A little Q&A for you. Take three members of three acclaimed Irish bands from the last ten years – Rollerskate Skinny, the Chicks and Johnny Pyro – and put them together in their own trio. What do you think it would sound like?

Given their pedigree, you might well venture that it would be a touch on the noisy side, nearly as noisy as our ill-advised meeting spot – the ‘beer garden’ (ie pavement) of a North Side city boozer. Nevertheless Stephen M, Annie Tierney and Mark Dennehy gamely battle to make themselves heard above the traffic.]

Mark starts by detailing the project’s roots, namely his early collaborations with Stephen. “We started off doing purely instrumental stuff a couple of years ago. Steve had some backing tracks and I played drums on top of them. We did that for a year or two, did a couple of gigs in London, under the name of Empire. Then we started to bring some songs in and began working with a singer called Linda Love. She had to go and do something else but it was sounding good so we thought about doing some more. We didn’t really know what we were doing but it was interesting. I’d known Annie for a long time and I asked her if she’d come and sing on a few tracks. It wasn’t a question of ‘forming’ a band, it just developed”.
How it has developed is the most surprising part. Kindness is, of all things, a classic sounding, string laden pop album stuffed full of melodies and catchy tunes, a record that owes more to the Supremes than it does My Bloody Valentine. Was it a conscious decision on the part of all three to move in a different direction to anything any of them had ever done? “I don’t think parts of it are a million miles away from what the Chicks would have been wanting to do”, says Annie. “But it was a very different way of working for me. Steve’s very calm, I was used to playing in a free-for-all with everybody squabbling”.
“I do like listening to the radio and current pop songs”, Mark continues. “I like melodies and that enjoyable sense of music. Then there’s the other side where you want to do something interesting as well. I don’t think that it’s possible to go and construct something with the pure aim of making it ‘poppy’, it doesn’t work. You don’t end with anything that’s good music. There’s a sound that people associate with pop; melody, simple enough songs that aren’t terribly long, and hooks”. Parts of it sound very like the sixties heyday of the girl pop group. Would that be Annie’s influence? “No, it might seem like that but I just do it as I’m told”.
Yet after it’s bright and breezy beginning, Kindness does move into slightly darker territory as it progresses, introducing perhaps some of the influences that you might have expected in the ghostly duets between Stephen and Annie. The latter is delighted with the feel of the record. “I like the way that it goes like that. You get into the vivid, poppy stuff at the beginning and then go with it”.
According to Stephen, however, there was no real plan to it all. “It was just serendipity, the fact that we all ended up together in the same room. Without getting all spiritual it was just one of those….well…..er…..spiritual things I guess. We’re not conformists but at the same time we’re not antagonists either, if that makes sense”. What makes them stand out though is that it doesn’t sound like an album recorded live in someone’s garage, as if often the wont these days. “There was live playing but we used sequencers as well. We’re all influenced by those kind of bands, from the Stooges to Franz Ferdinand, but the practicalities of it meant that we kind of built it up as a studio project. We have gigged a bit so we are a live band as well”.
“We were talking about this today”, says Annie, “we’ve gone completely the opposite way, built the record in the studio and then taken it out live”. Mark agrees. “If you look at the level of orchestration on the record, there’s no way we could reproduce that live, no band could. We did rehearse for a few months getting a feel for the songs and did a handful of gigs with backing tracks, without a bass player. Our live sound has never been about the full band thing”.
So having made a record in this manner, do the trio feel able to approach playing live with a slightly more fluid outlook. Mark nods. “I like the idea of playing around with it, not necessarily going in with the standard two guitars, bass and drums. We were never really locked into that mentality to start with. We’ve all played in standard guitar bands but you realise that there are other options. We don’t really know where it’s going, you just try and be critical of what you do. That sometimes means doing stuff that you wouldn’t normally do or even might be a little against. It’s been really interesting, especially when you don’t have any huge demand for a particular result. We had nothing to lose”.b

Kindness is out now on Reekus Records. The Radio appear at Dublin’s Temple Bar Music Centre on October 8.