Skinny Dipping

ONE OF the most widely held mis-conceptions about the rock 'n' roll business is that the moment you scrawl your 'X' on a contract, you can forget all this 'suffering for your art' nonsense and move into an elegant country retreat where snorting showbiz sherbet and indulging in all manner of perverted sexual practices is the order of the day.
"We haven't got the house yet," rues Rollerskate Skinny guitarist and brother-of-you-know-who Jimi Shields, "but the other part of the equation's coming on nicely!
"Seriously, I can vividly remember arriving in London last summer and sitting at the railway station with absolutely no place to go. We had one number, which was supposed to be our lifeline, but the guy was out and we were homeless. It had to be done though - there were too many distractions and reasons not to do things in Dublin and we wanted to be somewhere where we could pick up decent support gigs."
And has this plan of almost Baldrick-like cunning paid off?
"Well," chips in singer Ken Griffin, "since moving to England, we've played with Silverfish, Buffalo Tom, Mercury Rev, Th' Faith Healers and Verve which has been great experience and gotten us to the stage where we can do our own headliners and pull a crowd. For the first couple of months, we just stayed in the flat waiting for the 'phone to ring and once it started it never stopped."
It might have done wonders for their profile but, as Ken explains, it had a disastrous effect on their already ailing bank balance.
"If you get £50 for a support in the UK, you're doing well. There are so many bands willing to do it for free that actually getting a few quid is a bonus. Add to that the rental of gear and a van and most gigs actually cost you money.
"There's no point whinging about it - you either accept the rules and abide by them or you become a postman or some other job which guarantees a weekly pay packet. We weren't forced into this destitute musician lark, we made the decision ourselves."
A combination of rave live reviews and pretty much universal acclaim for their debut Novice EP, soon turned Rollerskate Skinny into one of the hippest names to drop in indie circles.
"We were fortunate," resumes Jimi modestly, "in that when we arrived in England, the scene was rather stale and people recognised that we were offering something a bit different. Journalists weren't able to put a label on us which, perversely, became a label in itself. Er, if you follow my drift!"
Oh, we're right there with you, Jimi. The media ballyhoo surrounding the Skinnies lead to Beggar's Banquet supremo Martin Mills taking a fatherly interest in the band and when he decided to launch a new subsidiary, Placebo, they were top of his shopping list.
"Martin isn't really involved in the day to day running of Placebo," adds Ken, "but it's wonderful knowing that the bloke who heads the company is as much a music fan as he is a businessman. Beggar's Banquet is a bit like a mini-Virgin in that it started out as a record shop and then became a label during the late '70's. They made their money with Tubeway Army - which means something good came out of Gary Numan!"
As well as playing host to so-bad-they-were-fucking-awesome punks The Lurkers and the now abbreviated Southern Death Cult, Beggar's were also responsible for Ivor Biggun's immortal 'Winker's Song (Misprint)' which drew strange analogies between self-gratification and Davy Crockett hats.
"The story's a little complicated," he continues, "but when we initially moved to London, it was because we had interest from Chrysalis Publishing and they helped finance Novice which we released through our own label. We sent a demo to Beggar's when we were still called Shake - they apparently loved it but the tape chewed, we changed contact numbers and they had no idea we'd become Rollerskate Skinny. Ian, the A...R guy, only made the connection when we met up six months later."
If you want to sample the schizophrenic delights of Rollerskate Skinny ahead of their Sunday night appearance on the Hot Press stage at Feile, you could do a lot worse than taking a blunt instrument to your piggy bank and investing in their latest Trophy 12". Therapy? and The Jesus ... Mary Chain are names that immediately spring to mind but these are merely reference points, not a hard and fast manifesto.
"We're also piecing together an album track by track," concludes Jimi, "and once that's out the way, we may come back to Dublin and indulge ourselves for a while. Who knows, we may even move into that country mansion."