Kelly Watch The Stars

Dubliner Nick Kelly founded one of the most respected Irish bands, The Fat Lady Sings, who took two brilliant albums and four classic singles to charts and hearts. But, disillusioned with his music career, he broke up the band while they still had a deal with a Warners’ label and even gave away his guitars. But the lure of creativity was to prove too much, and with a short story beating 4,000 entries to win the Ian St James Awards, he moved into advertising as a copywriter, with Quarrel, the tv commercial featuring the Mic Christopher song ‘Heyday’, one of his many major successes.

Yet the independent spirit that saw him break up his beloved band, when most others would have clung on, was also to the fore when he recorded and released his first solo album Between Trapezes in 1997, its initial pressing funded from the contributions of fans who paid for the record up front. Kelly’s 2005 follow-up Running Dog and it’s single ‘You’re Gonna Fall’ have already earned the plaudits, released on his own Self Possessed Records label, with, again, its first pressing sponsored by fans.
So, why do it your way, Nick? “I believe every artist should take responsibility and control over their own careerk," he argues, "otherwise you simply put yourself at the mercy of people in labels who obviously don’t have the same interest in your work as you do."
But given that it’s hard enough to get people to buy albums after they’re released, how do you persuade fans to buy something they haven’t even heard? “Well, The Fat Lady Sings had a sizeable mailing list and we had put out four singles independently before we got signed. One year I personally signed 7,000 Christmas cards to mail out to our fans. I felt that we were never going to be seen as cool so I thought let’s be warm instead! After the split I got back into doing some secret gigs and about 600 people had written to me, so I built up a collection of names and addresses and eventually I wrote to them all, initially about the secret gigs.”
As for how he got the fans to trust him with their money, Kelly has this to say: “I began to wonder if I could put out a record without all the usual trappings and without risking the unhappiness that came to me in the latter days of the band. So I hit on this idea of asking them for £15 with a promise they’d be credited on the sleeve and get the album sent in the post. 260 sent me the money in the post straight away.” He also acknowledges that such trust had a deep impact on him. “It was incredibly empowering, especially from an emotional point of view. I also realised that as a business model, this approach had merit,” he recalls.
It obviously requires massive work on shoestring budgets to follow this independent path, compared to being signed to a major label with lots of money, resources, skills and clout, but Kelly’s perspective is quite different.
“Actually, I sometimes feel sorry for bands on major labels. On the one had there’s the buzz of them giving you loads of money, but it’s not real money in that you have to spend it to make the records and so on. But there’s the pressure then of having to justify them giving you that money too, and the pressures that comes from being persuaded to do things you really don’t want to do but you go along with because you feel you have so little choice. Being with a major can be great when they’re supporting you, but when they go cold you can feel like the loneliest man on the planet. But real, genuine people sending you money out of their own small budget is very uplifting.”
And how does this fit into Kelly’s overall view of the art commerce interface?
“There’s a risk of getting divorced from reality. Music is one of the most over-subsidised branches of the arts. Musicians got complacent and assumed that once they got to a certain threshold everything would be paid for and they didn’t need to take care of business at all. But that’s changing. The industry’s current economic model is in disarray and going through a pretty cataclysmic process, laying off loads of staff, giving smaller advances, dumping bands sooner than they used to, suffering in a self-created situation where they can only make money by selling five million of one album and so on.”
One can’t help wondering how artists can think themselves beyond that dependence on the big record deal and find a true spirit of independence. But Kelly has no such reservations. “You can start by wondering if anybody will ever give you any money at all and then you move to wondering do you really need it, can’t you find creative ways of getting on with it and doing it. No musician should wait for somebody to give you permission to make your records or do your gigs.”
In terms of setting out to make an album, Kelly nearly always has all the songs written before he starts recording, and in the case of Running Dog he had a store of seventeen or eighteen songs on hand, but admits to being slow on the writing front, before adding, “Sometimes I’m comically slow. It’s a combination of superstition and laziness. The Fat Lady Sings never did demos and neither do I. I can’t afford to write in the studio anyway, although I love the recording process. Some songs that you think beforehand are absolute hits can somehow shrink away when you start recording, while maybe some little ditty can grow in the studio into something very significant. I like being open to that possibility.”
Whereas some artists use the studio as part of the initial creative process, Kelly doesn’t. He saves chunks of money and, in the case of Running Dog, did seven sessions in four-day batches, followed by three weeks of mixing. “About every six weeks I’d go into a small studio and put down tracks with acoustic guitar and vocal and a click track. I’d send that to Joe Chester (formerly of Ten Speed Racer) who would put a backing track together and I would then go into a studio with Joe and Sean Millar and do three songs at a time over the four days, whacking into it with real high-energy with additional people brought in to do other bits if necessary. Having once nearly gone insane after three weeks in a residential studio I like the idea of spending time in the studio and then going home to my own bed. It keeps you in touch with the real world.”
For what he calls their “open day”, Kelly and Chester went to Apollo Studios and brought in strings, live drums, and lots of other stuff and added and subtract bits to various tracks. They also recorded a completely different version of ‘The Loneliest Ghost In Pere Lachaise’ to the one on Running Dog. Why go for one version over the other? Why not put both on and let the fans decide?
Kelly explains, “The version I left off is a huge epic with strings, trumpets and guitars, really loud, a big Cecil B de Mille thing. Joe is scandalised that we left that version off. It was nagging me a lot, but I just thought the song was getting lost in the recording, so I made them all troop back and do it with just piano and some acoustic instruments. As for leaving both on, I believe that records are too long since CDs came in. I had a real moral struggle with wanting only ten tracks and eventually putting eleven on. I want an album to work as one complete whole, and there’s a limit to the length people can take in one sitting, just as with a film certain things have to kick in at certain points in the story if you’re going to keep.

