The Hard Ground

“The Tom Jones thing is going to come back and bite me, isn’t it?!” Marlene Enright looks a little nervous. We’re a few minutes past talking musical influences in Dublin’s Library Bar and her bandmates are discussing playing wedding receptions to pay the bills. I’ve innocently asked if they slip in any covers of the Welsh crooner. Rewinding a quarter hour and, while Marlene’s co-songwriter Pat Carey notes the fiery Tom Waits influence his contributions carry and his tendency to wander around Eddie Vedder’s vocal range, Enright is citing Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. That is, until she recalls a sonically traumatic childhood. “Honestly, I can’t tell you what I grew up listening to,” the Cork singer says. “My parents had really bad taste! Like... Tom Jones. Smokie. Joe Dolan. Not cool.” As her bandmates giggle, Carey feigns horror. “Joe Dolan!? Don’t put that down as an influence!”

Consider it almost done. Luckily for Marlene, her band, and us, she has long since freed herself of the shackles of a dodgy record collection, bought some decent discs and funnelled exquisite, tasteful and not-corny-at all sounds into her own work. The set of songs she and Carey have fashioned over two years have now been breathed into full life by old college friends and bandmates – and a string quartet – on well-realised debut, Broken Conversations. Mixing folk tendencies with masterly, studied playing, it’s a refined effort that marks them out as something unique in what is no mean Southern scene at the moment.
The Bandon-based outfit’s story begins in the People’s Republic, with each member (the line-up being rounded off by Dave Duffy and Dave Ryan) heading off to university to study music – “and life!”, Carey smiles. Part of two groups of young musos that came together to create, hang-out and do whatever else students do (traffic cones were likely involved at some point), Carey and Enright initially acted as the two-piece Berries Blue before recognising the need to bolster their sound. They had a large pool of talent to choose from and they chose wisely. “We recorded an EP as Berries Blue a few years ago that the lads played on,” Marlene says.
“It wasn’t anything major, just something to have.” Pat continues. “We’d been together in different bands anyway, playing in various incarnations of things over the ears. So it was a no-brainer getting the other guys to ultimately join us.”
We all know the struggles new bands go through today and The Hard Ground are no exception, but the music keeps them going. And those moments, mostly live, when they look at each other and realise they’re slowly but surely getting somewhere. “We played the Triskel in Cork and it was beautiful,” says bassist Dave Duffy. “For one of the ballads, three of us don’t play, so I just remember us sitting there, taking in the full sound, the gorgeous lighting of the church. I was sitting there going, ‘this is fucking great’. It’s all about those moments and you’re just trying to get as many of those as you can.”
Marlene nods. “They keep you going. You only need a few moments!”
At the core of The Hard Ground’s sound is the interplay between the high tenderness of Marlene’s voice and Carey’s bluesy, earthy tones. Together five years, they have a strong dynamic that informs their approach to writing. Most of their numbers form dialogues, emotive conversations between a man and a woman. “In my head,” says Carey. “Broken Conversations happens inside in this bar, around different tables. Out of that, you naturally cover the break-up song, the make-up song, the argument song... Because that’s what people do when they’re in the pub, in Ireland anyway. But looking forwards, I can’t see the next one being based in the pub across the road or anything!”
They write separately, he says, and then bring the others the bones of a song, “like putting flesh on a skeleton.” How does the rhythm section assess the different styles Marlene and Pat possess? “From our point of view as the band, it was hard to figure out where they were coming from at the start,” proffers Duffy. “Now we’ve come to realise that Pat’s are the real ‘goers’ in the set, they have that high energy. And Marlene’s writing a lot of the more delicate stuff. But not always...”
Thus ensues a brief band debate about the specific exceptions to this rule, with the lot of them laughing, “We’ll just argue this amongst ourselves!”
Do heated discussions arise from time to time?
“I think there’s an honesty there,” says Duffy. “We can look at each other and say, ‘that’s great’ or ‘that’s not working’. It’s pretty clear which songs are the strong songs. We had about 20 and it was just a case of finding the ones that were right for the album. ‘Dance Of A Lady’, for example, was a bit hit-and-miss for a while. We changed it so many times, trying to figure out how it should sound. That song was probably the most work on the album.”
A considerable amount of work went into Broken Conversations, from the production down to the artwork. Recording began in February 2011. It was a labour of love. “Money-wise, it’s been tough enough,” admits Marlene. “We could have gone down a cheap route but we knew we had to go down the other, grander road.” That road led straight to brass sections and a string quartet from the National Symphony Orchestra. Did they arrive into the studio in black tie and formal dress. “No but the day they came in was pretty mad alright!” admits Marlene. “We wrote the scores and it was a bit scary giving them to these people that are so good.”
“I was absolutely shitting myself” exclaims Carey. “Definitely a bit ropey that day! But it was great to get them in. That’s the challenge we took up and we had the ambition to make it sounds like it was supposed to sound in our heads. There’s no point doing it half-assed. Realise our ambitions and get it done.
“We wanted the full package to be perfect. It’s a full, complete album. Not just a collection of songs. We’ve taken our time to do it but purposefully, so it represents us properly. It was important for us to have songs relating to each other. Not comparing it to some true greats like Dark Side Of The Moon or anything like that...” He pauses. “I just did, didn’t I?!”
Duffy imagines the resulting article: “Loves listening to Tom Jones! Better than Pink Floyd!” We all laugh at how absurd that would be...