Gary Emerges from the ‘Wreckage’! 25/3/13

Image compliments of Paul Brown

Gary Elliot is a promising young singer/songwriter on the cusp of completing and launching his first
EP. Originally from Strabane, Gary is currently studying music production in Derry and although he’s
only 20, he has been involved in the local music scene for 6 years! The EP ‘Oceans’ is to be launched
at the end of April with a possible tour coming shortly afterwards.

Gary tells the story of how he first picked up a guitar. “My brother was a drummer and my sister was a singer. There were no guitar players in the house so I always wanted to learn to play acoustic or something. I picked up the acoustic when I was about 8 or 9 when I got it for Christmas. I always just messed about with it in my room, I was never too into it until I was 10 or 11 when I got guitar lessons. From there I was self taught and I think when I got more into rock music was when I wanted to learn to play bass, that was pretty much easier to learn after playing the guitar.”

Gigging days started very early for Gary in a rock band he formed while still at school. “When I was
14 I started a local band, ‘Sunday Wreckage’, and toured around Northern Ireland and the Irish
scene. From there I was just a bass player, knew a wee bit of backing vocals and got introduced into
mixing and software and stuff. I kind of developed when I was 17 or 18, a solo career. Nothing really
serious like writing just covers and this last two years I’ve been writing material and recording it now
with Peter Doherty from Karma45. They were all 3 or 4 years older than me so they were all around
17. I was still studying at highschool and remember playing at Sandinos and they had to almost
sneak me in. I was around 15 or 16 but they knew what age I was so no drinking involved. It was all
fun and games and a good learning experience. I picked up the ropes there and how the industry
works from that.”

His transition from Bass guitar back to acoustic has been a smooth one. Gary wanted to be able
to put more into music, including writing and producing his own songs. “I didn’t write any of the
stuff normally and didn’t have any input, it was just all, “Here’s the song, can you play it on bass?”,
because they were older than me. I didn’t write anything ‘til I was about 16 or 17 and from there on
I just really enjoyed it. I had written my first three songs inside a weekend at Christmas and thought,
“this is really fun”. Then I got involved in writing more. This year I really wanted to write a lot more
and see what I could do with it and it’s kind of grown into something now.”

In a way, Gary’s move from the band to pursue a solo career gave him the determination to create
his first EP, an ambition he didn’t get to fulfil in the band. “The aim was always going to be to have
an EP because as part of the band we never got ours finished so the aim was always to do and finish
something but on my own this time, just go for it. It’s turned out well, there’s a great vibe from it
so far, just playing stuff. I’d have a good few songs but I wanted to take a different genre, and give
it a different mixed feel. They started off as really deep and soft but then turned to more rock, well
acoustic rock and then with Pete on guitar and my sister doing harmonies, I don’t really know how
to describe it, kind of like Frank Turner maybe. There’s a last song I’m doing which is just dance, like
an off-beat acoustic tune, so that one’s different from the other stuff. I’m working on a music video
too and a tour hopefully after that. We’re in the final mixes of the last song which is all recorded it’s
just to be mixed and mastered but I’m hoping it’ll be no later than the end of April that it should be
done. There’s 3 tracks and the looks of a possible 4th, like a B-side.”

Although song writing came quite naturally to Gary, one song in particular made him take his time
and work a little harder than the rest. “One song took the guts of 2/3 months called ‘Meaning of
Life’ that took the longest. Being such a deep subject I didn’t know where to start with it. The other
songs where kind of built up over time, I would have just recorded stuff on my phone that had come
into my head, from there I would’ve worked around it. They were basically just two-day projects
but ‘Meaning of Life’ was 2/3 months, writing and pulling my hair out getting it sussed, but I got
there in the end.”

One date has already been announced for Gary’s up and coming Irish tour. He will be playing at
the Galway Fringe Festival at the end of August. Updates on other up-and-coming gigs are all on
his website http://garyelliottmusic.bandcamp.com/track/wooden-boat as well as on Facebook
and Twitter. To have a sneak peak there are tracks of him on the site as well as videos of him on
YouTube.

Deadpool to Make a Big Splash! 18/3/13

Image compliments of Deadpool

Deadpool, a local four piece alternative group are searching for success at the up and coming semi finals of the Dylan Fest singer/songwriter competition in Greencastle. The heat takes place on the 14^th April in the Castle Inn where they will compete for a place in the final.

