Interview: Vroom at the Top - Walking on Cars

Many moons ago, in a leafy suburb of Cork City, a young boy was kept awake by the din of some ne'er-do-wells on the street outside. The loutish presences soon moved along, but their mark was left in no uncertain terms: the perfectly preserved footprint of a size 11 Nike runner slapped on the bonnet of the O'Regan family's beloved '95 Toyota Corolla.
Given that it's been close to two decades since that nightmarish incident, yours truly insisting that this interview begin with an inspection of the subjects' shoes might seem rather redundant. Maybe it's a Christmas spent watching Making A Murderer that's brought out the forensic investigator within. Or maybe it's because Walking On Cars have a habit of leaving an indelible mark of their own, both in Ireland and beyond.
From ticket sales and acclaimed releases to radio play and online streams, the Kerry quintet have enjoyed success in just about everything they've attempted. And that success is accelerating, now that the album charts are in their crosshairs.

It's more than a year since frontman Patrick Sheehy discussed with me the imminence of putting the finishing touches to their first full-length collection. Little wonder, then, that - as he takes a seat alongside bandmates Sorcha Durham and Paul Flannery to discuss the release of Everything This Way - there's more than a hint of relief in the air.
"It's essentially been done and dusted for a year," Pa admits. "It was pushed back over and over again. The wait's been tough."
Bassist Paul offers a more pointed take. "It's been a balls," he grimaces. "The date would change, and change again, and you start thinking 'This is never going to come out!'
"It definitely adds to your worry, in a way," he adds, "because if we'd just recorded it and put it out there, it would have been more normal for us. We did our own thing for so long, when it was just a case of finding a picture for the front of an EP and away we'd go. That's obviously very different with a label behind us."
It's about 18 months since the three musicians, along with fellow WOC members, guitarist Dan Devane and drummer Evan Hadnett, threw the John Hancocks on a deal with industry giants Virgin EMI. But their story begins a further four years back in a small town on the south west coast. There are no stories of classified ads or audition processes, because in a place like Dingle such efforts are entirely unnecessary.
"You're going to know just about everyone else in town," keyboardist Sorcha explains. "It's not a big place. Paul, Evan and Dan played together in a band as teenagers; Pa was in a band with their brothers; my brother was a good friend of Paul's, so the two of us hung out together growing up."
They assembled in a kitchen in the Kerry town during the summer of 2010 - although that initial union was altogether fleeting.
"We got together for about six weeks," says Pa. "We wrote a bunch of songs, and played a gig at the end, but then we all went off again. I was in college in London, Evan went back to college here, and everyone else was working part-time, not doing a whole lot. But we got together again the following Easter, and I never went back to college."
He chuckles: "Evan didn't either - and his mother was sickened!"

A couple of springtime sessions in 2011 were enough to convince the quintet that maybe, just maybe, there was something worth chasing in this band lark, as they busied themselves writing songs before testing them out in McCarthy's, a bar which was to become something of a home away from home. "Everything we did was in and around Dingle," Sorcha confirms. "Our first gig, for example, was in a local youth cafe. Then we started playing in McCarthy's, and you had everyone's support from the start." The kind of support, in fact, that could confuse an outsider. "The band's first trip out of Dingle was to Limerick," Paul chuckles, "for the worst gigs of all time."
Pa paints the picture. "We had played at home in Dingle to around 60 people made up of our friends and family, and the place was hopping, just absolutely mental. So when this guy walks in with his girlfriend, he thought 'Who on earth are these guys?! I've got to get them to Limerick'. He thought there'd be the same buzz - but nobody knew us in Limerick! The poor fella put us up to play three gigs in three nights."
"We were playing in sports bars too," Paul continues. "Jamming away with the Champions League on in the background. He really hadn't done his research. We couldn't say no, though, because we needed money to buy the shittest van ever seen. We drove the arse out of that thing, until the back half started to come away from the front. The night it died, we were coming back from Sligo, and had to stop every two miles to pour water into the thing."
Pa blushes. "It should be pointed out that we were also pouring water in the coolant tank. Which you're definitely not meant to do."
"Sure it hardly mattered," Paul retorts. "It was just flowing straight out onto the ground anyway. But we stopped in Knock at one stage. It was the Bank Holiday Sunday, so nowhere else seemed open. We got Holy Water, filled the van with that, and I swear we got about seven miles. We thought it was some sort of miracle! That journey took a good twelve hours..."
A nice long trip to every gig is the norm, of course, when your home patch is located on what could probably be marketed to tourists as 'the edge of the earth'.
"When we play in the UK there'll always be some sort of interviewer looking to know about Dingle," Pa reports. "It's hard to know what to say: 'Well, it's a small place. There's not many people. But we do have a famous dolphin...'"
At the risk of straying off message, we have to ask: is it true that there's only been one Fungie over the years?
"God, yeah!" Paul exclaims, with the sort of indignation that prompts Hot Press to consider potential escape routes should things turn nasty. "There's no way you could get another wild dolphin to stay in the same place. In any case, he has the same marks on him, and has had since he arrived in 1983. I'm standing up for Fungie, man!"
That most certainly settles that! However, there's still the question of how basing a band in that sort of outpost could possibly make any sense. Dingle is a great many things - beautiful, rugged, inspiring - but it is also rather isolated.
"That helped us," Sorcha points out. "Because we weren't in a city, or surrounded by a scene that we could be part of, we weren't being edgy or cool, or trying to fit in with something else. It sounds cliched, but we were doing it first and foremost for our own enjoyment."

