Look forward in anger

There are, as we will find out, certain things that Eamonn McNamee happily subscribes to – the genius of Bob Dylan, a less than positive view of the Northern Irish music ‘scene’ and Film Four.

“Have you ever seen Buffalo 66?” he asks, just off the train from his hometown of Ballymena. “Well, when they were making that, Christina Ricci was being a real pain in the arse, turning up late all the time, messing the filming schedule up. Vincent Gallo got really fucked off by it, so he went over to her one day and asked her if she was enjoying herself. She said ‘yes’. He said ‘great’, and then asked her who her best friends in the crew were. She named three people or something. So he called the first name over, sacked him on the spot and then told her that if she was ever late again he’d sack the rest of them.”
The Throes’ frontman claps his hands together: “Angry Vince,” he laughs. “That’s the attitude. This town could do with a bit of that.”
And there was me thinking all it needed was love.
Given his choice of managerial role models, cross your fingers and hope that Mr McNamee never ends up as an employer. However, for all the tongue-in-cheek bluster and feud-stoking rhetoric (assume that The Throes won’t swap Christmas cards with Iain Archer), there is little that is genuinely mean-spirited about this jittery, boisterous four piece.
In fact, taken in tandem with the defiantly protean nature of their songs (from skiffle to Pixies holler and back again), their fondness for pontificating can be seen very much as the by-product of some ravenous (but most welcome) imaginations.
“We don’t really have much in common with people in other bands from here,” Eamonn reveals. “I go to the odd party and because I like talking about music I end up arguing with them. Some night there a few weeks ago this boy started giving me grief, saying that I had to get into new music. He started talking about Shellac’s third album and I was like, hold on, mate, two things – first, that’s not new, and second, it’s shit. Broaden your fucking horizons. I hurt his feelings. He told me I had a bad attitude. Why? These people don’t know how to have conversations.”
It wouldn’t do the band’s contemporaries any harm if they rose to The Throes’ bait. A clutch of new material, recorded “on the cheap and in a rush because the European Championships were just about to start” with Dave McCullough is a wonderfully confounding mish-mash of sparky, flailing guitar tunes and (like ‘The Jazz Age’ – where The Great Gatsby is rewritten by a big fan of Jonathan Richman) intriguing lyrical by-roads.
“I like songs that mean things,” Eamonn insists. “That might be stating the obvious, but it’s depressing how little you find that these days. I’ve been listening to that Dylan Live in 64 record – the Halloween gig. He keeps introducing songs by saying how he’d got the idea from reading a newspaper article. People just don’t do that now. They don’t react to the world around them; they don’t give a fuck. Most lyrics these days are just horrific nonsense.”
With summer now drawing to a close, The Throes are looking forward to re-entering the fray in the autumn. And, it seems, they will be drawing the most unlikely of weapons from their ever-growing arsenal.
“I’ve just started playing the harmonica,” Eamonn reveals. “Nobody round here uses them, and the horror on people’s faces when I take it out. These Emo boys, they go on to me about how music shouldn’t be regressive. They wanna listen to themselves. A big bag of dogshite. These guys write these huge, monstrous songs about their girlfriends leaving them, but you just don’t buy it. You look at them and think – there’s no way it was messy, that must have been an amicable split. She’s gone to live in Somerset. It’s not real and it’s not right. And they tend to be Christians. They all love Jesus and Jesus is going to look after them. For fuck’s sake.”
The good book gives ample warning about passion. Will you resist The Throes?

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