Quompilation #1 by Quarter Inch Collective
Second in our series of interview in the run up to the Quompilation launch on Thursday in the Lower Deck is Squarehead, garage pop power trio and victors in the Nialler9 Song of the Year poll last year with the undeniable Fake Blood. We sat down to talk to them about their Adebisi Shank cover, two other artists covering them, album plans and other stuff. Read Cloud Castle Lake from yesterday if you missed it, and stay tuned for We Are Losers tomorrow.
I want to start at the start. Squarehead started with just you, Roy?
Roy: Yep.
You were just recording or writing songs by yourself?
Roy: Well it goes before Squarehead, because me and Ian were in a band before that with Lar, who plays guitar in Adebisi. He played drums in our band. It was called Vimanas. That kind of split up after an EP or so. We weren’t really doing anything much, and I was in college playing acoustic stuff, playing more what I used to be into when I was younger. I started recording that stuff at home and that’s how it began.
What kind of music? Indie pop type stuff?
Roy: Yeah, not a million miles away.
Ruan: Wait, Vimanas? Vimanas were a screamo band.
Ian: We weren’t a screamo band. We were a progressive math rock band.
Roy: Whatever. It was heavy stuff, yeah.
And your stuff wasn’t?
Roy: Yeah, it was more of the poppier rock stuff I was into when I was younger.
That was called Squarehead though.
Roy: Yep.
Aidan Wall said something about trying to put out some of your old stuff on Long Lost.
Roy: Yeah, there’s loads of recordings of half-songs and unfinished songs. Some songs that we play now, but other recordings and different versions. He’s gonna put out a tape at some stage. It’ll probably be out later this week.
So when did the band come together and why?
Roy: Last January I was still playing acoustic gigs by myself and I was kind of cheesed off with that, so I went and recorded two songs with my friend Andy from I Heart The Monster Hero. I asked Ian to play bass, and Andy actually played drums even though Ruan is credited on the 7″. It was just and Ian for a while, and then we eventually met Ruan through Ian, who recorded Fake Blood. We just went “yeah, you play drums, come on.”
So why did you want to do a full band thing?
Roy: It’s more fun, you have more options. When I was writing songs for myself I had that in mind. If you have a bass player and other vocals, you can think a lot more.
Ian: Me and Roy have been friends for years, so it’s nice playing with your best mates.
Roy: Yeah, we’ve been friends since we were 14/15.
I just wanted to ask for a full list of all the other bands you are in or have been in.
Roy: I was in, first of all, Vimanas with Ian. That was the first band that really did anything. Before Squarehead was really a band I joined Hands Up Who Wants To Die, who are on the Richter Collective. I recorded an album in Frankfurt in August with them, that’ll be coming out this year too. I’m doing the launch gig next month and them I’m gonna phase it out.
Ruan: I am the percussionist in Groom, and I play in Tieranniesaur with Ian, Lie-Ins with Mike from Groom, Walpurgis Family with Jeroen and Wil from Groom, and Pantone 247 sometimes on the very rare occasions that he plays gigs. And before all of that I was in a band called the Maladies. I went to the Villagers gig with O Emperor supporting, and I missed them. I asked, what are O Emperor like? And somebody said “they’re the band The Maladies could have been.”
Roy: I still actually haven’t heard the Maladies
Ruan: We released two albums and I actually don’t even have them.
Ian: I played in funk bands in stuff. I played bass when I was a teenager, so I was inevitably going to be playing funk and slap bass. I did a bit of fusion. And then Vimanas and Squarehead and Tieranniesaur, although we don’t take part in recording and we don’t play that many gigs with Tieranniesaur. I’m not a big fan of being in loads of bands. I’m just really obsessed about Squarehead.
How close are you to putting out the album?
Roy: It’s finished. We should have the masters back today. But we’re putting out a single first, so that’ll be like a 7″, next month at the soonest. The album, after that, is pretty much ready to go. Probably looking at April, like, realistically.
Ian: We’re not too stressed out about that.
Roy: The single’s coming out on the Richter Collective, and we’re probably going to put the album out on the Richter Collective, but there might be other options.
What kind of other options?
Ruan: We can’t speak about that!
Roy: Mainly because we don’t know.
Ian: We’ll see what happens. Our main thing was just getting the album recorded, that was our priority. We’re not too stressed about it coming out, our main thing was just getting it done and sounding as good as it good. So we’re not too stressed any more.
Roy: I was never stressed.
Ian: I lost sleep over string choices.
What was the process of doing the album? When did you start and where did you record it?
Roy: We did it in two halves, because we did it in a studio rather than in somebody’s house. So that was a bit more expensive. We booked four days in October, and then went back in in December to do more. We just needed that time to save up the cash. It wasn’t even that expensive, we just aren’t very good at saving money. Or making money.
