Quompilation #1 by Quarter Inch Collective
Continuing the series of interviews with Irish bands who feature on Quarter Inch Collective’s Quompilation is We Are Losers, featuring three members of the now-dormant Super Extra Bonus Party and one of the still extremely vivacious Grand Pocket Orchestra. Their recordings to date have been the work of leader Gavin Elsted, so we talked to him about why he chose indie pop, the situation with SEBP and more. Read Squarehead yesterday and Cloud Castle Lake on Monday if you missed them.
So how did We Are Losers come about in its current form?
We Are Losers came about because I wanted to challenge myself with something. I’d been listening to a lot of old recordings and lo-fi stuff, stuff coming out of the States. I wanted to see if I could recreate that vibe fairly quickly. It just so happened that I was needed at home in Kildare for an evening and I had nothing else to do. I decided I wanted to do it then. I wrote and recorded a couple of songs and sent them round to mates, nothing planned. The mp3s got spread further, and the next thing I know I’m getting a call about gigs and stuff. So I tried to put a band together then. It happened really quickly, but it’s great, because it’s so much more direct than any musical project I’ve been involved with before. Straight to the point. Guitar music, no bullshit. Just set up and play.
Why do you think you were drawn to doing that as opposed to what you’ve done before. You do remixes and electronic stuff too, don’t you?
Yeah. I wouldn’t really class myself as a remixer or an electronic artist. I try to find stuff I really like and do my take on it, or something like that. All the electronic stuff that I did pretty much came about through a fascination with really old 80s euro-disco and stuff like that. Slowing that stuff down and taking it apart and fusing it together. It sounds okay, but I’d never really concentrate on that. Guitar music would be my main love, indie rock. So it’s quite easy for me to pick up a guitar rather than a sampler.
So I’m trying to get a picture of the kind of overlap there is in bands in Dublin. Can you list the bands or projects you and the others in We Are Losers have done?
Well, quite simply, three out of the four members of We Are Losers are also involved in Super Extra Bonus Party. One other member is involved in Grand Pocket Orchestra. I also do electronic music under Adultrock. I think that’s pretty much it for the time being unless I’ve forgotten something.
What’s the story with Super Extra Bonus Party at the moment?
The story is that it’s too tough to put a seven-piece band on the road at the moment. There was a point in our career when we had to make a break for places outside Ireland because we were doing the same tour over and over again. A lot of us didn’t have the time or the money to give it the full push. It was a financial decision and a time decision. So there’s no real plans to reconvene at the moment, but I’d say we will do something in the future.
So you’re not broken up, per se.
No. I hate using the word hiatus, because it’s just prolonging the agony. But I’d like to compare us, not in musical terms but in terms of productivity, to someone like the Rednecks. They all have their own things, living elsewhere, some of them have kids and stuff. Once you get older, your priorities have to change, and it just so happens that my priorities don’t really have to change at the moment. Which is why We Are Losers are doing so much stuff.
Was it strange, having done Super Extra Bonus Party, starting again from scratch in terms of getting people interested?
We really enjoyed it, and we still do. I’d be lying if I said the previous band’s name helped us, because it doesn’t really. It’s a different kind of thing. Maybe I’m generalizing a bit, but I don’t think that you’d find an awful lot of crossover between the two crowds. When you’re starting again, you are doing the 8 o’clock, playing to five people, why am I doing this kind of thing. But it’s totally refreshing going from the stuff we did with Bonus Party, to go into a venue and not have any shit with the sound and… We do have certain things we’ve carried over. We’ve managed to hang on to our sound man, Sean. He just makes things so much fucking easier. Obviously building things back up again takes time, but it’s nothing we haven’t gone through before, and I’m sure we’ll go through it again.
Was the indie pop and lo-fi scene in Dublin and influence on you trying to do that?
Definitely. I wouldn’t have been au fait with a lot of them before. I did see a really embryonic Squarehead full band gig and I thought it was fucking amazing. Nobody else in Dublin was doing that at the time. It reminded me of Weezer and stuff like that. All the other bands that would be playing were the Adebisi Shank, Battles-y kind of math rock stuff. And there Squarehead were doing their Weezery buzz. But that stuff is always going to take off, because it’s pop music. Obviously the Popical Island thing helped an awful lot. Squarehead were like a gateway into all of that. I’d been acquainted with Grand Pocket Orchestra before because they’d played with Bonus Party, but then I got more and more into them, discovered No Monster Club through them. Just going through all the bands, you’ll find something great in all of them. It’s a really healthy time. A lot of people are picking up on it now, which is great.
The EP you did, that’s just you?
Yeah, that’s one evening’s work pretty much.
So you didn’t come together, write songs and then do the EP. The band came from the EP pretty much.
Yeah, it wasn’t premeditated at all. It was just a spur of the moment thing that went mental from there.
Is that how you’re going to proceed?