THE FAT LADY SINGS AGAIN
The Fat Lady Sings, reputedly one of the last Irish bands to move to London as a prerequisite for fame and fortune in the music biz, are to reform for two special gigs, Vicar Street, Dublin on Friday, April 8th and the following night at the Islington Academy in London.

April also brings the release of a retrospective double-album on Warner Music, featuring many of the band’s tastiest works, plus a barrowload of rare and previously-unreleased recordings. The release has the working title The Fat Lady Singles (& Opera Obscura), and one CD will include all ten of their singles, with the second CD packed with rare gems and several unreleased tracks long sought by loyal fans.
The band, led by singer and songwriter Nick Kelly, emerged in Dublin in 1986 as part of a new generation of Irish acts inspired by the success of U2. It was a fertile time for the Irish rock scene as bands like TFLS, Something Happens, The Four Of Us, Blink, Therapy? and The Pale could measure their record sales in the tens of thousands and tour the country at will.
In 1990 TFLS signed to East West Records in the UK and Atlantic in the USA. A single, ‘Man Scared’, was soon in the shops and 1991 brought the band’s first album Twist. It was a distinguished collection of supremely-crafted songs based around Kelly’s literate lyrics welded to tunes to die for. It generated further singles, including a re-release of ‘Arclight’.
The band’s second and last album Johnson was released in 1993, in the wake of the single ‘Show Of Myself’. It also contained ‘Drunkard Logic’, their highest chart single in the UK, almost cracking the Top 40. A sapping six months of touring followed, including three-months in the US, concluding with a storming pre-Christmas show in the legendary home of New York punk, CBGBs, in December 1993.
However, things were falling apart within the camp. As Kelly recalled for hotpress, “We were touring America and had reached a certain level, but we didn’t seem to be able to move up.
I was really miserable at the time anyway, tired of being on the road in cramped conditions and going nowhere. A few nights before we did the last gigs in New York we played in Baltimore to an audience that comprised the members of the other three bands on the bill and nobody else! Actually, Dermot remembers the precise time when he knew the band was over. He walked into a bar in Baltimore the next day and whatever look I gave him told him it was the end. I actually went awol for about two days and made my own way to New York for the last gigs.”
At a subsequent meeting with the UK record company in January 1994 to discuss the re-promotion of ‘Drunkard Logic’ Kelly, sadly disillusioned with the machinations of the music industry and a frustrating lack of progress, announced that he couldn’t do it anymore, and that was the end of the band, until now that is.
Since the split, Tim and Dermot enjoyed chart success in the USA with Dog’s Eye View. Tim’s multi-instrumental, production and arranging skills have been used by Tanita Tikaram, Fatima Mansions and David Gray (with whom he tours and records).  Dermot has also worked with David Gray, besides becoming a much sought-after tour and production manager with Keane, Fun Loving Criminals and Supergrass.
While Kelly has continued to record and gig as a solo artist (see interview), material from The Fat Lady Sings has been irritatingly elusive in recent times. Now that particular problem is to be resolved.