Solitude cuts both ways. For sure, there's a payoff to ploughing your musical furrow well away from others in terms of artistic purity - but the flipside is that there's very few venues to hit around town, and even fewer role models from whom to draw inspiration.
"It's true that wasn't there for us," Pa agrees. "But we each had our own individual heroes and all that - and then came Other Voices."
If the annual event has made a considerable impression on the Irish scene as a whole, then you can guarantee it was the definition of a game-changer for a group of young music lovers in West Kerry.
"I didn't take much notice at the beginning," Pa confesses. "I was just a naive little teenager, after all. But a friend of mine had a ticket to a show for a band I'd never heard of, Bell X1. Once they started playing, I was in complete awe. I loved it, and it planted the seed for me, to end up doing what we're doing now."
"It's an awesome thing, really," Paul continues.
"When it first started, it was a little under the radar, not like now when everybody who's anybody is in every bar in town. Back then it was just the crew and musicians keeping to themselves, and only the locals knew the secrets. You'd have someone give you a nudge, asking you to come into a gig, and Jose Gonzales would be sat there, playing in the corner. And you'd have been on the way to the shop to pick up some milk for your mum. You'd be thinking 'If I don't come back soon, she'll kill me!'"
While the group came to understand the importance of the event - and have played the festival on a number of occasions - they never lost sight of the fact that their future would depend on wooing audiences a long way from Dingle.
Indeed, the scale of their ambition could be seen immediately, when record companies began forming an orderly queue outside WOC HQ. The band turned down a number of offers from Irish labels, on the basis that a deal with an international label would likely increase the prospect of overseas success.
It helped that their music had captured the imagination of key movers and shakers in the UK media, including the likes of Zane Lowe. Their singles 'Catch Me If You Can' and 'Two Stones' scaled the Irish charts with minimal promotion. And their stock among gig-goers continued to rise with every live date.
"We always had certain goals and ambitions," Sorcha muses. "At the start, it was to play in this city, or that festival - and every year those goals would get that bit bigger. A Whelan's gig was one of our big ones early on."
Pa expands: "When you're starting out, Whelan's is on a pedestal, even more so than other, bigger venues. Whelan's is where it's at, and you want to play there and sell it out. And we did!"
By now, of course, in terms of pulling power, the band have outgrown the legendary Wexford Street venue. They are also becoming real festival favourites. Talking to HP at Indiependence 2014, Pa confided that they had played to an audience of about 20 at the festival just two years earlier; now they were packing the main stage area. In the capital, meanwhile, 2015 saw them sell out the Olympia Theatre three times - an impressive achievement for any act, and a scarcely conceivable one for a group without an LP to their name.
"When you put it like that, it's pretty cool alright," Pa grins. "I suppose you can't really predict those things."

So what is the secret of Walking On Cars' success to date? Being ready for a surprise or two is one thing. For example, they hadnÕt rated the song 'Speeding Cars' as one of their strongest. Their management were infatuated with it, however, and so they agreed to record it - it ended up as their most recent single.
And when they landed in the studio to record their album with Tim Bran and Roy Kerr - the decorated production duo MyRiot - there were further bombshells waiting.
"It's always going to be very different, bringing other people into that 'creative circle'", Sorcha says of teaming up with the London Grammar and Foxes knob-twiddlers. "It's normally just the five of us in a room, so having other people come aboard is going to change it. At the start, it was definitely a case of us feeling: 'What the hell are you doing to our songs?!' But once we let things sit for a little, we realised just how awesome it was. Sometimes you have to do that, and allow someone else to take your music in a different direction for a bit."
"And anyway," Paul adds, "you can always just take it back to where it was in the first place, so you've got nothing to lose."
That spirit of creative collaboration seems to have done the trick: their 12-track debut is a superb piece of work. While one blogger's description of their sound as 'placid indie rock' is way off the mark - though, as Paul points out, "at least thatÕs better than flaccid indie rock!" - their potent mix of swooning balladry and powerful pop-rock anthems looks set to land them alongside the likes of Kodaline, The Script and Snow Patrol in the ranks of ginormously crowd-pleasing success stories to come from these shores.
The record is strong enough as a calling card to turn the requisite heads. But, however it is received, there will be no resting on their laurels for Walking On Cars; putting in the hard yards in that ill-fated van was how they made it in Ireland, so they know what they need to do now.
"We're treating the UK very much in the same way," Paul reveals. "Pile into a van, play a load of gigs, and then go back a few months later to see if there'll be more people!"
"We're lucky that we have that experience built up - and the experience of doing it all ourselves," says Sorcha. "We had a bunch of festivals over the summer, and had we been taking our first steps they would have been daunting. By now, though, we have a decent idea of how these things work, and a great team around us."
As they limber up for a shot at the big time, they can hark back to the lessons they learned while on the road supporting James Bay, a man who this time last year was in a similar position of surfing a wave of massive hype, before releasing a record.
"He's superb, with an amazing voice," Paul opines. "But while touring with him, you see what an absolute pro he is. He's out there during soundcheck, directing where the lights should point, asking for the snare drum to be a bit sharper. Nothing is a fluke; he's on top of it. That's where we have to be too."
Paul, it turns out, has been divining little tricks for his own use. "I do enjoy snooping around other people's pedal boards," he smiles. "Taking photos of their setup, comparing their levels to mine. It's nerdy stuff, but at least I have Dan with me doing the same thing!"

