Life Of Brian

IN THE clattery confines of the RTE Kenny Live studio on a Sunday morning in late March, time is out of whack. Relax friends, it s not Y2K or a rip in the fabric of the universe, it s just that the clocks went forward last night, and nobody seems to know when the hell they are, least of all your correspondent.
But that s alright; Brian are onstage, performing a run-through of Turn Your Lights On for a Dermot Morgan tribute programme, and, as anyone who has heard Bring Trouble (not least Nick Kelly, who awarded the album a rave review in the last issue of this magazine) will testify, when Ken Sweeney sings one of his immaculately crafted tunes, hours, minutes and seconds go out the window.
So, as the players go through their paces and the techies perfect the camera angles, the studio bustles with one-time Morgan collaborators, including Neil Hannon (who later rehearses an acoustic Songs Of Love ) and a couple of notable former Hot Pressers.
Graham and Arthur, yeah, Ken later considers over lunch in the RTE canteen. Arthur (Mathews) played drums on the Planes EP in 1992, just after we did Understand. And I m old friends with Graham (Linehen), one of the writers on Father Ted, and through that I ended up getting into the odd episode, muggin the camera. I ve been on a few Ted shoots and stuff, it just seemed like a good way to spend a week or two, goin down the country, driving round in cars dressed up as a priest, shocking the locals.
Whatever about geography, in terms of chronology, it s a long, long way from the International Bar to Montrose. A regular at the esteemed Dublin 2 ale-house, Ken Sweeney formed Brian with Niall Austin back in 1989, and the two wasted no time in releasing a single entitled Million Miles on their own record label (the song was subsequently voted fourth best single of the year by Hot Press scribes).
According to Ken, in a scene dominated by polished, over-produced and often preposterous Irish bands, Brian were everything that they weren t. We were unprofessional, unambitious, we weren t really a band, we didn t have a manager, a record deal, a gameplan, anything like that. And I think people picked up on us because we were the opposite.
By 1990, Sweeney and Austin had relocated to Ealing in London, and recorded the single You Don t Want A Boyfriend , a tune Sweeney still gets asked about. When we listened to the recording in the studio, it was something I felt very strongly, but in the same way it kind of scared me as well, he recalls. So we packaged it and put it out and had this story about a girl killing her boyfriend with an Encyclopedia Britannica, and when the police arrested her, she asked to keep the book. I suppose it was so kind of loaded with feeling and mood, and so simple and so beautiful, to me anyway, that it kind of opened up a lot of doors to us.
One of those doors was Keith Cullen s. Impressed by the atmosphere of the band s demos, Setanta decided to release those roughs as an album. Hence Understand.
Obviously, I wrote a lot of the early stuff we did when I was younger, Ken continues, and at that age you re a lot more self-obsessed and more self-interested. But as you get older you become more tolerant and understanding of other people and their actions and what s going on inside their heads. I hope that s reflected in Bring Trouble, that it s more outward looking. I was a big Red House Painters fan for a while, and I look back on my early 20s when I was miserable and I think, Jesus, what a waste . I see it in younger people than me and it makes me so angry. I suppose that s why you get such unrelenting pop at the start of the new album. But I know that even when I d given up completely, when I wasn t able to make music I was happy with, Setanta kept re-pressing and re-releasing Understand, and I was still getting letters from people who had it. It must touch something for people at a particular time in their lives, it obviously hits the mark. I m obviously not the person who made that record anymore, but it s nice to have it out as a document of work.
At the time of the release of that debut album, Ken was working in the BBC film archives in Ealing, a vocation he would pursue until 1995, when, burnt out by a bad case of writer s block, he decided to return to Ireland. Fortunately, the change of environment worked, resulting in the reinvigoration of the Dubliner s creative faculties.
Most of these songs were written in Arthur Mathews and his sister Ria s house in Termonfekin in Co. Louth, the singer explains. A tremendously happy time, and I hope that s reflected in songs like On A Roll . I thought, cos I d lived in London, I was kinda hardened and very sussed about things, but I went up to Termonfekin and I was very taken . . . as I get older I m starting to understand how the creative process works. Once I got a break and got back to Ireland I was able to write again.
