Braggadocio may well be the last refuge of the vacuous indie scoundrel (hello Shed Seven, Northern Uproar and Cast) but surely it’s a cold, cold heart that fails to be warmed by the lippy, Napoleonic outpourings of a group of young turks on the make.
Dirty Stevie may have been together for less than two years, but such is the gusto with which they’ve set about the business of being a band – stoking feuds, bellowing through gigs, knocking out thematically questionable anthems – that their place within the Belfast music scene seems secure.
Not, of course, that they need telling.
“I stick my neck on the line and say we’re every bit as good as anyone out there,” says lead singer Smitty. “Our new CD and the way we’ve developed live over the last few months, we’d eat and shit any other band in the North. I think we’ve got our own reputation now based on the fact that there’s no one else like us. It’s a Belfast name. We’re a Belfast band with a Belfast attitude. A street mentality. And the further I go the louder I’ll shout about it.”
“There’s never really been a big band from Belfast,” adds guitarist Ryan. ”The bands that have made it from Northern Ireland have been rural boys. Down there you’ve more time on your hands, up in Belfast there’s probably too many distractions. So, that’s the aim: to be the biggest band ever to come out of Belfast.”
Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is an entirely laudable ambition. As is the band’s desire to appeal beyond the confines of Belfast’s traditional gig demography and to bring the Dirty Stevie sound to those who come from areas on the city’s map habitually stamped with Here Be Monsters.
“I think we’ve got the most diverse audience that anyone has,” states Smitty. ” We’ve people going to our gigs who never go to gigs. We’ve got kids coming from Belvoir and New Lodge. People from the estates who have never been upstairs in The Empire or in Katy Daly’s, they all come and they all fucking love us. It’s because there’s no shit with us. Like ‘Do You Wanna Have Sex With Me’, that’s straight to the point and people like that. Who gives a fuck about these Emo boys gurning because their girlfriend’s dropped them? Nobody wants to go and sit through that.”
‘Do You Wanna…’ (a song that has been the subject of so much debate within Nordy indie circles that it has qualified for its own acronym) is, depending on your viewpoint, either a juvenile, one-joke, pub-rock slog, or a stomping howl of perpetually-horny frustration. Whatever, in a scene that normally conducts itself in a resolutely minor key, it was a tune that stuck out like a Van Damme cameo in a Wes Anderson film.
According to Ryan, “It’s just an old 12 bar blues that came about as a laugh. Bands wouldn’t have the balls to write that. It’s just a roaring, brash record. I’ve always loved Iggy Pop and The New York Dolls and that’s kinda how I look at it. But what we’re doing now knocks ten shades of shit out of it.”
The four piece’s latest CD is the result of a productive spell working with former Scheer man Neal Calderwood. And they hope that the four tracks show they’re more than capable of backing up all the stake-raising rhetoric.
Smitty: “It’s a fucking call to war but it’s still only the tip of the iceberg. What you’ll hear there is what our lives let us put in. See if we ever got the chance to make a proper record, I guarantee you it’ll have people foaming at the mouth. I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t believe it. We’ve got something special. I know people who would love to go and see gigs, have a pint, have a laugh, but because they don’t think the local scene has anything to do with their lives they’d rather go somewhere and watch a covers band. We’re the only band that gets those kind of people down to our shows and gets them up dancing on the fucking tables.”