Home truths from abroad

Mark Cullen has been through the musical mill. Currently trading as Pony Club, and with a new self-recorded, Setanta-released album, Home Truths, Cullen says his callow beginnings as singer with Irish indie pop glamsters Bawl and his industry struggles with former incarnation Fixed Stars, haven’t made him remotely bitter or cynical.

“I never want to get too cynical,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and had bad experiences with it, but on the other side, I’ve got to meet a lot of interesting people and record an album at Abbey Road.”

The Fixed Stars album was recorded at the famous studio, “apart from a few tracks recorded with Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds, on his barge on the Thames one summer. It was great, you could go fishing while waiting to do your vocal takes. I’d highly recommended it to any band,” laughs Cullen without any hint of cynicism whatsoever.

He admits Fixed Stars ended up “in a mess.” “The record company wanted to put out a single, but they weren’t going to promote it properly. We kept having arguments with them and they were going to put the album on hold for a year. Then they decided to drop us, but they still had to pay us for another year so it wasn’t too bad.”

Some of his former band members remain a part of Pony Club, but for Mark it’s essentially a solo arrangement. “I want to have full control of my songs. It’s easier not to have to deal with other band members trying to play the songs the way they want to, like a guitarist deciding he wants to be Jimi Hendrix or whatever.”

Obviously he’s learned from past mistakes. “We decided we’d make this record first and then take it to a label. We decided against taking it to a major, ‘cause we didn’t want to go through the same old thing again. We’ve known Keith Cullen from Setanta for years – he really liked the album and said he’d put it out. At least we had a guarantee that it was gonna be released, without having to worry about doing the obligatory three singles and all that.”

As Pony Club, he no longer feels the need for big studio set-ups or major record labels. Home Truths was, aptly, recorded in the bedroom of Mark’s childhood home in Finglas. “My brother engineered it and we co-produced it. We bought the studio set up for the guts of about twenty grand. It’s just a normal PC and we had to beg, borrow and steal the programmes and effects. The quality’s just as good. A lot of the dance crowd do it, and there’s no reason a band with real instruments can’t. It means you have a lot more time to experiment, without any pressure.”

Despite his professed positive attitude, Cullen has long been associated with an extremely caustic lyrical wit, which is very much in evidence on the latest album. He has been living in London for the past eight years, and the album is as much influenced by the landscape of his Northside youth, as the high-rises and housing estates of the UK.

“Whether it’s in Dublin or London, there’s always a real strong sense of community in places where people don’t have much. I’m not slagging them, but a lot of it is really funny. Like in ‘CCTV,’ there are batches of young girls now being called Britney and Christina, and I just think that’s fucking hilarious. When we were touring in Europe I used to seek out the run-down areas of every city to see if they were similar, and most of them are just the same.”

He’s sad that the Ballymun towers are to be pulled down. “I always thought they looked amazing. It was always an adventure to go and visit friends there – the view was great. I think they should take the people out, but keep the towers, maybe turn them into artists dwellings or something.”

“It’s a sweeping generalization,” he continues, “but a lot of working class families are very close, and I see a lot of my mates’ middle class families that are just as dysfunctional, or even more so, than working class ones. That’s fascinating to me. On this album I wanted to write about the closeness within families and in relationships. I had the album title Home Truths before I had the songs.”

Even so, in the relationships he describes, from whatever class, and including the more personal songs, he tends to focus on emotional traumas and conflicts – there’s a lot of fear, frustration and anger accompanied by Cullen’s trademark bright sweeping melodies and energetic pop tunes.

“That’s what most relationships are like,” he says. “Even the best ones in the world. Even when you’re completely in love with someone, you can wake up one day and think, ‘I fucking hate you! You are totally fucking me up.’ I don’t feel I’m being moany or whiny with my lyrics, I prefer to be cutting, and say exactly why I’m not happy with someone or something. I don’t mean to be sarcastic. I’m just saying things the way I see them.”