“We entered a singer/songwriter competition in Moville and we’re through to the semi-finals now and we’re just basically playing about trying to get the name out there at the minute. A good friend of our Jack Craig entered it and we thought why not. He said to come down and play a few songs, play a few covers. A review went up saying one of the songs was a perfect ten, ‘Ink’, so we have to go back down now for the semi final”, said lead singer Aaron.

Reviews on the Criac On website couldn’t speak highly enough of the group’s performance saying, “They got a tremendous reception from the crowd” and went onto say, “If any pub owners are reading this who have a space for a full band they should get onto them.”

Even though the group are doing so well they haven’t actually been together that long, around 6 months in total. Aaron and drummer Darren, explain how the band got together. “Well three best friends, we all play guitar and myself and Willie were actually in a band before. We had written all our own songs so it was inevitable, as soon as that band broke up we were going to start a new one. We got a hold of Darren who’s a magic drummer and took it from there. Myself and Dee have been friends since we were wains, he’s a great guitarist so we had to get him on board.”, said Aaron. 

Darren describes how his dads reputation helped secure his place in the band.“I was in a band about 8 years ago, playing away. I went to London and I came back a couple of years ago, my partner is related to Willie the bassist so he kind of said to Aaron about me and that I play drums. The only thing they could go on was my Dah, so they went onto YouTube and they typed in my father’s old band The Sect. I think it was one of them ones where if my Dah could play I could play, so that was how I ended up going in for the first practise session up in the Nerve Centre.” 

From the Nerve Centre to their first gig, they had some expected nerves but for lead guitarist Dee, nerves ended when the music began. “The first gig I was freaking out up in the Castle Bar. I mind before the gig I was standing there shaking and all but as soon as I got up on stage and hit my first chord it just all went away. The whole band just becomes its own thing. I was expecting to go up and mess everything up but everyone was saying how good we were then. We looked back at the videos put online from the live stuff and we were surprised that it actually sounded really good.”

The group has managed to move fairly quickly and have already started recording already.  “They already had their tunes down so all I was more or less doing was walking into tunes that were already set-up but putting my own drum take on them. We’re making up more of our own stuff now and filling up on covers just to keep us going and keep us practising and filling up the practise times. When all our new stuff starting coming along we got this EP but we’re getting that replaced now with a LP. Brian from Beechwood (Beechwood Recordings) loves our stuff and he decided that because he’s getting new gear in we should scrap the EP and use it as a demo to through about to get gigs. He’s decided he’d like to stick with us and do a LP instead so it’s going to be rocking.”, said Darren.

Upon talking about the drive behind song writing in the group it became clear their inspiration is touching on some home truths. “We write about everyday things, life and times, different relationships, things that have happened in the family, things that happen around me in Galliagh, scum bags, drug dealers, that’s where it all comes from really. A lot of it is about the real City of Culture, to me it’s all really fake over there. For people like me coming from Galliagh you see what’s really going on with drug dealers, joy riding and that kind of thing.”, said Aaron.

 Darren said, “It’s about us being disaffected. If you’re on the dole at the minute or going about your day to day life and you’re not directly affected by the whole City of Culture buzz then you just get on with life. get on with wakening up , going to bed and everyone saying, ‘Aw, this is going to be a good year’. It is going to be a good year, but a good year for some people. There are still many of us out there that it’s another day, another year. If far as I can see the City of Culture is all about the legacy so let this year be done and we’ll have our legacy, hopefully it’ll be all good.”

 “We have no genre really, I could say alternative because it’s kind of a bit of everything but the songs vary. We have raps, sum guitar parts by Dee would be a lot heavier, were as myself and Willie would have a more punk sound. I think it’ll be about spring or summer by the time it’ll be coming out, we’ll make sure it’s all perfect this time, get it mastered and have artwork behind it.”, said Aaron. For this reasons it might be a good idea to take a look online at the groups Facebook for links to some of their material until you can get your hands on their album later in the year.

Metal Making Monsters 11/3/13

Image compliments of Paul Brown

Local metal band Making Monsters are going to be appearing at Hammerfest, a metal festival produced by Metal Hammer magazine and Hard Rock Hell fest. This will be the groups’ debut UK Festival performance and will see them play on Saturday the 16^th March. Making Monsters are due to play on the Jägermeister Stage, as they as currently sponsoring the band and have featured in their music video. Paul Monk describes how the band first got together.

