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| Image compliments of Ronnie Carnwath |
multi-instrumentalist, explains the success they have been having with the album so far both at
home and further afield. “With the new one we’ve had local support again from Stephen but also
from Marc Riley from 6 Music picked up on one of the songs, Frackie, played it three weeks in a row.
Rodney Bingenheimer, he’s a KROQ FM, in the states, in Los Angeles. He’s the guy who when all the New York bands wanted to make it on the West Coast all went to see Rodney Bingenheimer, he’d
be like the LA equivalent of John Peel and he played 100% Dynamite a few weeks ago on his show.
It’s really good, we’re getting a lot of really good feedback now.
We did a wee gig in the Castle Bar in December with Shine May Sun and Belfast band Urban Avenue, that was pretty good gig and we sold a couple of CDs at that, it was a completely different experience obviously doing the stuff live. Recording the stuff tends to be very clinical were as doing it live your flying by the seat of your pants. We’re hoping to do a whole lot more live stuff and Stephen McCauley has mentioned bringing us into the studio in the next month or so.”
Ronnie initially took up music after the death of two of his brothers from muscular dystrophy,
one of which had played guitar. At the age of 7 or 8 Ronnie was given the opportunity to learn
an instrument at school and brought music back to the old guitar. “I still can’t read music, I do
everything by ear, I’ve always learnt things by ear. I always had a good kind of knack of picking things up, you know, if someone played me a song by the end of the song I’d be able to play it, that sort of thing. I actually found my old music teacher as well recently. I contacted my old school through our website and they told me she’d been living in Belfast working for the Education Board and they gave me her email. I got in touch with her and she’s been keeping an eye on how things have been progressing too which is nice. Almost like a bit of closure.”
Ronnie’s band days began in his late teens as a student. “I was at college, I was bored and I was
doing an HND in Graphics Product Design but I just wanted to play music and I didn’t have any
interest in playing other peoples music, I just wanted to do my own but I didn’t have any songs at
the time. We just kind a started writing together, same as it is now, other people would come to
me with pages of unedited stuff and I would have to knock it into shape. For some reasons I always
ended up writing the music for them, it wasn’t something intentional but I seemed to be the one
they come up and say: “See if you can do something with this.” I was in a band in Derry years ago
called Honey Ryder and after they fell apart I sort of lost confidence really and I didn’t want to do
any music at all.”
But his faith was restored after finding the other half of what is now Lulubelle III. “I found
Christopher who is the other guy involved in the project and he had a MAC, so he had Garage Band,
a music editing programme. We just sort of tinkered about on that to try and put some of the Honey
Ryder stuff out because we never really put anything out. We taped all our practises and taped all
our gigs but it wasn’t great sound quality as we never got into the studio. While we were working on
those songs I started writing again and it started over from that.”
The inspiration to start writing again had pushed Ronnie and Christopher to write more than
they would need for a few albums never mind just the one and they’ve been getting some great
feedback. “By the time the first CD came out there was about 40 or 50 dongs so we had to kind
of weedle it down for the first album. Same now, we’ve got about a hundred songs at the minute
but obviously we just choose the best ones at the time and see what happens. So there are two at
the minute now. I hadn’t played in a while, I think I’d played one gig in the last 20 years after the
previous band split. I did one gig in Belfast supporting Language Of Flowers and it was just a kind of
spur of the moment thing. I just got up and started playing guitar for around 15 minutes to test the
water. The reactions were generally pretty good, people coming up and saying stuff reminded them
of the likes of Graham Coxon (of Blur) , Syd Barrett (formerly of Pink Floyd) or of TV personalities
which was all the sort of thing that influenced my writing.”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, either be in a band or be a DJ, I heard John peel when I was a kid, I grew up in the 70’s so the radio was always on and my sisters always had the radio on all the time so we were always getting ELO, Abba, Wings and that kind of thing and I still love all that 70’s stuff that I grew up listening to but whenever I discovered John Peel it was like: “Oh! Guitars!”. I either wanted to become a DJ or a musician and I’m both and not getting paid for either!”
Ronnie is hoping that there will be a lot more live performances in the pipeline for Lulubelle III. For those who’d like to have a listen to some tracks of the album they can do so at Lulubelle’s Soundcloud page https://soundcloud.com/lulubelle-three and videos are available online from their Facebook Page or website www.lulubelle3.com. The new album Foyle Delta Blues is available to purchase locally.
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