Ruan: We don’t have any money.
Ian: I think it was really good having that time in between. It gave us some breathing space. We were originally going to put out a six song EP on Richter, and we just ended up doing an album instead. The space was nice to get the other six songs together.
Roy: Some of them weren’t written before. So in the space between the first recording and the second recording, I think three of the six songs we did were all new.
Ian: If we did a twelve song album in the first session, I don’t think the finished album would have been as good as it is now. We had more time to reflect on songs and work them out, that kind of thing. The finished product is better for the break and for the EP not existing.
What’s the vibe of it, would you say?
Ian: It’s nice.
Ruan: It’s all very upbeat, there’s no slow songs really.
Roy: I guess the two off the Fake Blood single are pretty laid back and ballady.
Ruan: Is it wrong to say “hit after hit after hit”? Or intended to be.
Ian: They’re all kind of single-y songs. That’s what you want your first album to be like. You don’t want to get too self-indulgent with 40 minute jazz trombone solos.
Ruan: We were thinking of the first Strokes album, or The Knack.
Roy: Yeah you know those power pop bands in the 70s and 80s who just had songs, you know? Nothing too complicated. Other people were saying we should get some guests in, one of the lads from Adebisi to play guitar. But we just wanted to have a pretty straight up album of our songs.
Ruan: It’s the typical three guys in a room thing. And we got to record it all live too, which was great.
Roy: That’s what we wanted, just to get a good quality recording of us playing together.
Ian: It kept it as organic and natural as possible. I think that translates on the recording. It doesn’t sound messy, but it still sounds energetic. Sometimes when you’re playing to clicks it gets stagnant. It’s good when you’re recording bass to be able to look at Ruan as he plays drums. They’re really tight with each other.
Ruan: Yeah, we speed up together.
Ian: Exactly.
How did you feel about winning the Nialler9 Reader’s Poll Song of the Year?
Roy: It was pretty mad. It was my birthday. People were like “hey, look, you’re number one!” and I was like, “that’s nice,” cos these days you don’t get that many presents.
Is there anything else off the Popical Island compilation on the list?
Ian: Well, the Groom album.
Ruan: I don’t think there was. Nialler himself put Sketch! by Tieranniesaur and a Feed The Bears number in his own personal chart. Nothing else made the reader’s chart. Pricks.
Ian: It was very flattering. It’s not the kind of thing you take a lot from, but it is flattering.
Ruan: It actually became a joke way too quickly. We were playing in Galway that night, and we were getting drunk and going, “song of the year! Look at us, aren’t we the best!” I think we started the bus journey being really humbled and surprised by the whole thing and then by the end… We were playing with Cloud Castle Lake and Daithi O Droney, a pretty serious line-up. And we were like, “we’re gonna show these kids who’s boss, we’ve got the song of the year!”
Ian: Pricks of the year.
Ruan: Yeah, total jerks of the year.
Ian: It was very ostentatious, having a bottle of prosecco and opening it on the bus home.
Everyone else was asleep.
Roy: We’re really grateful, we didn’t expect it at all.
Ruan: I’m more grateful to the guy who left the comment going “this is excruciating, it sounds like a Stephen Malkmus demo.” I was like, “really?!”
Roy: All the comments that were left there after were just tearing it apart.
What do you think about the covers on the compilation [both Hipster Youth and Patrick Kelleher cover Fake Blood]?
Roy: They’re amazing.
Ian: They’re fucking brilliant.
Which is your favourite?
Ian: Well we know them both really well.
Roy: We can’t pick.
Ian: They’re both really different as well.
Roy: Paddy’s my favourite person.
Dissed.
Ruan: If only we had a fourth member, two of us could take Paddy and two could take Aidan.
Roy: They’re both really different.
Ian: I have a soft spot for Paddy’s one just because I really like working with Paddy’s one.
Roy: I really like Aidan’s one, all sped up and stuff. It’s deadly. And Colm from Goodly Thousands’ backing vocals on it are really good.
Ruan: I think Cloud Castle Lake’s one is my favourite of all of them.
Ian: Yeah, that was a real fucking brave one to do as well. They’re playing it live on Thursday, which I can’t wait to see.
Is there anything you don’t like? You’re not gonna say.
Roy: No, I wouldn’t say, but I don’t think there is. I’d give you a wink if there was. [He does not give me a wink.]
Ian: True to form, I haven’t heard any other songs.
Anything else you particularly like?
Roy: Ginola I heard for the first time, I thought that was amazing, Rudeboy.
Ruan: I think the quality of the tape was really really good. Everything on it sounds nice.