“I had loads of riffs and song ideas. I just wanted a band then so I just put it out there to friends and stuff to see who wanted to gig but not mess about because too many bands waste time. Then I came across Brian, so it was guitar and drums and originally I had my cousin Michael Monk on vocals and Dee Mullan on Bass. But Dee decided he didn’t like bass anymore so we got Robert, we changed singers before that, Emma, just came across her in the Battle of the Bands, she’s a brilliant singer and I just asked her if she wanted to do something and jammed. That’s the line-up now.”

From forming to writing, Paul explains that song writing for the band can often come from a solitary riff and builds from there to become a new part of their set list. “Normally it starts with just a riff or some chords and drums, bass line and then the vocals. I have a song written and then we put our own bit to it but now we’re kind of more comfortable and we’ve got a big enough set list. Robert’s starting to write riffs, just everybody’s ideas, normally the song generally comes first then lyrics and vocals after, it’s just improvising. Every song is different, we try and make the next song completely different from the last one.” However, as Robert Arbuckle goes on to say, the group sometimes use the lighter side of things when coming up with new ideas. “Me and Emma, we’ve done a bit of writing together as well, like an acoustic thing on the side, we even put up a track on our Facebook called ‘Fire’. The way we wrote that, I had a riff from before and then Emma put her brilliant lyrics and vocals over it, it was as simple as that. I write a lot on the acoustic first because I don’t have an amp and electrical guitar, so I just platy away on acoustic and come up with ideas and sort of have the picture of what it would sound like as a band in my head. I’d always be thinking of the other instruments and maybe what the vocals could do as well.”

When first forming the band Paul was adamant he wanted dedicated members as he wanted to take his music seriously in order to make a career out of it. With some bumps along the way he thinks he’s found the final line-up for the job. “There’s a while laziness but a lot of bands in Derry but it’s probably the same everywhere, where people think that success comes to you or work comes to you but you have to bring the product to the right people. I think it’s from my previous band No Mean City that I gained that experience. Too many bands are laid back and wait for things to happen, you just need to do it yourself. I’m really determined, I don’t know where I want to be. I want to be a household name, not for popularity, I would like it to be my full time job. It’s a dream career and it’s what I enjoy, obviously I want us to be as big as we can, we’d be more likely to get a career out of it. I think before we kind of knew the weak links because Dee was a guitarist that played a bit of bass but his main instrument was guitar and he just missed playing guitar when he was on Bass. The previous singer just lacked experience but the current singer Emma has come a long way since she started with the band. I think we’re all really determined, I don’t think there’s a weak link now, or that we’ll be changing anything anytime soon. We’re all into the same kind of thing, it’s fun.”

Having not long recorded and released their first single the group simultaneously put out their first music video and are hoping to be following with more. “We just recorded a single ‘Instinct’ and released it with a video so it was kind of two products as once rather than a music video for an old song. We had recorded a brand new song and no-one heard it until the video came out so you were getting a visual and the audio. It’s expensive being in the band but any money we get we put it straight back into the band. We make zero. I don’t really know what’s happening next but I want to do more recording this year if we can afford it. We realize our first EP in the Summer last year, a four track, hopefully towards the end of this year we’ll have another EP, and some day an album.”

“The single is available online at www.makingmonsters.bandcamp.com you’ll come across the single there, or if you search YouTube the video will come up and there’s a link on the video to where you can buy the song or we can be found on facebook at Facebook.com/makingmonstersband.” The group will also be appearing locally in May as part of the much loved and celebrated Jazz Festival. Make sure to catch them there as the plan for the group seems to be to catch the attention of other festival organizers in both Ireland and England.

An Alien Sound in the City 4/3/13

Image compliments of Strule Theatre, Omagh

Balkan Alien Sound are doing what they do best as part of WOMAD. The group who produce Balkan/Irish music with a bit of a jazz and rock twist  are half way through creating their second album or original tracks and are hoping to be launching in May. Marty explains how the group formed. 

