The past year had been one of growing frustration for Richie Egan. Having completed his third album after positive early airings, he found himself at the receiving end of label cutbacks. The album was sitting, stagnating and impatiently waiting for release while Jape was itching to move on to new material. How did the band content itself during this time? “Well, we did cut some new songs. We’re going to play a couple of them tonight actually. But I reworked the old songs to keep them interesting for us. It keeps them fresh, keeps it interesting for us.” He’s determined album number four won’t take so long.
Judging by the songs debuted at the gig later on (including Technology, which was so addictive the band decide to play it twice, something Richie hasn’t seen any band do since Elastica) only another circumstantial crisis will be able to hold a new release back. Forever melding the separate parts of their sound to create a decidedly singular synthesis, Jape has moved from Smog comparisons through Yo La Tengo and has ended up on the right side of Hot Chip, without leaving earlier influences behind. “The balance of acoustic and electronic was difficult at first, but I think we’re getting a hold of it now,” he explains. “This album was originally really dancey, I tried to take some of the elements of that out of the final mix. I didn’t want it to be too tied to dance, and everything that comes with that.” This decision means Ritual is a perfectly balanced heterogeneous mixture of all an album needs for mainstream success, with as many pop friendly songs and chill-out numbers to compliment the more dance floor friendly tracks.
So just how does a band start off with Bill Calahan comparisons and end up at Kraftwerk? “I still love acoustic guitars, it’s sometimes where I’ll start writing the song. But there’s only so much you can do with one guy and one guitar.” Along with the changing sound of the band, the roster of Jape has fluctuated too. My first live experience of Jape included David Kitt in the band. It is perhaps telling of the band’s developing sound that I haven’t seen the troubadour since. Rather now Richie’s constantly complemented onstage by the “mysterious” Son Green (Redneck Manifesto fans might notice a strange similarity between he and one of Richie’s other band’s entourage), who he credits as having a huge influence on the live songs. Constantly surrounded by a mountain of synths and donning a bass, it’s easy to draw a line across the Richie Egan family tree from Son Green’s MySpace songs to Jape’s and mark it ‘kissing cousins’.
Ritual is very much Egan’s album, however. He cites the songs as being bound together by his need to express himself, whether he’s feeling heavy or light. Even the album’s name is a play on this. “You’re the first person to pick up on that!” he laughs, “Yeah, it’s a pun on my name on the one hand. On the other it’s about how people need day-to-day rituals to keep them sane.” The concept of the album name alone speaks volumes about Egan’s striking lyrics: playful, personal, cathartic, and sometimes as dark as they are frolicsome. His particularly obscure brand of humour has been on display since naming his second album The Monkeys In The Zoo Have More Fun Than Me, and is evident onstage to the Crawdaddy audience as he takes the piss out of himself for daring to call an album that. His onstage banter is effervescent with wit (anybody who’s heard his background story for song Phil Lynott will concur) and his artwork and videos a visual representation of the mischievousness he threads into his craft. The new lyrics are saturated with quotable lines, from the deadpan drawl of “Look. At. The. Fucking. Moon.” to the schoolboy-confessional “I popped my cherry to November Rain. Think she liked it but don’t think she came.” His storytelling ability is a reason to return to his songs over and over again, giving something like the pleasure of reading old notes your mates passed you in the back row of a classroom. Jumping from the hushed, nursery-rhyme vocals perfected on his first two albums to nigh-on rapping, the delivery matches the content to a tee. He acknowledges he’s not the greatest singer that’s ever walked Dublin’s streets, but his awareness of his own limitations has allowed him to perfect his own unique style.
Commercial success has, up until a quite recent boom, been stunted by the delayed release of material and small-scale releasing of earlier albums on Volta Sounds and Trust Me I’m A Thief. The recent boom has been described as an effect of what top scientists are deeming the Skins Effect. “I didn’t know they were going to use Floating. I’ve never even seen Skins, that’s how old I am. Then I realized something was up, because all these kids with mad haircuts started adding me on MySpace. It’s a good way to make the fanbase bigger, all right. I know how impressionable I was at that age. You’re told what’s cool. As long as they’re telling them Jape is cool. Ha ha ha. I heard the director’s a big fan of my music, so that’s great.” Having played across Europe recently, and jetting out for London the morning after we caught up, it seems Jape is finally receiving attention that has proved elusive for so long. As with the Redneck Manifesto, the band are determined to be more than small time success. There’s only so many times you can headline a Crawdaddy gig before claustrophobia sets in.
His admiration of Phil Lynott as another “man who plays the bass from Crumlin” reflects Richie Egan’s big aspirations for his band. Perhaps not quite a U2, but certainly not an A House, Jape might just be a Thin Lizzy: respected in all quarters, internationally known, but artistically viable and downright sexy all the same. So, does he think there’ll ever be a life-size bronze statue of him off Grafton Street? “Err… maybe on my grave, my family might do one for me. I don’t know if Dublin City Council would be too happy with a big, bronze statue of me around.”
