a plague on all your houses

THE ARTIST Guy Peellaert specialised in painting portraits of rock legends as semi-mythical figures: Leon Russell as Count Dracula, Bo Diddley as a gunslinger, Ian Anderson as a tramp. His best known work was probably Rock Dreams, published in 1973, with Nik Cohn providing the text. One imagines that if Peellaert were ever to turn his hand to The Plague Monkeys, he'd cast the Dublin quartet as a team of intrepid paranormal investigators.
Over the last two years, the Monkeys have been chasing all manner of musical ciphers. It's only natural, then, that their debut album Surface Tension should reverberate with the sounds of the beyond.
"It kind of reminds me of those spooky programmes that were out about 15 years ago," Monkeys drummer Thomas Haugh admits. "Like Sapphire And Steel, Blake's Seven, they all had this ominous feel to them."
"Day Of The Triffids!" guitarist Donal O'Mahony pipes up. "It was the cheapest programme ever made. They just had these big huge plastic flowers, four or five actors and this newly-built housing estate for a set, but because of that, there was this atmosphere."
"It was almost a serendipity thing," adds singer Carol Keogh. "By accident they found something that was even more disturbing than anything any hi-tech graphics could've done."
"And the kids really got it," Donal continues. "When I watched it as a kid with my parents, they saw the tacky element to it, but I was always freaked out."
"Doctor Who scared the shit out of me," Carol confesses. "I used to hide from Tom Baker's face when he came up!"
Perhaps that's the root of the Monkeys' phobias. Certainly, a song like 'Thirty Times Three' suggests some late-night existential panic attack, possibly brought on by too much late-night TV.
"That was the feeling I got off it as well," Donal agrees. "When I put down the music for it, even before I got it to Carol, I brought it downstairs and put it on the hi-fi, and my little sister was knocking around at the time, and I followed her around the room with the carving knife in my hand doing this in time with the music (imitates Psycho-style stabbing motion). It worked! And Tom added the glockenspiel loop and it doubled the effect."
"It's small, it's tiny, it's little, it's in front of your head, but it's really relentless," Carol elaborates. "There's something about it that's quite disturbing. You can't switch it off."
We're sitting in the bar of the Parliament Hotel, on a Thursday evening in April. The three Monkeys before me (bassist Barry Roden is elsewhere) exude the good-humoured confidence of a group who know that they've just made that rare commodity - a truly startling Irish debut album. (Mind you, bearing the imminent Perry Blake and Pelvis releases in mind, it looks like they'll soon have company.)
But what sets this band apart from so many of their contemporaries is an unfussy but emphatic refusal to do anything that doesn't suit them. Hence, these Monkeys have dodged all the usual major label courting rituals, overseen their own promo campaigns, collaborated closely with director Brian O'Malley on the videos, and helmed their own album, a collection of haunting but rhythmically sinewy songs.
Surface Tension delivers on all the early promise of last year's Navigator EP, spilling over with riches like the undulating 'Safe', the sublime 'White Feathers' or the star-crossed summer sonnet 'Bloomsday'. The latter is certainly a strong contender for the most heart-aching tune of the year.
"That's probably the only one that's in any way nostalgic," Carol reluctantly admits.
So what's the story behind her obvious discomfort at discussing the tune?
"Summer romance," she winces. "That's putting it in two words; it's as much as I'm going to say."
And fair enough too. The Plague Monkeys are the kind of band who are reluctant to spoil the listener's personal interpretation of their music with the gory details of their own private lives. But strangely enough, in contrast to the rather impressionistic, even pastoral nature of the music, Carol's lyrics often employ language that is quite analytical, almost scientific. Phrases like "glyphs and graphs", "a plain white topograph", "studying auroras", and words like "units", "limits" and "laws" suggest pragmatism over pantheism.
