Bleeding Heart Pigeons are a curious proposition within the Irish music scene, or perhaps more accurately, just outside it. On one hand, they are comprised of three young men who’ve known each other since their early teens, and started playing together in a set of circumstances so innocent, relatable and organic that they walk a line between mundane and heartwarming. Having done their time playing Muse covers in a shed, like countless after-school rockers before them, they started to work on a couple of originals. So far so standard. For most this is where the story ends, but for Bleeding Heart Pigeons something almost entirely unheard of occurred: their sweeping brand of art-rock made it’s way from their weather beaten wilds of the West to the ears of a major label.
Now, following years of build up, their debut full length is finally ready for release through Virgin. In a domestic music landscape that remains as parochial as our own, the endorsement of a major label brings with a potent mix of envy and suspicion. Who are these upstarts and why the vote of confidence? We called up frontman and guitarist Mícheál Keating to find out how it feels to finally have the record primed for release and just how these Pigeons ended up making the big boys coo.
So, we’ll start at the start. How did you guys start playing together? You’ve been doing it for a few years now, right?
We’ve been playing for about eight years now. I went to school with Cathal [Histon, synthesizers] and we went to a summer camp in our local music school where we met Brendan [McInerney, drums]. We kind of hit it off, we all had similar senses of humour. So we stayed in contact and shortly after the camp we started playing together in my garage.
What age were you going to this camp then?
Cathal and I were both 13 and Brendan would have been 12. He was just about to go into secondary school. We were just playing covers, Rockin’ In The Free World and that kind of stuff. We did some songwriting as well, it was kind of an early experience of what goes into that.
So you guys have been playing together ever since then? How did a garage band come to the attention of folks like Universal?
Yeah, until 2012 we were just playing in my shed at home. We’d never really had any gigs, just because we are kind of from the middle of nowhere so there was never really anything going on. So in 2012 I spammed Little Green Cars on Facebook with one of our songs and then they passed the song on to their manager. He got in contact around April 2012 and by December we’d signed to Virgin Records. It all happened really quickly. We didn’t have many songs. We were kind of signed on promise rather than actual material, but it’s worked out OK for us I think.
Well, a vote of confidence can’t be too bad that early on.
It was good but at the same time when you are suddenly launched into that world of A&R people you’re kind of wary of people giving you compliments. You get so much of it sometimes it can just feel uncomfortable or fake but, at the same time, they put their money where their mouth is…
Do you think in a way it was kind of beneficial to be coming from a position of relative isolation? Did that situation, removed from the cross-pollination of ideas with other acts, stand you in good stead as time went on.
I think it did. We never really came across many other Irish bands so I think what we were doing was just researching music on the internet and finding what we like, listening to more and more. For us, that’s where our music would have come from. I think it’s been very beneficial to us, it makes us a bit a more stand-alone, which can be a little challenging, but it’s always good to challenge yourself in that sort of way
So you’ve been appearing on ‘ones to watch’ lists since 2012 or 2013. Why such a long gestation period between now and then? How much of that was recording and how much was letting the album sit for a while?
Well, we signed in December 2012 and played Other Voices around that time and there was a small bit of buzz .Then me and Cathal finished out our year in college and deferred our courses. Brendan was still doing his Leaving Cert. that year too. We were working a little bit on songs then, jamming every week. It took us a while to finish a lot of the songs, to write lyrics from them, to develope them until we were happy. So it gestated for about a year and half and then in July 2014 we went and recorded the drums in Liverpool before coming home to record the rest of the album. So, by the end of 2014 it was all mixed and we’ve just been waiting for the right time to release it. It can take a long time, especially for a debut album, the major labels seem to take an awfully long time to decide when to release. So we’ve been waiting a year for it actually come out.
So would you say there’s any benefits or negatives to working on something like that for such a long time? Did it breed a kind of culture of second guessing yourself? Or was there always a real certainty despite the fact the process was drawn out?
I’m wondering about the second guessing, but I don’t think so. In a way, I don’t think it’s been as long as it seems. We finished school in 2013 and one year later we’re recording the drums so all the structures of the songs were in place by then.
Considering especially that people are finishing school and starting college, those years can seem like some of the longest ones, since you’re going through such dramatic changes in your life. It probably feels like an eternity ago that you were still in school.