The angels are in the details. As the aforementioned Mr. Kelly observed in songs like We Close 1-2 (which evokes REM s Daysleeper in its examination of the dehumanising effect of menial work) and the unflinching study of betrayal that is Right Through Tuesday , it s Sweeney s eye for the small print that paradoxically lends his songs a positively epical air.
Connected to this, in sound if not subject matter, there s also palpable yearning for the past in Bring Trouble, not-so-subliminal echoes of prime 1980s pop. Forget the Thompson Twins, Huey Lewis and Nik Kershaw; for those of us born when Brian Jones died, there was another 80s, a grainy, rainy heartbroken country whose national anthems were not synth-sequinned MOR horrors, but fabulous standards such as When Love Breaks Down , Stay , Bury Me Deep In Love and The Wrong Road . Ken Sweeney came of age during this era, and the music he heard then has never left him.
There are particular bands who go beyond being bands for me, they just took on some other quality, he reflects. One of the most inspiring things I ever came across when I was thinking about playing music was that song Wide Open Road by The Triffids. There s a wonderful line in it: Tell me how do you think it feels/Sleeping by yourself/And the one, the one, the one you love/Is with someone else . To me that song had such possibility. I love those Australian bands like The Go-Betweens, their music has a yearning for something that s quite distant, maybe that s out of reach.
However, for all the wistful evocations of an age when men were sensitive and women unattainable (for some reason fey raincoats like The Immaculate Fools and The Dream Academy suggest themselves here, as much as more credible acts like The Lilac Time), Bring Trouble manages to walk a fine line between retro and current. Yes, the album invokes an often disparaged past it was recorded in the Cocteau Twins September Sounds studio in Richmond, and certain songs feature related personnel like Simon Raymonde and Mitsuo Tate yet the songs sound no more anachronistic on Pre-Millennium FM than, say, Stereolab or The High Llamas.
I think there s enough bands that sound like Big Star at the moment, and I was quite capable of making a record that sounded like Teenage Fanclub or something like that, Ken remarks. A lot of my friends are in those kind of bands, and that s great, I like that, but I wanted to go off in another direction that people wouldn t expect, and I wanted to reflect the sort of things that I like: Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout, The Blue Nile, people like that. That s why there s so little jangly guitar on the album, I got kind of bored with that a few years ago. I just kind of wanted to mess around with sounds; I think there s a lovely wave of mood in keyboard sounds.
There s a wonderful sadness and richness and warmth in it, while at the same time, the songwriters I love are country singers like Lucinda Williams and Iris DeMent My Life is one of my favourite albums, it s a very personal album about her parents dying, I love the depth in the lyrics. And Lyle Lovett s quieter songs as well. And what I wanted to do was marry Steve McQueen and Hats and all that kind of stuff with lyrics I love from country singers. I haven t actually heard anyone say on a record before what I said on Getting Meaner , about the way I feel about music these days and how I m becoming as a person.
The song Ken s referring to is indeed a standout on the album, managing to pull off that tricky feat common to all remarkable pop songs it articulates an everyday truth and makes it sound new: ( I m losing touch/With all the things/That were so close to me/The books I read/The person I used to be/Lost in a crowd/Trying to get back home/And getting meaner/I m getting meaner ).
It s here that Sweeney displays lyrical abilities neither Elvis (Costello, not Presley) nor T-Bone (Burnett, not Walker) would snort at. And if some music survives on the vibe, the personality of the players, Brian are all about The Song. But, as Ken admits, it s no joke trying to maintain such rigorous quality control.
That s probably why there are only nine songs on the album, he concludes, although I think it has a beginning, a middle and an ending. You don t feel in any way shortchanged, it s a very full album I think. All you can do is make records for other people out there you hope are just like you, to articulate what you hope other people would be feeling. n
Bring Trouble is out now on Setanta.