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| Image compliments of GC Photographics |
Local Country Rock n Roll group The Murder
Balladeers are soon to be bringing out album number two. The group have had the
album recorded for a while now but it’s finally going through the mixing stage.
For those who got their hands on the group’s first album, ‘Ain’t No Money in a
Border Town’, the number album is due to be slightly less country and slightly
more Rock n Roll. Singer Rion McCartney explained to
me that the group formed more out of necessity than anything else.
“We formed in September 2011 where Mark Patterson was putting on a charity gig and they wanted me to just come up and sing a couple of songs. So, I had a couple of songs written and my brother Gavin, he had a couple of songs but I just sort of freaked out. I was always a guitar player in Here Come the Landed Gentry so I’d never ever done it solo before. I got him in, John in and then I got a boy Conor McCauley to play percussion so I guess it was after a week we just formed a band. It was only like a side project because we were still in Here Comes the Landed Gentry, me and John that is.”
The group’s popularity spurred
then on to continue performing and to produce music of their own. “We did a
couple of gigs, got a few pound, made an album and got more gigs, good offers,
decent gigs so that’s where it stemmed from. We then got a full time
percussionist in, Todd Gfeller so that was that, that was us on the road then.
As we went on we sort of went from being totally acoustic, banjo, acoustic
guitar, like a stripped down percussion set-up and bass. As we progressed on
and got a full-time drummer in and we’ve had a few different piano players and
fiddle players so we’ve become a more kind of rock ‘n’ roll type band rather
than acoustic. Things are going well and we have a second album getting mixed
with Conor Mason of Little Bear so hopefully we’ll have that ready for spring
time. It’s a lot different from the first album. The songs, some of them are a
bit less country than before and less folky but it’s looking all right.”
The Murder Balladeers identified
themselves as very much so a country set-up but the transition to a more Rock n
Roll sound was a natural progression for Rion and his brother Gavin due to
their influences. “People always ask you who your influences are and I always
tell them The Ramones and it’s like people will say, ‘Ye’s don’t sound like The
Ramones’. Me and our Gavin, when we’re writing songs, we’re from the sort of
punk school of writing and putting a band together in the real D.I.Y. sense. So
our influences would be more punk, not necessarily country music even though
there is a good element of the country music there. We’ve always been in
electric bands and we just tried it out and it worked really well. People in
this town, when you say you’re in a country band they automatically think of the
likes of Gareth Brooks, real naff stuff but we like stuff like Hank Williams
and Flying Burrito Brothers and blue grass. There is a better scene than the
glorified Nashville, we’re a wee bit anti-Nashville, and we’re more into a
Bakersfield, Californian country scene. It’s more acid, hippy stuff, less
country bumpkin with dungarees and sitting sucking straw and playing banjo.”
The new album was not much of a
chore for the group with both Rion and Gavin writing and composing the album
quite quickly from older and new material. “We’d a few songs that we’d sorta
had that had been kicking about for about 5 years and we just changed them
about a bit, stuff we had from Here Comes the Landed Gentry. Gavin wrote a few,
I wrote a few and we got together and blended them into proper songs, wrote a
few more bits and pieces and it came from there. Actually written verly quickly
and we have it recorded about a year but it’s just we haven’t had a lot of time
to finish it. We have it more or less finished now and hopefully it’ll be ready
around April/May direction. I want to call it ‘The B*****d Sons from Hell’ but
I don’t know, we’ve sort of been talking about ‘The 57 steps’ because it’s 57
steps up to our rehearsal room, something like that maybe, it’s corny. 9 tracks
on this album, there’s a couple of epic 6-minuters. There was just a couple of
sort of rock outs, rock out a bit at the end.”
The group has local musicians join
the line up regularly to add something extra. Rion has mentioned that the group
are on the look-out for both fiddle and piano players to add to their line-up
on a more permanent basis to achieve a more unique sound. “The core of the band
is Barry, Gavin, John and myself, Gavin would drop out of solos and let the
piano player take a few. They would split solos but he can cover everything
when it’s just the four of us doing it. It’s the same with a fiddle player, one
will take this solo, one takes that solo. The musicians we go to, to help us
out are good musicians that can adapt to everything and the songs are pretty
simple anyway. We are looking for a permanent piano play or fiddle player or
even semi-permanent. We like to do stuff like where I would play electric
guitar and just do like really, like a Paisley Underground type sound, like
Long Riders type sound, good and heavy but then we like to ply acoustically
too. We have a good 20 original songs and 15 good covers that works well both
for doing a set electric or acoustic.”
The group have a few nights of
great music planned so try and get along to one of the shows. “Sunday 3rd of
March in the Gweedore with Mama Rosin and Teknopeasant is doing support too,
that’s £7. Then Saturday 9th March in the Atlantic Bar in Portrush
and then St Patricks Day we’re play in the Courtyard at Cafe Del Mondo, that’s
a free show so we’re going to try our hand at a few Irish songs and try to
‘Irishify’ a few balladeers ones. Some of our songs are actually true songs
written about Ireland so we just give them a bit of a country twang.”
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