LETTERKENNY. It's dark. The band go on stage. Plug in. The crowd look wary. Then there's a shuffle as someone races onto the dance floor and flays about like he's trying to catch the fly who just shat in his pint. A day at the races. A night in the zoo. Time to party as Letterkenny goes orgasmic.
"There were people getting up on tables, diving off tables, jumping up on stage . . . The amount of times the mic stand was knocked over . . . Me pedal was falling off the stage, leads were pulled out and me going 'oh shit!' Ducking down to plug them back in. We got invited to an art exhibition that day and the fella who had the exhibition was there, 'cause it was the opening of his . . . And he was out of his face. At the end of the gig there was blood all over him. He cut his chest and his nose was pumping blood. It was mad. A great gig. We really enjoyed it."
Flexihead are awesome, simply fucking awesome The first time I saw them I thought, yeah, there's something here. The second time, I was thinking, this band is intense, different. The third time I didn't think much . . . at all. In the cosy, intimate Attic, in front of no more than thirty people, I experienced one of the best gigs of my life. Let me repeat, Flexihead are awesome, awesome. In each performance they didn't so much develop as metamorphosise.
Dublin hasn't noticed them much yet. But down the country, from Meath to Donegal, the culchies have smelled something meaty, something worth biting into. Flexihead talk about how they love playing down the country, about how the people go to gigs there to enjoy themselves and let go, in contrast to Dublin, where leather jackets come to gigs wearing bodies.
These are simple ingredients: guitar, bass and drums. They belong to thousands of people who play in hundreds of bands. You go to gig after gig in search of their perfect mix and you come away, again and again, disappointed. Then Flexihead walk on stage and plug in. They don't look anything different. In fact, they look downright ordinary, like they walked in off the streets through the wrong door. But in their ordinariness there is a freshness. Because one of the first things you notice about Flexihead is that they have no pretence, no pose, no 'so cool I'm frozen' smirks.
And then they inject and ignite and from Niall Byrne's guitar comes riffs that verge on what you know but then veer off with subtle shifts, intermixing hypnotic harmonics with the rhythm. It's like two guitars, it's like one, it's like . . . No, it is! It's right! And Niall Bowden's bass is in there, doing its work. Picked at times, slapped at others and when the time is right, smashed. And when you notice the bandage on his thumb, you know how it got there. Andy Inight's drums do all they're supposed to; they speed and they climb and they thud out that basic, essential rhythm.
Flexihead are about intensity and passion. They love what they do. When they make mistakes they smile and when they get it right, they smile. When their music plunders through their amps, they become connected and their bodies respond by dancing with the feedback and screams. They're up there and they're enjoying it, living it, electrified.
Ballyfermot Rock School, take a bow. You have been respon-sible for getting together a group who I believe will soon rock the world. But it wasn't 'love' at first gig, as bassist, Niall Bowden explains: "At the end of the Rock School we split up, and then like for a couple of years we were just going our own separate ways, you know. An' I met, like, Andy in a pub a while ago and we were very drunk and we were talking about the great times we had and we said, 'let's get the band going again, let's go into a rehearsal room and jam and have a bit of fun'."
The first rehearsal was a wash out - a double booking, no less - so they washed down a few more pints in the pub and talked some more about the great time at Ballyfermot. But when finally they did get to rehearse, they felt the change, knew the difference. The two Nialls grew up on the Metal tradition, saving up for cheap instruments and starting lots of small-time Metal bands. For drummer, Andy - "Norseman and proud" Inight, it was a little different. "My Dad's a musician, he's a keyboard player, so there was always music in the house. And he was trying to push me into playing keyboards but it never excited me or anything like that. So, he used to drag me around to music shops and I'd just see the drum kit in the corner and it's the biggest thing there and I was going, I want one a them. I did lots of saving for it - wasn't bought for me at all - saved me confirmation money, you know. Remember me Granny gave me #100. That was a big thing."
Fair dues to the Granny, but did she know what she was helping to start? Hardly. Nor did the lads until that reunion rehearsal, when something clicked and the riffs flowed. Something had changed. Niall Byrne puts it down to opening his mind up to music outside Metal. "I heard Big Black and thought, that's the best thing I've ever heard in me life. I'd listened to thrash metal and thought, that's it! You can't get more powerful, more aggressive. But when I heard Big Black, it just blew it away. Bands like Fugazi as well. I heard them and I thought, yes! Cause that was totally different than anything I'd listened to before. Like Fugazi has clean sounds but some of it is unbelievably aggressive. Then I saw them live and I'd never seen anything like it before."
