If I Were A Richie Man

He’s a shape-shifting, genre-hopping, multi-tasking staple of the Irish music scene and our nearest equivalent to professional band hoppers like Damon Albarn and Jack White (who, by the way, is a fan)… which is why it’s a real pity that the esteemed Richie Egan is moving to Sweden.

Yup, from next month, Egan and his wife, who is of Swedish stock, will call the southern city of Malmö their home. But don’t become hysterical just yet, Jape fans; the much-loved frontman assures me he’ll be back from time to time and that the move isn’t going to upset his beatmaking; in fact, his studio equipment is already over there, waiting for him.
“It arrived safely, thank God!” he tells me. “I told the lads who were driving, ‘You have my heart in the back of that van!’”
Until such time as Egan can be reunited with the synths that form part of his circulatory system, he’s having to make do with just an iPad, a microphone and a guitar, a significantly more modest set-up that he’s rather enjoying.
“If I’d had an iPad with GarageBand on it when I was 16,” he trails, “who knows? All these new kids coming up, it’s no wonder that they’re getting so good so fast. It reminds me of playing video games when I was a kid, you spend hours tweaking things, except instead of getting a high score at the end, you get to put a record out!”
He doesn’t appear to be too concerned about the cross-continental move, but then, change has never bothered Egan, who’s been see-sawing between Jape and influential math rock outfit The Redneck Manifesto for nearly a decade. He’s probably best-known for the 2008 Choice Award-winning Jape album Ritual, which was followed by Redneck Manifesto masterstroke Friendship… which was followed by the critically-acclaimed Jape album Ocean Of Frequency last year. You still with me?
Since then, there’ve been a bunch of killer Jape remixes, two spacey EPs with electronic duo VisionAir (a project which Egan tells me is “not quite dead, but very sick”), and just last week, a new song with Villagers’ Conor O’Brien. On top of all that, Jape just scored another Choice Prize nomination for Ocean Of Frequency, (“I think I’ve got about the chance of a snowball in hell of winning twice!” Egan laughs, “but I’ll definitely get a pint off whoever wins.”)
“I knew it wasn’t gonna be a commercial success,” he says of the record. “but I had to write it. I could have come out with another poppy thing like Ritual and it probably would have gotten bigger, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to learn about certain things that I didn’t know and now it’s cool because I’ve done that and now I feel like writing a really melodic, accessible record.”
The last album may have been a little more experimental than what we’re used to, but Egan reckons the shift in direction has only made the live show stronger.
“Ocean Of Frequency is more of an introverted album but I didn’t want the live show to be that way, so I beefed up some of the older stuff and beefed up some of the newer stuff. We’ve a good live thing down now. It’s taken us a while to get it good, but I think we’re there.”
I’ll say. At a recent gig in Castlebar, the Jape trio incorporated a puppet show into their set. Wait, what?
“I have this jacket…” he explains, pulling out a lime green puffa from under the table. “It’s manky, like, but when you hold it like this, it’s kind of cool.”
The puffa suddenly begins to resemble the mangled corpse of Kermit the frog, and Egan, rather impressively, makes it flail about by tugging at some of the elastic pulleys.
“We had it all planned before the gig, I would ask the puppet a question and Neil, the drummer, would do the voice. So I was saying to the puppet, ‘How does it feel to be in Castlebar?’ but the sound man put the effect on my microphone, not Neil’s, so you could just hear Neil with no microphone going, (squeaking) ‘It’s great to be here!’
“We always try to stick something in, some stupid idea. We did a techno version of ‘Put ‘Em Under Pressure’ a few years ago, that kind of shit. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re actually entertaining people and the only thing you can do is what feels right for you. I just like jumping around the place and having a laugh, basically. That works for me.”
Everyone from Adebisi Shank to MMOTHS has proclaimed their love for Jape over the years; does Egan see himself as a role model for younger acts?
“You know, I don’t really think about that, because I look up to them as well. You need to remain open and childlike to music and when I hear a song, I don’t care where the fuck it’s coming from, if it’s good it’s going to inspire me, so I like to think of it as a two-way thing. Hopefully they won’t throw older dudes like me onto the scrapheap!”
So, he’s not keen on acting as Dublin’s musical Godfather, but what’s the best piece of advice he’s received over the years?
“Someone said, ‘You’ve got to be at the bus stop to catch the bus.’ Keep working. If you keep working, you’re bound to come up with good shit. A lot of people place too much importance on what they’re doing. You’re only one tiny human, so you may as well say whatever the fuck you want!
“The thing is to try to break down the barrier where it feels like it’s something special. It should just feel like making a cup of tea. It should be that natural to you. You should never put it on a pedestal. People go, ‘How did you do that?’ and they think it’s this magical thing but it’s not magical at all, it’s really simple and that’s the thing you have to know. It took me a long time to realise that. It’s hard to understand that your voice is as valid as anybody else’s, but you have to just be yourself and hope for the fucking best that people want to listen.”