They may have a name that suggests shrinking violets but Dublin three-piece Wilt have as strong and punchy a set of guitar pop tunes as you are likely to hear.
Formed from the ashes of Kilkenny guitar-poppers Kerbdog, Wilt are fast leaving those references behind as they develop their own sound and their own fanbase. Their current, double a-sided single, It s All Over Now/Working For The Man is garnering rave reviews in all the right places and is picking up a fair amount of airplay.
It s great, cos it s our first real single and we didn t know what to expect, enthuses Wilt frontman, Cormac Battle. Everything is very favourable but it s early days yet. There s time to put a halt to that and say that we re the biggest load of crap ever.
Having been through the record company mill with his former band, Cormac is entitled to be quite cynical about this business we call pop, but he and his band (which also includes former Kerbdog drummer Darragh Butler) are enjoying things this time round.
We were disillusioned by all that stuff after Kerbdog and we gave up music completely for a while, Cormac says. But it s like a virus really, once you get it you can t get rid of it. He got a job and I went back to college and we started making music again, along with bassist Mick Murphy.
When you re 19 and you sign a record contract, most bands think this is your road straight to wealth and fame, but getting a record deal and putting out records is probably the easiest part of the whole thing. The hard part is trying to get people to listen to them. If that doesn t happen, we have all our defence mechanisms in place to be able to accept that, so we don t feel as much pressure as we used to.
Why not?
We don t have budgets to be hassled and pressured any more, he explains. Everything was done on a shoestring budget and we recorded the album and the single in the evenings and at the weekends, whenever the studio was available. We didn t have the time to sit down and try out different things. That took the pressure out of it, in a way, because we didn t have time to think about what we should do, what s the zeitgeist at the moment and all that kind of bullshit.
Plus, it didn t cost a million pounds to make. We don t feel under pressure to a record company to sell 500,000 copies. In fact, I could probably go round with my rucksack full of CDs and recoup the cost of the album if I sold them on the street.
The debut album, Bastinado, is set for a February 2000 release. It was going to be this year but it would be pretty pointless releasing it along with Cliff Richard and whoever else is putting out millennium albums, admits Cormac.
What Wilt do, and what some would argue that Sir Cliff used to do, is write great pop songs. In fact, their current single calls the guitar pop majesty of Sugar to this listener s mind. Cormac is proud of the fact that his band inhabit planet pop, and, yes, he does want to end up sharing chart space with the likes of Geri Halliwell.
Yeah, of course, and anyone who says they don t are telling lies, he says. It would be great, but we haven t set our sights on that, because it fuckin hurts too much when these things don t happen. I would really like these songs to be recognised for what they are and not for who we are, but, yeah, hopefully they will reach the masses. n
Wilt play Whelan s on October 28th, supported by UK band Muse.