Well, half and half. Because I’m so used to playing with the other two lads, and Bronwyn has fit in really well, I know that they’re very competent at playing and their ideas are great, and I’d be really open to their input on anything we do from now on. It depends. If I feel the need to do it myself, I’ll do it myself. I’ll send it round to them for their opinions. Or if we find ourselves in practice and someone comes up with a riff, we’ll work like that. You can’t put a limit on what you do. It’s up to them, how much they want to contribute or not.
There does seem to be a new type of band now, where one person is the songwriter and they play everything on the recordings, and then they have a live band.
Yeah, like that band Cloud Nothings. They’re great, like. And what’s stopping people doing that? The other side of that is that Cloud Nothings did a few EPs, got signed to a label and now they’re in a studio and the new record’s really clean. Or not clean, but more band-oriented. It’s just the initial push. Maybe one person needs to be the headstrong fucker who says “I’m doing this. I don’t have time to wait around for other people. If they want to help me, grand. If not, fuck it.” I think that’s a healthy thing. I’m not advocating dictatorship in bands, but there needs to be one person that pushes everybody along. Not in a destructive way, but in an encouraging way.
Are you working towards and album, or is that a bit far away yet?
We’re definitely doing a 7” single in the next two or three months. We’re firming up details of that. I would say that’ll probably be followed by a load of little things. We’re doing a split with No Monster Club, but we don’t know when that’s going to be out, or who it’ll be out through.
A split single?
No, I think it’ll be a split cassette. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes of music. After that, maybe an EP. We haven’t really decided what we’re doing yet. There’s no talk of a record and there’s no pressure. Whenever Bonus Party made a record, we disappeared for six months, and the three of us have discussed it and agreed that we’re never doing that again. So it’s very important to be visible. Be sound and be around.
That is quite like the stuff Cloud Nothings was doing last year. There’s a lot, but it’s all EPs, splits, things like that.
I think that’s the way forward. Because of mp3s, and I know it’s a really fuddy duddy way of putting it, but people’s attention spans are so fucking short. I find it hard listening to an album these days, unless I’m really really into the band, or I want to give it the time it deserves. If I’m just half-arseing about a record, I’d skip through and find a song I like and focus on that. By and large, I feel like people’s interest wanes quite quickly. Because there is an awful lot of music and an awful lot of ways of getting it now. Stuff like singles and EPs, that’s the way. Once you establish yourself as a band, that’s when you start talking records.
How did you choose Leave House to cover?
I went to see Caribou in the Button Factory. It was the gig of the year, as far as I was concerned. I’ve never been as blown away by a band’s grasp on dynamic and just the fucking overall force of the entire thing. Obviously it was a weird one, because when people saw us doing a cover of Leave House, they probably thought it would be a lo-fi guitar thing, and it turned out to be electronic. But I wanted to recreate it as faithfully as I possibly could. I tried it with guitars and it didn’t work. I just absolutely loved. It’s probably the last foray into electronic music that I think we’ll be doing for a while.
I was talking to someone about it and they wondered why you didn’t do it under the name Adultrock.
Because We Are Losers were asked. That’s pretty much it. Somebody else mentioned that to me too. It’s just a classic indication of my ADD. I just do a song and call it whatever I want. There’s a Sacred Animals remix we did, and because it’s me, I just go, fuck it, I’ll call it whatever the fuck I want. But I really do have to start being more smart about that kind of stuff. Because people could be really into the guitar stuff and then hear an electronic thing and go “what the fuck is this?” I’d never release an indie pop tune with Adultrock. It’s not the right aesthetic. I should be more careful I guess.
What do you like on the compilation?
The Cloud Castle Lake version of Lost In The World is amazing. The production on it is amazing. The Kid Karate cover is good too. Obviously both versions of Fake Blood. No Monster Club’s contribution is suitably fucking bonkers as usual. It’s great, all of it really good. Obviously, I was quite taken with Spies’ version of Terrible Love. But it was so faithfully recreated it was actually incredible. Actually, the story behind Leave House was that we had it half completed and then our studio fell apart. A load of pipes burst and the ceiling fell down. So I had to come up with a back up. I figured out the song Washed Out uses in Feel It All Around and did a cover of that, and sent it around to people. They thought it was too faithful to the original. But I think sometimes it really works. The Spies cover is really good, your man’s voice really suits it.
You’re presumably not going to tell me any you didn’t like.
There was no tracks that I didn’t really like, quite frankly. If there was, I’d tell you. People at that gig aren’t going to know what I look like.
You’re not playing.
No, we can’t really do it. I have a chest infection and it’s getting to the stage where it feels like there’s a fucking bonfire in my chest. A break is needed. But I’ll be down there getting really hammered and shouting at everybody. That’s the idea.
Even if nobody else shows up, there’s enough bands playing for there to be a crowd.
Exactly. I can’t wait for it. The line-up’s really good anyway. Even if it wasn’t a compilation, if you had that line-up at a gig, you’d go.
Words: Karl McDonald