Ian: Everyone else’s sounds better than ours.
You think everyone else’s sounds better?
Ian: The only mixes I’ve heard have had that horrible internet static on the guitars. It’s nothing to do with Fiachra [who recorded it], it’s just that kind of internet interference on the guitars and the cymbals. I’d change a few things on the bass as well. That’s what happens when you record drunk.
Ruan: Yeah that’s the only time we’ve ever recorded drunk.
Really?
Roy: Our friend Fiachra just came over one night and we had loads of beers and recorded it.
You practiced it though, presumably.
Roy: Yeah, it wasn’t just like, let’s do a song.
Ruan: You wrote the words that night though, didn’t you?
Roy: Yeah, the words are hilarious.
Ruan: A bunch of them are lines that are in other songs of ours. “Nothing is real” and stuff.
Roy: When we were doing the album I was writing out the lyrics a lot just to have them in the studio, and the amount of times I use some words… I really need to start reading or go back to school or something.
Ruan: You should get Word Of The Day toilet paper.
How did you pick the Adebisi song?
Roy: We got asked to do a remix by Vinny from Adebisi, and I was just saying to him that we don’t use computers at all. So we wouldn’t be able to remix it in the classic sense, so we just gave it a go. I started messing around with the riff and trying to write a song around it. And then we got asked to do the Quompilation as well, and we though, hang on, this could work for both. But then it only ended up being used for the Quompilation instead of calling it a remix.
Ian: That helped as well because we were arguing over what our favourite song of 2010 was. So narrowing it down to just Adebisi made it a lot easier.
Roy: Ian had a massive list of all his favourite songs.
Anything else that came close?
Roy: There’s a Beach House song I was trying to figure out, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Ian: That Arcade Fire tune as well.
Ruan: Yeah, Mountains Beyond Mountains. That was one we could all agree on.
Have you played outside Ireland?
Roy: Yeah, well I did a tour of Eastern Europe as Squarehead. It was a Hands Up Who Wants To Die tour, and we were going from Germany to Poland to Ukraine to Belarus and all around there. And I was asked if I wanted to do Squarehead sets every night, and said yes without really thinking about it. It was squats and stuff, so it was pretty hardcore, playing these wimpy pop songs to some crusty punks. It went down well in some places… Other than that, we played Belfast.
Ian: Belfast is not another country!
Roy: It’s the furthest we’ve played as a three-piece.
Are you going to go further?
Ian: I think touring is the main priority now.
Roy: It’s always a plan we’re kind of forming, but we never quite get there.
Ruan: We’d like to do something during the summer, to have some summer holidays.
Roy: Yeah, I haven’t been away since that Hands Up Who Wants To Die tour.
Do you see Popical Island ever working like Richter Collective, sharing contacts and booking agents in Europe and stuff?
Ian: Well, we were kind of told that our kind of music isn’t the kind of music that… heavier bands have a lot easier time booking tours in Europe because there’s a much bigger scene for that.
Roy: Somebody said that in reference to DIY stuff. There’s not a big garage pop trail of contacts throughout Europe, like there is with hardcore.
There’s loads in America though…
Roy: There is, yeah.
Ian: We’ve been talking about America for a while, but it’s a major financial investment.
Roy: We’d like to do it, but it’s a big gamble, so we’d want to be guaranteed to have some shows.
Ian: It’s definitely an ambition to go the States at some stage.
Ruan: I’d do a tour of Mongolia. Playing in yurts and stuff.
What are you listening to?
Roy: I’ve been listening to a band called The Young on Mexican Summer.
Ruan: Lower Dens, I had a chance to go see them and I didn’t, and then I got into them.
Ian: I’ve been listening to The Vaselines and the Righteous Brothers.
Cool. And are you going to have the Song of 2011?
All: No.
Roy: We’re done with that. We’ll have a severe backlash.
Ian: Album of 2011?
Ruan: Worst album of 2011. Biggest letdown.
Roy: It’ll be a new category on Nialler9. Biggest Letdown: Squarehead.
Ian: We’ve got the 7″ coming with Patrick Kelleher as well.
Roy: Yeah, it’s not a split, we both play on both songs.
So you wrote one, he wrote one, and you both play on both?
Roy: Yeah, but we haven’t done our one yet. We’ve done his.
Ruan: It’s incredible.
Ian: That’ll be song of the year actually. Paddy Kelleher’s song that we were lucky enough to be allowed to play alongside him on. It really is the best song I’ve ever heard.
(laughs)
Roy: No, it actually is.
Ruan: It’s a really great song.
Ian: He’s a genius. It’s insane.
Big talk.
Ian: Wait till you hear it.
Words: Karl McDonald
