990s, the days of the Britpop dividend. "I found myself in London one day, I had just been given a cheque by A&M Records (who signed Bawl) for £45,000 and later that day, I was given a cheque for £40,000 by my publishing company. I went home that night to the flat that the record company were paying for - the rent was £2,000 a month. I just thought: Wow."
Bawl were installed in Abbey Road to make their album; later they were moved to the prestigious Rockfield Studio in Wales and there was also a stint recording in Mike Hedges's studio in France. Big-name, big-fee producers came and went. To drum up interest, Bawl were put on tour as part of a BBC Roadshow package that also included Travis and The Stereophonics.
When the Bawl album emerged, it didn't sell. At all. There was a call from the label - "Sorry, we've just gone into liquidation." Bawl didn't really care, they had a two-album deal, and the label had to honour it. Because the first album hadn't done the business, the band were strongly advised to change their name. Start again, pretend nothing had happened. They moved to Mercury (same parent company as A&M) and re-named themselves Fixed Stars. There was another round of advances, another round of producers and studios. When the second album - the first as Fixed Stars - was finished, the label refused to release it.
"We got dropped, big surprise," says Cullen. "The money spent on us was ridiculous, the best part of a million. We were actually told that even if the second album was released and sold in Shania Twain-type amounts, we still wouldn't have broken even - ha, ha, ha. Then, just as we were being dropped, we looked back at our contract with the label. We found a clause which said that if the label refused to release any of the two albums under the deal, then they had to pay a 'penalty fee' of £50,000. So there we were being dropped, being told we owe a million pounds and we were going, 'where's our £50,000?'. So we walked away with £50,000 in our pockets . . .
"A few years later, we're back in Dublin playing this gig in The Sugar Club. Part of the deal on the night was that you had to play a cover version at the end of your set. I decided to do [Soft cell's\]Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, to rescue it back from the acoustic thing David Gray did to it. I really ham it up, and when the lights come on at the end, I realise Morrissey is sitting in the front row, laughing his head off. He asked for an advance copy of this new album and a while later, we found ourselves opening for him at the Royal Albert Hall. A lot of the Mercury people came down to see him and they just couldn't believe it when they saw me up there opening for him. They were going: 'You're the guy who owes us a million quid'. They said later that they thought I would have given up music because of what happened -I was just: 'Give it up? Because of you lot?' "
If you took a laboratory container, threw in the DNA of Cathal Coughlan, Dave Couse, bits of Jarvis Cocker and Mike Leigh and plenty of northside Dublin and gave it a good shake, out would tumble Mark Cullen. A gifted lyricist and tunesmith, he's of indie lineage, but knows his way around pop, glam stomp and Tamla Motown.
With the band now called Pony Club, the first Setanta album, Home Truths, of three years ago, was a lyrically scabrous but musically refined affair. His ambition has always been "to write lyrics like Morrissey and melodies like Brian Wilson".
"I've always found it easier to write about battered wives than love," he says.
If, at this stage, you're wondering why you've never heard anything by Mark Cullen, it's because he's got 95 per cent of the way in the music industry but never really got over the final hurdle. If you have a Lightening Seeds album, you've heard his songs because he writes for them and Ash have covered one of his songs, but, like other gifted Irish songwriters Cathal Coughlan and Dave Couse, he's never fully impacted on the mainstream. That may soon change.
The new Pony Club album, Family Business, although recorded under trying circumstances, is a major hit-in-waiting. Think Pulp hitting pay dirt with Common People after 12 years on the margins. "It was really tough to make. I'd been through two major record deals, had a huge council tax arrears bill to pay in London, so decided to come back home to avoid that. I had just got married, but had to move back into my old bedroom in my parents' house in Finglas with my wife. And my wife and my mother didn't get on. All the time, I'm trying to make this album."
Already the recipient of a glowing Q magazine four-star reviw, things are on the up for Mark Cullen and Pony Club. "Q want to do a feature on us and so do Uncut - they're putting one of our songs on their next CD. The producer of Later with Jools Holland has been in touch and the people who do Queer As Folk want to use one of the songs as the regular soundtrack to the new series. On the back of the Morrissey tour, we're getting renewed press interest. The only thing missing really is radio play. Our radio plugger guy keeps ringing me up and saying 'you're not making my job any easier by singing about all these coarse things'. Then he sends me over the Jay-Z album and says 'listen to this, it's great'. I'm thinking: Jay-Z is singing about ho's, bitches, oral sex and shooting people in the face and you're telling me my songs are too coarse for the radio . . ."
Pony Club's Family Business is on Setanta label. The band play in Tower Records, Wicklow Street, Dublin, next Friday at 6 p.m. with a full Irish tour in April