Groom With A View

he band’s songwriter, Mike, is a bit of a control freak knob and tells the rest of the guys what to do a lot of the time. It’s not like he’s a bully, he’s really annoying and persistent. They don’t much like it but they do it half the time because, well, complaining is a pain in the arse, isn’t it?”

So says Groom’s MySpace page, but how does Stevens himself plead?
“I suppose I am a bit of a control freak when it comes to the songs,” he laughs, “but I think that’s kind of inevitable when you write them all. If they aren’t delivered as you envisioned them, you’ll be disappointed. And the guys do get to put their own stamp on the music; musicans always put their own slant on things. But really,” he deadpans, “we all know the songs are mine.”
He’s joking now, but it seems that Stevens' determination and work ethic can stress him out. Last year it took running away to France for him to clear his head.
“I was totally caught up in the Dublin scene, so in the summer of 2007 I moved with the wife and kids to Carcassonne in the south of France for a six month break. I went running along the canal every day, to clear my head. It was a chance to write, and it took me out of my routine which was a very welcome change at that point.”
With their lead singer and songwriter off gallivanting around the south of France, the other members of Groom must have been worried about the future of the band.
“They might have been alright!” Stevens agrees. “I would get the odd worried, ‘Are you moving for good?’ question, and would go ‘We shall see!’, which probably didn’t help their nerves!”
Much to the band’s relief, he did return from his French escape, and Groom launched their third album Marriage two weeks ago. As the title suggests, the album is a witty, folk-pop exploration of relationships, covering the good, the bad and the ugly.
“I like to focus on themes for our albums. Not concept albums, nothing that explicit. I like picking a theme. The album expresses my own opinion of that universal theme of marriage. I’m all for love. Marriage has its own particular flaws and aspects that I think people can relate to.”
The songs on Marriage do appear to be incredibly personal, with ‘Don’t Park Your Heart Here’ depicting the fears of a guy not ready to commit, ‘The Mysteries Of Life’ acting as a tribute to a somewhat undeserving paramour, and ‘Doorways’ exploring the lows that follow a vicious fight. How much of the experiences documented are drawn from Stevens' own life?
“It varies. Some of the experiences and people are real, some are semi-real, some are composites, some are completely created. I don’t make it explicitly clear. For example, the couple fighting in ‘Doorways’ are based on real people, but they don’t know it’s about them!”
So kiddies, lesson of the day is: never confide in Mike Stevens about your relationship, unless you want to become fodder for album number four. Though I can imagine that singing about your past wrecks of relationships could be quite theraputic. Maybe I should write an album called Cheating Bastards... yeah, he’s definitely on to something here.
“I have probably saved thousands of euro on therapy bills alright!” he laughs. “Especially with this album. It’s not that you get catharsis exactly, but performing the songs there’s a real release, which is somewhat theraputic, yeah.”
And with the formation of Popical Island, this could well become group therapy. Stevens set up the music collective last year, and it now includes bands like Yeh Deadlies, Land Lovers, Lie Ins, Sqaureheads and Tieranniesaur, who perform at monthly ¡Popicália! gigs in Dublin.
Another incriminating MySpace quote claims that Popical Island formed because “Dublin’s indie music community is a notoriously curmudgeonly bunch, usually bound by circumstance rather than aesthetics, secretly plotting each other’s downfall by craftily placed banana skin or falling piano.”
Again, Stevens pleads innocence.
“Well, I think it’s true that everyone in Ireland is quite curmedgeonly, but that’s not actually why we formed Popical Island! We were all friends and were playing together anyway, so it was a fun way of putting a stamp on something that already exists. I think it also provides a context for audiences; they know that the collective is pop-based so they’ll understand what the music is about more readily.”
So it’s not that the bands in Popical Island got together to show how cool they were?
“Are you kidding?” Stevens exclaims. “When we started the collective we always looked at bands and thought, ‘They’re really cool and we’re so not cool’, but then it turns out everyone’s thinking the same. It’s the curse of indie-pop people, we’re all pretty shy and polite.”
Until you dump them that is, then they’ll get muscially vicious. Consider yourselves warned.