The first time I ever clapped eyes on Desert Hearts, they made me laugh out loud. Many, many moons ago, Colin Murray would annex the upstairs room in Morrison’s on Belfast’s Bedford Street for a Sunday night club – Stereotype - that made great sport in disregarding the ‘chill-out’ concept that was the norm back then for promoters looking to squeeze the last buck from the weekend.
Murray - whose aesthetic kinship with Brian Potter from Phoenix Nights can now finally be exposed – hosted Bulls-eye tournaments, ran bingo nights and, one Christmas, dressed up as Santa Claus and took up porky residence in a home-made grotto. Between times, he also forced any local bands angling for a gig to up their game before allowing them near the venue’s (much-missed) stage.
Straightforward shows were as rare as pauses in Murray’s on-stage introductions. Instead, bands were expected to play sets comprised of songs from their favourite albums, or to learn the tunes of their local compeers.
One week we went along to discover he had twisted the arms of some of the usual local indie suspects into taking part in a Stars In Their Eyes extravaganza – guess who took the Matthew Kelly role?
In truth it was a pretty dispiriting evening. Although this was the fag-end of the 1990s, many of Belfast’s finest had failed to call a cessation in the great grunge wars, and once their big transformative moment arrived, their choice was often as humourless as it was predictable. Put it this way: the backstage scramble for the Kurt Cobain wig was probably a far livelier spectacle than anything that mooched onto the stage.
Until, that is, the very last act appeared.
You really have never seen A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ until you’ve watched it performed on a hand-held Casio organ by two deadpan provocateurs dressed in home-made space suits with various household objects – shoes, ash-trays, steam irons – cellotaped and stapled to their persons. And who end their stint by smashing their equipment, barracking the audience and collapsing onto the floor in painfully authentic looking convulsions.
I laughed like a drain – both at the spectacle, and at the sheer imaginative chasm that yawned between this mob and their slouch-shouldered contemporaries.
Their Metal Machine Music-take on Morten Harket and co.’s first number one may not be considered one of Desert Hearts’ finest hours – however, looking back, even in the midst of that endearing shambles, the reason why the band were (and are) such electrifying performers was clearly in evidence.
Charley Mooney and Roisin Stewart were funny, enigmatic and fiercely unpredictable - Mork and Mindy as cast by The Chapman Brothers. In the seven or eight years since - despite adding an integral third member (drummer, Chris Heaney), winning a deal with Rough Trade and then losing it again, and (most importantly) releasing an album, Let’s Get Worse, that stands proudly in the company of the last decade’s great Irish LPs – the fresh-faced (and slightly unworldly) individuality and mystique that set them apart at the beginning of their career still hangs brightly around their shoulders.
You want evidence? Well, the case for the defence will be delivered shortly.
Gargleblast Records, the label run by the band’s Glasgow-based producer, Andy Miller, will be releasing their second album, Hotsy Totsy Nagasaki in early September. And all home-town favouritism aside, it’s great. Really.
When you consider that Charley and Roisin had been boyfriend and girlfriend since school, it’s perhaps not surprising that at times Let’s Get Worse felt like intruding on a conversation taking place in a private code (there were moments in the early days when the spectacle on-stage had the same hermetically domestic atmosphere as Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs). In Hotsy Totsy the seal seems to have broken wide open. These songs are boisterous, rowdy and eager to engage with the outside world.
‘Central Line’ thunders along like QOTSA, while alluding subtly to the London Tube bombings, ‘Ocean’ is a power-pop stormer that Tim Wheeler would kill for, and the sing-along, show-stopping ‘Bone Song’ comes across like a Palace Brothers take on ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. Their heart-stopping way with a ballad is also very much in evidence – both ‘Apple’ and (especially) ‘Urchin’ are fitting additions to a canon that already contains the deathless ‘Florida Keys’. Overall, it’s a record that is as convincing when Charley intones “Would it shake your bones/Would it melt your head/If I was to tell you/That by 30 I’d be dead” (‘Gravitas’), as it is when he’s brimming with adolescent braggadocio (the chorus of ‘Black Albino’ runs: “I’m armour-plated, motherfucker” ). There have been some great records released so far this year, but Hotsy Totsy Nagasaki will confidently go toe-to-toe with any one of them.
These days, Murray’s gone and upstairs in Morrison’s has been converted into the same-old-same-old – it’s reassuring to know, therefore, that Desert Hearts still have it in them to put a smile on your face.