“We actually started about 2008 as a proper band but initially before that me and Steven and Gary who was playing guitar for Balkan, they had a performance in Magee and myself and Gary were listening to a lot of Planxty music, there was some Bulgarian stuff and that. Gary had chosen a song called Smeceno Horo, which is a Bulgarian tune for his performance piece and myself and Steven went in to perform on it. After we finished playing it we had the bug. We were just really hooked on it and then for the next four or five years I just immersed myself in Eastern European music and went out around Europe travelling and just kind of stayed out there seeping up all the music and the culture, and finding out as much as I could about my own instrument the bouzouki. I came back here and just said to the boys, ‘Wait til you see what I’ve got and let’s go’. They were well up for it by that stage.”

Of course this style of music isn’t normally heard around the city but even though there were some questions raised the band’s style they gained a lot of support. “A lot of people wondering ‘What is going on there?’ because we were Irish but as far as we were concerned we were just a band that was thinking, there’s people playing jazz, there’s people playing blues, there’s people playing trad music, this is just another form of music that we have chosen to play. The similarities between Balkan music and Irish music are really strong. One of the main differences would be time signature but instrumentation wise, nowadays it’s almost identical, the same family of instruments is all used. I never saw it as a difference. Then the more our personalities were coming into the music, there was like jazz, ska and a wee bit of rock going in and I think people were identifying it more as not just a Balkan trad band but our own kind of band then. Over the years it’s been more accepted that were not just a straight Balkan band we’re Balkan Alien, alien to the Balkan stuff.”

As the style of the music was so different to what they’d worked on before the group didn’t start composing right away but soon this changed and they also began to merge gernres. “At the start when we first started I think for about the first 18 months we were drawing straight from klezmer music. Half our set was like old Yiddish music and the other half was one or two Bulgarian songs. The first album is totally traditional music but over the last two and a half years we’ve just been composing and our own songs started creeping into the set. We never say on stage ‘This is our song’ or ‘This is a trad song’ we just play them. The style of our compositions has changed so much in the last two years. The way I would write now I would think always in a Bulgarian sense but I always try to keep a wee Irish side in it. That’s way I like having Steven O’Carolan there beside me as well because I would take a tune to him, we’ve just written a tune called ‘The Immigrants Waltz’ Aideen McGinn is going to be singing in Gaelic in it so it’s like Bulgarian music with Gaelic vocals over the top of it. We’re really excited about getting that recorded and released because I’m not sure if it’s been done before. I know Andy Irvine done some Irish music with Bulgarian vocal over the top but I’m looking forward to doing it the other was around.”

While working at a festival in the city the Balkan Alien Sound group picked up some unexpected but welcome new fans.“We actually got a really nice compliment from a Bulgarian couple who had moved to Northern Ireland about three years ago. The last festival we played in Derry, they were up and around it and they heard a version of a song called Gankino Horo, it’s like a barn dance in 9 over 16. They just heard it in the air and they were so homesick and they ran up to the side of the stage thinking one of us was going to be Serbian or Bulgarian and then we came off stage and they were speaking to us in Bulgarian but we were like, ‘Aw what’s the craic? We’re all from Derry!’ they were liked completely shocked. We’ve actually ended up being in a film with them at the minute called ‘Tapestry of Colours’. It’s a film that’s about the diversity of cultures in Northern Ireland today and there’s a feature of those guys in the film.” 

The sound the group produces has changed with the changing line up but Marty thinks this has been for the better.“Robert Peoples, Steven o Carolan, Mark Forbes, Gary’s living in Brighton at the moment but any gigs we do in the UK, he done WOMAD there, he’s still available if we need him. I thought we’d miss the guitar and miss the improvisational side of it but it has kind of lead us to go down a more compositional route. Me and Mark on the bass have maybe composed a whole albums worth of Bulgarian influenced tunes. If one member leaves it’s making the other members go ‘Right, we need to step up a wee bit’ but Mark O’Doherty from Little Bear, he’s filling in at the moment on drums. We’re looking for a drummer to go out on tour with us this summer, we’re going out to Germany and we’ve a lot of WOMAD gigs. It’s good to be working closely with such a big prestigious festival because you’re going to be working with world class artists all the time. It kind of makes you up your game a bit because you don’t want to be messing up in front of these big acts. Balkan Alien sounds will be launching their album at the Gypsy Folk Club with bands appearing from all over including France, Greece and some in the UK too. To check out the band online visit: www.balkanaliensound.wix.com/balkans, or if you just go to Facebook.

57 steps to Rock ‘n’ Roll 25/2/13

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 9^th 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.”