Fortune favours the cold

“Small-town outsiders frequently believe more intensely in rock myths. Swallowing dreams whole, they can lack the worldliness, agnosticism and chameleon habits of Big City scenemakers. Kurt Cobain’s version of punk could be nothing but fundamentalist.”
Bill Graham, Hot Press, October 1993.

And so it is with The Blizzards. Mind you, the Mullingar band, whose debut album A Public Display Of Affection is out this month, betray little of the angst-ridden posturing of their grunge and second-wave punk antecedents.

Instead, they cleave to old-fashioned (but not quaint) entertainment values acquired from playing venues where rock ‘n’ roll was never meant to be played.
Acts who cut their teeth outside the hermetically sealed metropolitan bubbles tend to learn the practicalities early. A full dancefloor means a return booking, a sullen audience a tactical setback. Despite this though, the quintet have managed to dodge the rock-showband epithets hurled at acts like The Sawdoctors and The Revs.
“We decided we had to get out of our comfort zone as soon we as we could,” says Niall Breslin, the former rugby pro who fronts the band. “You can only get so far with your friends clapping, so we came up to Dublin straight away and played Eamonn Doran’s a few Friday nights, and almost before we knew it, we started creating this fanbase. At the time our songs were quite undeveloped, but we did have energy and we did put on a show. Now we’ve scrapped all the songs that weren’t good enough.”
Having developed under the tutelage of A-list producer Michael Beinhorn, The Blizzards can now boast one of the tightest and most single minded of Irish rhythm sections. That said, the ska-rock hybrid inflections that distinguished early singles like ‘Trouble’ are largely and surprisingly absent from their debut, as if those elements were an adolescent infatuation. That said, they still hold fast to the importance of an unrelenting groove.
“The Clash were my biggest influence,” says Niall. “When friends were listening to Metallica and Sepultura I was listening to Clash records. I didn’t even know what ska music was. But nobody in the world hates ska music. Not everybody loves it, but nobody hates it. I mean, I can’t dance, but when ska music comes on, you can’t help it.”
“The 2-Tone packaging was great too,” adds keyboardist Justin. “The thing about the Clash is the bass player (Paul Simenon) was brought up around a Jamaican community, and hearing records first hand at parties and gigs or whatever, you absorb it like a sponge. I think their music carries a certain kind of authenticity because of where they were from.”
Breslin, who seems to have his head screwed on a lot tighter than your average debutante, will also cite Weezer as a prime example of how to weld pop sensibilities to post-punk attitude. Me, I think they echo the spit ‘n’ polish manifestoes of Rocket From The Crypt or Rancid.
“We haven’t reinvented the wheel, but it is fresh,” Niall says. “We’re a pop band, and there is the humourous side of it, but a song like ‘Why Do You Fancy Scumbags?’, that’s a funny song but also a sad song. Beinhorn, when I was doing the vocals for it, he wanted to be torn between laughing and crying. 20 takes later: ‘You haven’t got me.’ And I sang this kind of out of key, weak vocal and he goes, ‘That’s the one. You got me! I don’t know whether to cry or fuckin’ laugh!’
The Beinhorn angle is a story in itself. Rivals might be entitled to inquire as to how a Mullingar band goes about enlisting the services of an LA producer whose client list includes the Chili Peppers, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden and Hole. The answer lies at least partially in the band’s more extroverted attributes, evident in tunes like ‘Freaky’ and ‘Miss Fantasia Preaches’.
“He brought that out of us,” Niall affirms. “We sent him some tracks and got a phone call and he was going, ‘Look , I think you’ve got an awful lot of potential, you’ve got all the bits, I just think you need to gel them together. I’m very interested in doing an album; what kind of album do you want to do; where do you want to do it; have you got the budget?’
“He’d never done a debut album, or a UK or Irish band, and he was scared shitless coming over to do it, he’ll tell you himself. And he told me the first day, ‘If this doesn’t get finished it’s not the end of the world.’ And I told him, ‘Michael, it will get fuckin’ finished.’ Cos we prepared as much as we could. I think he knew from day one that we were going to do it.
“But he thought the songs had character; they weren’t shoegazing songs, they were quite obvious, and he liked that, he was kind of sick of doing these cryptic ‘deep’ songs. And what potentially could have been a really flat record, he turned it into a record with personality.”
It is, I suggest, an uncommonly assertive record for a debut.
