It’s a nationwide thing, but still, no one’s going to be more excited than our Galway brethren at the reissue of Toasted Heretic’s Charm and Arrogance and Mindless Optimism in one lovingly remastered package.
The originals, if you still have yours, will have by now all but disintegrated, some 20 years after the cult band tried to write a song as perfect as ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’.
The self-sabotaging Galway group would have been notorious for their stubborn commercial displacement if, well, they hadn’t been so successful in that endeavour.
Tales of charging A&R people for copies of their albums are confirmed by Julian Gough, and legend of the frontman’s arch-lipped insouciance have found their way into journalistic bogey-man stories. “Me? Arched lip?” asks a wide-eyed Gough when HOT PRESS meets with the entirely reformed character who has just spent the last seven years “trying to revolutionize the novel” (his second) and putting together “a documentary on Bronze-age beer” with Mike Casey.
Gough is finally ready to revisit his Toasted Heretic days, and the once taciturn frostiness has been replaced with an altogether more cheerful demeanour.
“The thing about Toasted Heretic,” smiles Gough, “was that because we were friends and hung out together and had fun, we never actually broke up, we just haven’t done anything as a band for years. We’d done a couple of fantastic albums, but because we had no money, no distribution and no record label, people just didn’t get to hear them. And there’s no point being a pop band and not being popular!” he helpfully points out.
“I keep thinking that maybe there’s an alternative universe where Cathal Coughlan was the greatest rock star of all time and Toasted Heretic and Fatima Mansions would battle it out at the top of the charts.”
So the group went away to “do some other stuff for a while, to clear our heads - and that just turned into 12 years, so they’re very clear now (laughs)".
Fans who may have once found themselves on the Toasted Heretic Stole My Money Tour will be delighted to hear Now In New Nostalgia Flavour, which stays so faithful to the original versions, including nasty hiss and tinny vocals. “We didn’t even have a bass,” Gough confesses, “We just tuned down an ordinary guitar and recorded at double speed, so when we played it back at normal speed it sounded a bit like a bass.”
Rumour has it, the band were considering doing a cheese-and-onion scratch-and-sniff version of the release. Gough shamelessly concurs. “We got that vinyl effect on the CDs in the end," he says, "but you can get CDs to smell any way you want! If they don’t have it, they’ll custom-build a smell. And we nearly went for it, but then we thought, ‘Maybe a lot of people aren’t going to like their entire CD collection starting to smell like cheese and onion crisps’. We gave out packets of crisps instead.”
Being as enthusiastic as ever in “communicating the music” means Toasted Heretic don’t expect great commercial success this time round either, and the Heretic caveat – “copy this for your poorer friends and make the rich ones buy it” – still stands.
“We’re practically losing money on every copy! But we just wanted it to be perfect. We want to give people something for their money,” he says.
“The rich friends should buy it because we deserve to eat as well. But if you’ve got poor friends, copy it; it’s more important that people hear the songs than that we eat (laughs). Hmm, of course, that was the philosophy that led to our doom."