"I have an overriding theory that science is not really quantifiable at all," Carol muses. "In fact, it's incredibly creative and artistic. I'm inspired by the elegance of theories when I read about science, as I do quite a lot. Sometimes I find that the language used is, I wouldn't say emotive, but I suppose it conjures up impressions for me. There are a lot of new words, neologisms, if you like, and a lot of Latin words that hark back to arcane times, and they have meanings that maybe scientists haven't considered.
"Art and science only became divorced maybe a few hundred years ago," she continues, "and prior to that, art, science and religion were pretty much all of a piece, they were all a sort of hierarchy of creativity. If you're going to address music in any kind of creative way you have to be systematic in your thinking, otherwise you're really just throwing oil at a canvas and hoping it lands right. I mean, music is mathematics to a large degree, but you don't necessarily have to know the entire theory to understand that much."
"One of our philosophies is to allow the song to breathe," Donal expounds, "to allow the spaces between the notes to be heard."
Without detracting one iota from the other musicians' artfully constructed soundscapes, it must be said that Carol's voice is a remarkable instrument in itself. Does she consider it a gift?
"I suppose it's a gift in that it's a very ordinary gift," she concedes. "Some people can make closets, I can sing. I don't see it as being extraordinary."
How does she feel when her voice is compared to other people's?
"Bored. I don't take it seriously anymore, I kind of got affronted for the first few times it happened, and then it happened so often, I was compared to so many people."
"It's a girl thing, isn't it?" Donal argues.
"Well now, to be entirely honest, it happens much more to female singers than to male singers," Carol admits. "I don't know why. I've been compared to people who are well out of my range, never mind anything else. Joan Armatrading, Janis Joplin, I mean c'mon! Joni Mitchell, maybe I'll go with 'cos she's a great writer . . ."
"It's a very lazy thing to do," Donal says, "and it makes me feel lazy."
"Eventually, if I become known, or at least established in any way whatsoever, I'm gonna sound like me," Carol continues, "and then other people will unfortunately be charged with sounding like me, and it's pathetic, but there you go."
"What about during your performance in New York?" Thomas prompts.
"That was wonderful!" Carol guffaws. "We'd just played 'Star Country', and this blonde, jeans-with-turn-ups woman sitting in the front piped up: (adopts squeaky US accent) 'Is that the kinda star you like?' I thought I'd misheard her, I didn't know what she meant, so I said, 'Pardon me?' And she said, 'Do you like Mazzy Star?' And the relationship deteriorated from there. Actually, I was relatively polite, even though she completely missed the point."
"Nevertheless, I ravished her later!" Thomas grins evilly.
"Tom has a thing for big chunky turn-ups on the jeans," Donal confides.
And Carol, when she was at art college, had a thing for lighthouses, hence the dedication on the album sleeve: 'Last Watch' dedicated to the last lightkeepers, 24th March 1997.
"The last lighthouse to be automated in Ireland was the Baily Lighthouse in Howth," she explains. "That was in March '97. The song is more or less saying, regardless of how mechanised society has become, there's nothing that can transplant the human touch or soul."
This is a philosophy that informs the Plague Monkeys attitude to technology. While they readily admit that rhythm is a vital element of their sound, the band shy away from off-the-rack samples and flavour-of-the-month beats, preferring to improvise their own loops out of happy accidents, salvaged sounds, odd fragments.
And, just as the band express a love of low-budget TV penny dreadfuls, they also own up to a weakness for the retro sci-fi feel of string-driven things that go bump in the dark, antiques like theremin, Chamberlains, and mellotrons. Carol in particular, it seems, has a soft spot for moog synthesizers.
"The little modulator thing," she enthuses. "The little knob."
"Oh matron!" coos Donal in vintage Carry On Up The Oscillator style.
And with Ms. Keogh's pleas not to use that as a concluding remark still ringing in my ears, I leave this particular barrel of monkeys to their very fertile future. n
* The Plague Monkeys album Surface Tension is out now on Crosstown.