“Confident,” Niall says, nodding. “That was him. Obviously we were playing the instruments, but when Declan was playing the drums, during the takes, Michael would be on his bass drum screaming at him, going, ‘Will you hit the fucking thing!’ I lost fingernails. He used to be in your ear screaming at you really aggressively, but it was really friendly at the same time: ‘What kind of fuckin’ album do you wanna fuckin’ make!’ So intense.
“We’re very close friends with him still, we’re in contact every week. When we realised we had him, I started reading about different bands he’d done, and even in the Red Hot Chili Peppers biography they were saying, ‘This guy is a ballbreaker’, but he was a massive sweetheart. He was tough, but he was a psychological producer. I got an email off him before he arrived, and it pretty much Doctor Phil-ed me, it was a psychological evaluation in an email, and the guy had never met me, and every fuckin’ thing he said was right. And that’s how he gets it out of you.”
I must admit though, I find it hard to identify the solid and sensible Breslin as the author of such screeds as ‘Dangerous Bitches’, ‘Trouble’ and ‘Black Holes’. Quite frankly, I worry about the kind of women he’s been dating.
“We’re not trying to get attention with these titles,” he protests, “but ‘Dangerous Bitches’ is about a girl that I did meet, you know these people who pull the feminist card on you? ‘You’re so sexist!’ To me, feminism… my mum would be a very strong woman, I’ve three sisters – I can’t be rude to women. I’ve so much respect for feminism, but she just made it look bad. She was really attractive and I got chatting to her and I must’ve said something that… She was going to get her brothers after me and get me killed and all this stuff. That’s not feminism! And then I called her ‘babycakes’!”
One might ponder what it is that compels us, male or female, to seek out the odd and even outright unhinged in our opposite numbers.
“Tell me about it. I used to fancy Anthea Turner! It’s a common theme to the whole album. I think the relationship between man and woman is the strongest theme, the most talked-about thing. I’ve seen successful mates break up with girls and then that success is just gone. ‘On The Right Track’, that whole song is about if you’ve got strong family and strong friends, no matter what goes pear-shaped for you in a relationship, you can get through it.”
One of the great themes of drama through the ages: isolation as a psychological disease.
“(French sociologist and anthropologist) Emile Durkheim’s theory about 80% of suicides… when you’re on your own and you’ve time to think, everything becomes a problem. I’m not one of those people who needs to go away to a quiet room to write songs. I like writing songs with people around me. Most of the songs on that album were written on my mobile phone while driving home, and by the time I got to Mullingar I’d have a song written. I don’t need to feel bad or have someone treat me like shit so I can write a horrible song.”
Of course, the other element in the great 21st century teenage and 20-something malaise is alcohol. Government task forces assigned to tackle binge drinking might do worse than dispatch a sociologist to tour the country with The Blizzards.
“People think it’s hilarious in Ireland, and there’s a serious, serious, serious problem,” Breslin says. “And the government don’t give a shite because at the end of the day the vintners are getting their money, the government are getting the revenue. I don’t write about it because I’d get too emotional about it and the music will start being affected, I’ll probably start writing moany political stuff. But it is something I do feel strongly about.”
Presumably Breslin’s professional sporting background disqualified him from the usual alcoholic rites of passage?
“I did drink, but not much. With the rugby there was an extremely professional ethic pushed into me, and I accepted that, I wanted it. But when I gave up the rugby, I sat down with the band and said, ‘This is the way I want to bring this, professionally. We practice here, no one’s late, you do individual practice… It was quite a regimental thing, like, ‘You gotta trust me, if we do this, it’ll work.’ ’Cos I saw it work with me in the rugby. I scarificed stuff and worked hard and was hard on myself, but things accelerated a lot quicker. I took a professional ethic that was pushed into me and brought it to the band and everyone accepted it.”
The parallels between team and band psychology are quite pronounced, I imagine.
“The five of us fight all the time, but they’re little fights. Bands break up when you let it build up and a vein pops in your head and you say something unfixable. Apart from Justin, I’ve known the band for 22 years. Of course we could split up, but our families are interknit now; my mum is best friends with our drummer’s mum, it’s interlinked, which is a very, very good thing, it makes it a lot stronger.”
Justin: “It’s like an extended family. They’re our friends, but our colleagues too. And without them we’re nothing.”