Lost Gereneration Seek Success! 6/5/13

Image compliments of Gareth Johnston

Local band Lost Generation have recently reformed and are now pitching for great success in an all Ireland music competition online. The competition hosted on http://www.redbullbedroomjam.ie/ could give the group a chance to record a new album and tour Ireland. They aim to gain some support and hopefully take the lead in the competition.

Gareth, drummer and vocalist explains how they got together and that it hasn’t all been plain sailing along the way. “We originally formed in January 2012 with Susie-Blue as the singer and a different bassist who was playing recently with Rozza and the Boat Club. After a while it was going well and we played in the Playhouse and Masons and stuff but it wasn’t quite what we expected it to be after a while."

"We entered a competition called the Irish Youth Music Awards, our song, one of our original songs got Best Song, Truth for Me, a band from Magherafelt, two young boys singing went on to win the competition, which enabled us to get free recording time down in Dublin in National Ireland Recording Studios but before that happened the band split up. Recently reformed again in October and been writing and playing since then with the new members.”

Susie-Blue, who has also featured in Off the Record before used to be part of the line up but since her move to working solo, Gareth has been the main songwriter in the group. “Susan had written the lyrics a long time ago, she had a book of lots of lyrics she’d written and poems and stuff like that, that were going to use eventually but our guitarist, he just comes up with this insane riffs out of nowhere. I try and say then that we’ll develop it and we’ll work on it and get the structure and it all just comes together then, with solos here and there, stuff like that. Then we recorded into a wee recording module I had, it’s basically nothing but we could record and put stuff up online for people to listen to it, it helped.

There’s me, Gareth Johnston playing the drums and signing backing vocals and some other songs; Conor McConnellogue playing bass; Ruairi McGuigan playing lead guitar and vocals and then there’s a new member being introduced, he hasn’t played with us or recorded with us yet, his name is Mark O’Brian, he plays rhythm with a bit of lead and keys. I’ve been writing the lyrics for all our songs, the lads love lyrics as well and the people listening to the music say they’re great as well. I sort of try and bass them on experiences I’ve had and they just sort of come together. I think once you start you just can’t stop, once you get the first few lines you keep going.”

It’s not always an easy thing to try and sum up the sound or genre of a band, particularly one which has not quite finished crafting their sound but Gareth gives it a go and it’s clear some of his and the other members influences are effecting the overall sound they’re going for. “We are a rock band but at the same time we will play songs, I mean covers, to suit the people that are in the venues that were playing. For example, we’re playing some song like by The Coral, Dreaming of you, that has keys in it so Mark can play that one on the keys and just not use guitar for that song. We are trying to include some other songs as well, like Queens of the Stone Age, Make it Wit Chu, their song has keys in it and I would say they’re extremely rock.

Originally myself and the guitarist had been playing for about 5 years together, 6 years now. We would have just played Led Zeppelin, The Who, bands like that , and now more recently we’re starting to sound a bit more like Foo Fighters, maybe a little bit of Queens of the Stone Age, but it’s still all coming together. We are trying to find a kind of more original sound for ourselves.

Over the summer, after the bands had broken up, we had had a lot of plans for the band to play everywhere but that just sort of disappeared. It was left as it always was just myself and Ruairi the guitarist. We did do a few two piece gigs just for a bit of craic and it went well. We didn’t do any recording but after a while we sort of realized it wasn’t going to go anywhere, we wanted a thicker sound and more melodies. We were in school and Ruairi had come to the College with myself and Conor had been on at me for ages about starting a band but after the whole experience of the break-up the idea of another band, I didn’t know if I could be bothered with it again. We got together and started practicing and I was thinking it was sound all right, sounding good, and decided to keep practicing and try and get our music out there.”

Gareth and the rest of Lost Generation are keen to get the message across to all lovers of music locally that they are in need of great help and support to see them break into the second stage of what could be a very successful music career ahead. “At the moment we’ve been taking a break due to A-Levels which are pretty intense and we don’t have time to practice as much but Conor had just sent me a message saying ‘I’m going to enter our song in this competition, will you put it up on YouTube’ and I said: ‘right ok, I’ll do it now’. I wasn’t sure if we would even get anywhere in it. There are over 150 bands , maybe 200 bands in it throughout Ireland, some great quality musicians in it. He just sent me a text saying we’re number 7 on the list and I couldn’t believe it and went on to check. I said we’d have to do more to get ourselves up a bit more. Basically how it works is, people go on to the site , they can listen to the song that’s on there and can rate it out of five stars, like it, tweet about it and leave a comment. The amount of likes, the amount of ratings and the comments all come together to see who generating the most buzz on the website. As it stands ours is the highest rated song in the competition, it’s got 4.7 out of 5, but it’s got the least, well not the least comments but we don’t have a lot of comments mainly because it more support from friends and family and people we know. We just want to try and get more people to go on and take part and help us out.” The link is as above so try and log on, rate, leave a comment and share, the local talent needs you.