CRACKING THE WHIP

Whipping Boy come on stage and they don't care. They don't need nobody else, as one of their songs tell us - just themselves. Whipping Boy don't care about fitting in. They don't care about measuring up. They don't care about making the right moves for the right people. They basically don't give a fuck about what anybody else thinks. They're out there to do their own thing, to take it as far as they can go. They're enjoying themselves.

Having set their own agenda, having mapped their own territory, they are delighted to see others get up and get moving within it. At a recent Project Arts Centre gig, there were smiles all around, and as the band later admitted, a feeling that for the first time, they had truly connected with their audience. "A normal Whipping Boy gig," as bassist, Myles, puts it, "is for people to stand around, and more or less be looking at what we're doing. And they certainly don't seem to react. And we seem to be always fighting with a crowd. Maybe it's in our own heads, but because they don't respond - up until now - in a manner which kinda hasn't been encouraging to us, we've kinda went out there feeling, well we kinda have to win them over. Like, it's always a struggle against them."

But at that Friday night gig, it was, according to Myles, "an experience that we'd never had before. It gave us a better buzz than we've ever had at any other gig. To have people up jumping and dancing and singing the songs, you know, singing mostly the ones that haven't come out on record. At a time when things haven't been going as well for us as we would have liked, it has made us want to keep on going and keep on trying."

Finally, the seeds of distortion had swept off the stage and rooted and grown into a night where everybody who came had a journey and everybody who left had a memory. It had taken a while.

So what is it about Whipping Boy that makes them different to other Irish bands? Well, there's an element of danger to them that is in scarce supply elsewhere. They have always been prepared to take risks. They have always wanted to try for something else, to reach a point out there where music melts through into the unknown. In their growth and development they have looked to true pioneers for inspiration.

"We'll always look back and think of bands like the Velvet Underground as influences, Sonic Youth too," Myles explains. "We would like to think that it's the spirit of these bands that we have. It's probably a fuck ye all attitude that we've had from the start. We went out and basically didn't give a fuck what people thought of us. But, at the same time, we were out there and we were trying to entertain them. But we never tried to compromise what we do. We haven't changed anything to compromise to what we thought people might like. We've always remained basically doing the same thing. And I think people are beginning to appreciate that now. We're trying to keep challenging people."

If you've ever been to a Whipping Boy gig, then you will have found it impossible to ignore the presence of frontman, Fearghal E. McKee. He entertains, disturbs, turns on, pisses off, and behaves like only someone who is addicted to performance can. He makes himself a centre that alternatively attracts and repulses, while around him the band build their sonic, melodic assault.

Fearghal had always something of rock 'n' roll in him. "I remember being in school, I think it was in religion class," he relates. "And the priest was going around asking, 'what do you want to be?' And I said, 'I want to be a pop star'. And he said, 'don't be such a fucking fool'. And he got really thick over me saying this. And everybody wanted to be an accountant and all this. And I was only just bollocksing around; I didn't really mean it. I was just saying it, just to see what his reaction would be. And he just completely condemned me, like really tore strips off me in front of the lads. I think from that time on I knew that I'd have to do something different."

Performance for Fearghal is like skipping with a trip-wire. "To me it's dangerous sometimes when you perform," he explains. "It's like somebody going parachuting. Especially in the early days when you had no control and you were just going crazy. And you were saying, fuck it, if it works, it works, let's keep on going for it. That was the whole exciting thing about it. You have the possibility within yourself to take everything - and everybody else who's into it - as far as they want to go. As far as it takes them. No restrictions, no limitations, no control. For that half and hour or an hour, you are completely free of all that you've ever learnt. It's all primal, I suppose."

Any art worth talking about understands the primate in all of us. It also says something about its time. Whipping Boy say something about Ireland in 1993. They channel distorted feelings into a sound and stage show that rips a schizophrenic path through despair in search of some hope and light. They want to entertain but they also want to act as some sort of liberator from the particularly Irish emotional repression most of us have suffered throughout our lives.

As Fearghal puts it: "In a way, what I want Whipping Boy to achieve - in a live situation anyway - is to get rid of all that repression. I wouldn't mind if there was orgies there on the floor. Just people letting go and not being afraid of all these topics. If you get through all that I think you'll have a much better idea of what you want to do and where you want to go, and what type of person you want to be."

One of the topics Whipping Boy have had the bravery to confront head on is mental illness. The first lines of 'A Natural' - from their, as yet, unreleased EP - are: "Today is not a good day for me/For today I found out I was mad." The honesty of this song is at first disturbing, then refreshing and in many ways, liberating. Because, unless I'm an exception, I know lots of people who hide beneath the dark shadows of their minds. I sometimes wonder if I do it myself. We are afraid to talk of mental illness in Ireland, terrified of the shame we expect it will bring. But - and this is where art can play such an essential role - to find out that we are not alone, can be that first vital step in searching for a cure.

"The actual thing about honesty is that, first of all, what I had to discover was, that to write anything properly at all, you have to first of all write honestly about yourself," Fearghal explains. "And you get through all the pages of waffle and you cut through all the bullshite and you get down to exactly trying to, I suppose explain the whole scenario of what you're doing, where you're going."

'A Natural' explores not just madness but also the factors which may have led to it. Like coming from a broken home. Fearghal wrote 'A Natural' after his parents split up. He had spent several days on his own in a flat, reading, writing, drinking, bored to hell, and wondering what the fuck anything meant anymore. "You saw everything that you were brought up with, and the people who you respected and who you admired, fall down and do the exact same things, and behave in the exact same way as you feel," he explains. "And you can see a pattern then. And you ask yourself, when you're forty are you going to be like that? Are you going to still be making those same mistakes, that you as their child have been making. And that bugged me an awful lot. That worried me because there was some aspects of it I couldn't stand."

However, despite all such troubles, he still believes that the future is worth hoping for.

" Oh yeah!" he says. "If you don't have hope you don't have nothing. Hope keeps you well. Can you imagine living without any hope? I mean, honestly. You can't get out of things."

Hope has certainly helped Whipping Boy survive the last year or so. Their debut album - Submarine - though critically acclaimed, didn't sell well. Added to this, there have been acrimonious dealings with their record company. And then there was the Hot Press interview last year, when they laid into all and sundry.

Myles, in typical Whipping Boy fashion, is unrepentant. "I think, looking back on that interview, there was an awful lot of things said there, that for our part were true. If we see shit, we like to call it shit. The only parts in the interview I regret is the parts where we might have got personal with one or two people. Other than that, I don't see any wrong in calling something as you see it."

Straight up. No nonsense. And it is this sort of attitude that has allowed Whipping Boy to - as Ice Cube is wont to say - 'fuck y'all', and keep doing their own thing. Added to this is the fact that they're a very tight unit. "We've been together now for four or five years and we've become a real unit as regards four different individuals flowing into the one stream," Fearghal explains. "The one bonding thing that we have is the music and that's the most important thing. And out of that we're still the greatest friends."

Judging by the excellence of their recent performances and their many superb new songs, Whipping Boy music may well seep through into the pop mainstream. They certainly deserve it, as they have brought to the Irish music scene a genuine edge of danger and excitement.

I asked guitarist, Paul, what was the dream that fueled them during these years of waiting. "On the Velvet Underground album - 1969 - there's a passage on the inside sleeve. It's like an essay, and it talks about 'Heroin' being played in fifty years time, and children studying it in school. I wouldn't like to go to those lofty extremes, but I'd like to think that we will leave one album, which not even necessarily a body of people, but even a few individuals will cherish and say that that was part of their growing up."