Band names are a scourge. Musicians spend months agonising over a suitable handle, only for its meaning to become irrelevant as soon as the music insinuates itself into the public consciousness.
Having said that, the coolest bands also had the coolest names: The Stooges, the Velvet Underground, The Cramps…
“And then The Beatles,” declares Humanzi singer/guitarist Shaun Mulrooney, crawling out from under his hangover in the Library Bar, “what a shit name!”
And a shit band too, I might add. But Humanzi’s moniker is one of the better ones we’ve heard. The North Dublin quartet, whose first album Tremors has just been released, make a racket commensurate with all of the above mentioned acts (bar the mop-tops) with a dollop of Suicide, the Jesus & Mary Chain, BRMC, Can and Evil Heat-era Primal Scream thrown in for good measure. The name derives from an urban myth about a post-war military-industrial complex experiment that… well, over to Shaun:
“It comes from an actual conspiracy theory to do with NASA cloning humans from chimpanzees,” he explains. “It was an idea they had in the '60s where this actual chimp was cloned because he was as human as humans are. He’d sit at tables eating dinner and walk on his legs. The chimp actually tried it on with the owner’s wife.”
Suits you sir. Humanzi often sound like primitives trapped in underground bunkers hooting and gibbering and hurling faeces at blinking banks of HAL 3000 computers.
“Funnily enough,” Shaun continues, “not a lot of people have asked about the name. I’m quite fascinated by conspiracies.”
He could sing that if he put a tune to it. I get the impression Mulrooney and his comrades (guitarist Colm Rutledge, bass player Gary Lonergan and drummer Brian Gallagher) feel like they’re operating in an exclusion zone, quarantined from beardy bards and Byrds copyists. Do they have an outsider complex?
“Well no, because we have our mates in bands and our own little buzz going. But as far as HotPress and the rest of the mainstream media are concerned, yeah, we’re outsiders ’cos we’re only starting to come into it now.”
Me, I like Humanzi. Yes, Tremors could at times use a few more Kraftwerk-standard melodies to balance out the thrust and the throb, but I think it’s a pretty fine debut – although that’s not an opinion shared by many of my journalistic colleagues.
“Yeah,” Shaun responds, “I read a review, and someone said, ‘I’ve always had a suspicion about Humanzi, and a lot of people on the Hot Press forum would agree.’ It’s like this agenda. You’ve always had a suspicion? What the hell does that mean? I honestly don’t give a shit who likes us. I always find it better that people really hate you than just find you okay. I think that’s a really natural thing.”
Besides, musicians frequent message boards at their peril. They’re like primary school all over again. Even the subscribers to official band websites are vicious in their criticisms.
“You probably won’t believe me,” says Shaun, “but I don't look at forums, because if someone says something good about you, great, if they don’t, no matter who you are, it’s like reading a hate letter from an ex-girlfriend. It’s gonna get to you, so don’t read it.”
Fair enough. But what’s all this about MTV refusing to play the video for ‘Diet Pills & Magazines’?
“They just wouldn’t play it. They were giving us a couple of reasons, one was because of political overtones, we used footage of the SS marching and stuff, and there was a man tied to a tree. And they said there was rude content: pictures of strippers from magazine cutouts, yet they’ll play Aguilera in a g-string and see-through top, getting completely exploited. It’s really weird.
“And we didn’t spend loads of money on it, so it looked rough. Everything needs to be a little bit shiny and safe and pretty these days. Most videos out there are so formulaic. A performance in a room, everyone looks really clean running around an indie club. Like the emo bullshit that’s going around, made to look really nasty and stuff, but they’d be having their avocado for breakfast. The emo thing especially is like a completely manufactured selling machine. For some reason it appeals to the middle class angst generation: ‘My life is so hard, my daddy only has three Mercs.’ Hopefully they’ll grow out of it.”
So, conspiracy theories, paranoia and persecution complexes – expect to find Humanzi well up for inclusion on the soundtrack of any remake of dystopian parables like Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 or Brave New World. I suspect Shaun would get along just fine with the late great Philip K Dick, holed up in his Californian eyrie, hammering out that 8000 page exegesis on a battered typewriter, deranged from sleep deprivation, dope and speed. And if there’s one thing paranoiacs share with would-be rock stars, it’s a rampant messiah complex. Or at least, a Neo complex, believing they’re the only one who truly understands the extent of the brainwashing and mind control at work in this CCTV, surveillance-plagued, text-message and e-mail indexed world. How does Shaun plead?
“Well, I don’t think I’m God by any means.”
But he is a paranoiac?
“Who isn’t? I’m paranoid about consumerism. I did read 1984 and realised how real that is, how that’s coming into what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. I was shocked when I went to America and had to have laser images taken of my eye and fingerprints. Like, I’m a person. You don’t have the right to do this, to have my life there in front of you. What gives people the right to do that, in Shannon, in our country? And to walk through Dublin Airport, and you’re in American territory, that just makes me sick. I don’t think a lot of people realise just how controlled we are. But I’m not going to say I’m anti-capitalist ’cos I’m as big a part of it as anyone. I have a Nokia phone. I’m selling CDs in a big corporation.
“But mobile phones are really freaking me out. My nephew has a phone, a kid, immediately into this world of people sending them messages, just that feeling of…I know it sounds dramatic, but nobody’s safe, y’know? So there is that paranoid vibe, not only about consumerism or capitalism, just stuff I was feeling at the time I was writing some of the tunes, paranoia about relationships, everyday frustrations.”
But aren’t paranoiacs just like people who need to believe in God – or at least an all-governing, bearded Big Brother – rather than consider the awful possibility that the universe may be completely predicated on chaos, and what seem like meaningful patterns are just random convergences of coincidental events? The really scary thought is not that somebody’s controlling everything, but that nobody is. If half the so-called anarchists in the world were forced to deal with true anarchy, they’d soil their pants and run screaming back to the gated estates that spawned them.
“Well, even MySpace started off completely anarchic, no sponsorship,“ says Shaun,“and you turn it on now and they have people in every country finding out what TV programmes they like through talking to their friends, what drink they like, huge marketing campaigns based around it. Stuff like that could’ve been great and it gets taken over by the dollar. That’s all life is – a big market research survey!”