Walking On Cars' tech-inspecting duo must have been in dreamland when they headed to last year's SXSW festival, the ultimate music showcase on the planet, which takes place in Austin, Texas. And while there's a three-part harmony of the word 'unbelievable' to describe the experience ("There's a ton of music shops, but nowhere that sells socks," Paul proffers), there's also an acknowledgement that the week opened their eyes to some of the harsh realities of being in a rock 'n' roll band.
"Playing straight after James Vincent McMorrow was a proper fuck-my-life moment, for a start," Paul laughs. "The place was jammers for him, and he was unreal. The moment he finishes, everyone is out the door to see Catfish And The Bottlemen, and we're left playing to about 10 people."
It was a scary moment - but they lived to fight another day.
"It makes you realise just how many young bands are out there, and how hard it's going to be to make yourself heard," Sorcha says.
"You begin to make sense of it," Pa reflects. "You see that a radio station is probably going to have a couple of hundred songs thrown at them every week, and so you can't turn around and get in a huff if yours isn't played. It just doesn't work like that."
Perhaps that's why there isn't the slightest hint of hesitation when the question of streaming arises. For some artists, sharing your work on a platform that delivers very little in the way of financial recompense is a real hot-button issue. For these guys, it's a no-brainer.
"We're happy that people will listen to our music, and share our music - and someday those people might come to a gig, which will be fantastic," Paul says. "If you're Taylor Swift, and everyone knows about you anyway, then you're in a position to do what you want - but if you're in our position, it's the best platform to get that exposure, and allow as many people as possible to find you.
"If we get to a place where we could help the industry change for the better by doing it differently, then we will." He pauses, perhaps startled at Future Paul's benevolence. "But in any case, I think Spotify is fantastic from a customer point of view. There's no way I could say 'Our album isn't going up there, but I'll still use it to listen to everybody else's'"
The opposition in music is pretty tough, but Walking On Cars are generous in their assessment of the acts they are likely to be battling against for chart places during the year. Critical darling Jack Garratt passed the up-close-and-personal test at Other Voices in December, and prodigious teenage soulstress Mahalia also gets the stamp of approval. Meanwhile, among the emerging Irish acts, Kilkenny synth-poppers Neon Wolf and Donegal duo Little Hours are singled out as the prime contenders for having a big 12 months.
For many, however, this is poised to be the year of Walking On Cars. For a band unafraid to set goals, what are the main aims for 2016? The rejoinder is a swift one.
"To be on Soccer A.M." says Paul.
The idea of joining Helen Chamberlain on the Sky Sports show isn't an ambition we've heard all that often from rock outfits - but for Pa, a passionate Chelsea fan, and Red-til-he-dies Man Utd man Paul, it's firmly on the agenda.
"Actually, my entire downtime in studio is spent playing Football Manager as Sheffield United," Paul declares. "I'm now in that weird place where I know all the players, but have no idea what they look like. But when we were in England, we stayed in a hotel right next to Bramall Lane, and got a tour of the place, which was pretty cool."
In musical terms, League One stuff will soon be a thing of the past: the Premier League is calling. So what about your dream for 2016, Pa?
"Well, I know what Pa's going to say!" Sorcha laughs, instantly piquing our interest. "We did a bunch of UK festivals last year, so we'd like to do some of those again, and a few slots around the continent too."
"We obviously want the album to do well," Paul offers. "But go on Pa, tell him..."
Given the build-up, we're bracing ourselves. Will Pa reveal that it is his dream to play a gig on Mars? Or to convince Conor McGregor that he should pack in that low-rent UFC malarkey, and become the band's full-time security man? Instead, cooly and calmly, he sets out a pair of goals that in truth seem entirely attainable.
"I'd like to have a number one album," he says matter-of-factly. "I know it doesn't define your entire career, but your debut album going to the top of the charts is a nice start, and will certainly give us something to look back on, if we can do it. Just one week would be enough! IÕd love to play a gig in 3Arena too, of course. I imagine every Irish band does."
Part of you thinks: that's too easy. If the journey thus far is anything to go by, they'll have outgrown it soon enough...