They knew they had tapped into something different. Now, they needed a name. How did they get it? "There's a compilation album called 'Flexerhead', and we just kinda changed it around. It's also a vibrator; Flexihead vibrator (laughs). We didn't actually know about that, we were only told about that later, but we thought, ah, that sounds good. We'll pretend that's how we got it, instead of saying we robbed it off a compilation album."
Niall Byrne has a voice with the power to frighten, to chill. It has a passionate menace and when it screams it beats it way through any noise to leave its message shivering inside your head. It leaves its mark, for sure, as it stamps its way through stories of desolation, fear, disappointment and pure, spitting hate, like on the song called "Prick": "I think you're a prick/I think your girlfriend's a pig/I'd rather eat my own shit/Than . . . No matter, whatever."
The stories Flexihead tell are the final ingredient in what makes them unique and dangerous. They are stories fashioned on an entirely different anvil to what you're used to hearing from the puppy-love kids. They are full of bitter irony. They look on love from a battlefield perspective. On "Whore" we hear about the character's obsession with a girl. It's full of foreboding, full of a mind walking lines: "Hello lady, you look so tame/But you are my scratcher/I am a cunt. I am a whore."
"Saliva", with its speeding, thrash-metal rush, tells a mean and vicious tale: "What does that sound like to me?/It sounds like somebody squirming in the next room/Do you know what it sounds like to me?/It sounds like your girlfriend has found some company/She doesn't know you are here, does she?/Do you know you're starting to seethe? Do you know you're starting to drool/Saliva/Saliva/Saliva."
The songs go on, deeper and darker, ploughing their way through the veins, doing open surgery on the heart with a spade. They tear out from minds of China syndrome paranoia. "People Who Are Too Nice Are Two Faced" says it all in its title, while "Mine" vomits irony as the character tells her how good he is, how "you can tell me anything/You can tell me everything". He loves her and will no doubt love her to death if she ever dares to leave him.
When Niall Byrne sat down he took out what looked like the handle of a hair brush. Then he clicked it at the side and out snapped a six inch, shining blade, with a slight curve at the top. He kept pushing it in and snapping it out during our conversation.
I'm only joking.
You see, Niall Byrne is as sound as a bell. There is nothing remotely pretentious about him. He's not ashamed to be a gushing fan of the music he loves listening to. He's not ashamed to say that he still really likes Nirvana. That, to me, is a big point in his favour. I am so sick of wankers telling me about how they liked Nirvana when they did "Bleach" but how now, you know. pompous, phony, fashionably brain-dead wankers, who have to have their own little 'secret' band who nobody else has heard of, they love music about as much as the scumbags who set the prices for CDs. Niall and Flexihead are none of the above.
As far as the songwriting goes, Niall treads the same ground as one of his biggest heroes. Steve Albini. Albini documented the underseam; he was the person who stayed at the crash scene and took notes. Someone who watched what other people fed on. Niall is the same. "I had quite a happy childhood. I get most of my ideas from watching people. I could spend hours watching people. Like I think they're really funny. They do stupid things. I'm just putting it into songs. Or you'd see films like, and just . . . Like from anything you see, you get ideas from. You'd be just even walking down the street and somebody'd say something to you, and you'd go, I'm going to rob that."
Flexihead carry awesome potential. I've played their demo so many times and each time it finishes, I'm like a hen with an egg waiting for the tape to rewind. It just gets better, deeper, whatever. Riffs that hook into you, songs that disturb and entrance, and all the time feeling that I'm hearing the birth of a great, great band. How great? Oh, as great as you want. How great do you want? I just want more; twenty more, forty, sixty more songs like the four I've just heard and I'll be happy for a while.
May Flexihead keep doing whatever they're doing, because whatever it is, it's right. The only thing I'm worrying about as I finish this article is that it might bloat their egos and block the genius that's flowing through them. But I don't think it will, not if they maintain their down-to-earth nature and sense of humour. "We're a bit boring really. We usually just sit there going, ah . . . cup a tea. Yeah, a cup a tea an' we're happy."