Great start for GRIM 4/4/13

Image compliments of Peter McDonald

GRIM launches his single tomorrow night in the Playhouse. Derry based singer/songwriter Laurence McDaid will be appearing at the Playhouse between 8 and 9 pm, admission is free for the event. The single ‘Little Fizz’ is just the beginning of GRIM!

Laurence explains that his involvement in music started off at an early age at home but has gone full circle as he’s gone back to piano in recent years.“ I liked piano and grew up around classical music, my mother loves classical music so, it sounds really pretentious, but there was always Mozart playing. I loved that, the idea of one instrument making all that music. The things you can do with piano are amazing so I asked to go to lessons when I was about 8 or 9 and my mother arranged for me to go. Of course as I grew up I became a teenager and I no longer wanted to go to lessons, I hated classical music because that’s what my parents liked. I got to about grade 5 and then stopped. 

I hadn’t played piano for years until I started doing my course again and my parents gave me the old piano from their house because no-one else played it. I have it out and the house now and play away. When you think about nothing else but music and you like so many different types of music it’s hard to stick to one type. I went to the BBC Introducing Music Master class there last Thursday and everybody says you should stick to one, have one genre, have one sound so as not to confuse people but I find that very difficult.

 I’ve been playing the piano a lot recently but a lot of the stuff I do on piano is instrumental and then I use the keyboard to add sounds when I’m  recording but it’s just bulking out sound, I’m not actually playing, I’m layering. I haven’t recorded any of that instrumental stuff yet.”

Although he used to be involved in many different bands flying solo has allowed him to create music his way from a single idea to recording and mixing. “It is just me more or less, I’ve been playing at bands for years, been at it now about 10 years. I did a course with Marty Magill in the Nerve Centre, the performance and technology course. It’s brilliant, anyone who wants to get a start in music should go see him, he’s a great teacher. The course taught me to make music on the laptop using the software. I’ve been refined my sound for the last two years because it’s all trial and error, trying to do it all myself. I record everything in a shed which is about 4 feet across and 6 feet long, a tiny wee shed. I managed to get a pretty good mic and recorded by myself so it’s all mixing and mastering which is a pain. You have to keep at it and it does your head in but eventually I got it. The GRIM part came about because I wanted a name, not do it under my name but have a character. I love Tom Waits and he always talks about how the Tom Waits on stage is a character that puts on a show. It was originally supposed to be like ‘The Brothers Grimm’ with two ‘m’s but one of my first gigs at the Jam House, it was on the poster spelt wrong but looked good all in capitals, it stood out so I kept it like that. It was a mistake that worked. I think all music works like that anyway, all the best songs come about by mistake anyway, one that works. Half the stuff that I do when I record it and put it up on SoundCloud it’s all trial and error and some of it is mistakes, I just muck about with sounds and samples. Whatever sound catches my ear I develop and eventually it turns into a song, that’s how I do it. It starts with an idea. When I was in the band years ago we used to joke because when a song started with one idea, most of the time the song would evolve and the idea got left behind.”

Even though Laurence prefers to play bass on stage there have been some piano performances that have helped him stand out from the crowd. “I’ve been down at the Open Mic Night in Bennigans a couple of times and played the piano in there and it went down a storm. The reason I played the piano in there thinking about it now was because everyone else was playing the guitar and singing. I thought, ‘I’m not going to stand out here playing guitar and singing’ and I haven’t played the piano in ages but sat down and played a few songs and it went down really well. I play guitar but I’m not very good at the guitar. I went from piano Bass, started that when I was 14 because the band I was in needed a bass player. My parents got me a bass and I’m a lot more comfortable playing that than guitar. If you ask a lot of musicians, especially guitarists they’ll tell you it’s a lot easier to go from guitar to bass than bass to guitar because the frets are so far apart and you needs to press the strings so much harder. I’m very heavy handed with guitar, I miss frets and pulling strings just because I’m pressing so hard. I can play and will play it because going acoustic is quick and easy but bass and piano is what I’m most comfortable with.”

It’s not the stage image we’d all be used to but maybe it’s time for something a little different, with a little previous preparation involved. “I have my laptop with my backing tracks and I’ll either play bass or guitar depending on what the song calls for. At the moment I’m trying to whittle it down so I’m mostly playing bass, plus it’s an image thing, this is another thing I learned. Everything’s about image, you have to be a brand essentially. You’re not just creating music and people are listening to it, you’re selling yourself and it’s a lot about that. I look stupid with guitar anyway because I’m quite a big guy.”

The music is Electronica meets Rock meets Jazz with Indie undertones. It sounds different, he looks different and the performance is something different too! Check him out online at www.grimderry.bandcamp.com .