Yeah, there have been dramatic changes, but in a way you can’t help and look at it like it’s still the same. I’m still sitting in my parent’s kitchen as I would have been on a weekend when I was first going to college. We’re hoping that this year is going to the be the one where things change for us since we’ll be able to get out there and play the music for people.
When you were working on the album, how concerned were you with thematic unity between the songs? In your mind, were you always working on the record as a whole or was it song to song?
Very much the first one. We’re all massive ‘album fans’. No matter what we were doing we were thinking about the album as a whole and what kind of themes and sounds we want on it. I think we managed to make an album album. For me, theme-wise, it’s quite existential and concerned with all the changes you were just talking about there. There’s a lot of isolation on there, just trying to reassess what’s happening in our lives.
It struck me as pretty remarkable that you have two nine minute tracks closing out your debut record. Were there any raised eyebrows over that?
If there was, I certainly didn’t see them. The label were really supportive in the sense that they were almost non-existent, which is exactly what we wanted. They let us do our own thing, produce it ourselves and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t hear any complaints.
I was struck by Song With No Meaning. Do you buy into the idea that there’s an obligation on a song to have a meaning? I mean, for a song to be successful as an enterprise it has to have a clear authorial intent that is comprehended by the audience?
I mean, traditionally, you’d say yeah that a song has to have a strong meaning but then again you’ve got stuff like Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. For me, with that song, I just liked that as an idea for a song since there’s a few angles you could come at it. There’s the idea you were talking about there but also the idea that the song is just about trying to find meaning in life and failing to do so and the realisation that you don’t really need meaning, you can just do whatever you want and it’s a kind of liberating thing.
I was reading the essay you put out in advance of the album. It deals with those ideas of searching for meaning in your own life and how, for you, the writing of the songs themselves offered a kind of means for doing that. Is that sort of uniquely personal, inward-looking meaning in a song important to you?
Yeah, I definitely think they do. Writing the songs helped me to explore certain concepts that were making me feel certain things. It’s an aid in rationalising the things you feel. In a way, when I go back and listen to a song that’s finished it makes me feel like I’ve gotten through something even though all I’ve done is write a song. It’s quite powerful for me in that way. It means a lot.
I was talking to Cian Nugent recently about his starting to sing on his new record and he had a lot to say about the importance he put on singing in his own accent. On the record you’re very much singing in your own accent. Was that something you considered before?
It was definitely something I considered. It can be hard to sing in your own accent when you listen to so many English or American bands. When you first start singing you’re usually singing somebody else’s song so when you sit down to write your own you have to try and break down that wall that your brain has put up accent-wise. I definitely really wanted it to be a Limerick accent on the record, that’s me, that’s who I am, I’d cringe if it was any other way. Even going back and listening to earlier recordings the accent thing is always something that sticks out to me. I do try and make my actual accent work in a singing voice which isn’t always easy. In Limerick there can be a lot of deep vowels and stuff like that and sometimes it just doesn’t work musically but you do the best you can. It was a gradual struggle but I’m fairy happy with where I got with it on this album. I’m glad you think I sound like I’m from Limerick.
Well, it was apparent to me anyway. You have to wonder when the record makes it’s way over to the States where they’ll place you!
Well the lyrics are on the sleeve anyway [laughs]
So you hadn’t really toured that much beforehand. Will the gigs surrounding the release be your first real time on the road?
You’re right. We’ve only really done one proper tour before and that was more a practice run. It was November 2013 and we just did a week with Little Green Cars in the UK. That was just a little taster though. So hopefully we’ll get a bit more time on the road. I’m saying we’re looking forward to it now but we could just end up hating it [laughs].
So was there any hard learned lesson from the one week warm-up tour?
What I remember was I got my first pair of Doc Martens the day before we went on tour and wore them all week and by the end I couldn’t walk at all, I was crippled! So I won’t be buying a new pair of shoes before I go this time… or at least bringing a spare pair!
Bleeding Heart Pigeons’ debut album Is is out now on Virgin EMI as a download and a limited edition vinyl. They play Upstairs in Whelan’s on Saturday 12th March, with tickets costing €10. For more see www.bleedingheartpigeons.com
Words: Danny Wilson
Photos: Matthew Thompson
