Visiting Hours Of A Travelling Circus, the soon-to-be-released debut album from Lisburn three-piece Mojo Fury, is a dense, layered conundrum – full of big choruses and blood red emotion. No place for the faint-hearted – Mike, James and Ciaran have agreed to take you by the hand and guide you safely through the record’s plunges, detours and hair-pin corners.
 
‘The Mann’: (James) “This was a result of a late night in a dingy basement spent making electronic beats with (the programme) Reason 2.5, and then recording live drums, distorted guitars, bass and screaming over the top of it all. It originally sounded like a soundtrack to a nightmare... one of Gary Numan’s! But when we played it live it became a more traditional straight-ahead rock song. For the album, we tried to balance the two, so it was the perfect opening track.”
‘Deep Fish Tank’: (James) “It’s a song that basically came from us standing in someone’s garage in the middle of winter playing fast riffs to fend off the cold. The track was full of energy and fun to play. On the record we added a few Moog lines and some samba percussion, but overall it remains one of our rawest tracks, and the one where you really see our three-piece roots shine through.”
‘Lemon Marine’: (James) “There are sections of this song that have been around for almost as long as we have. In our writing process we will tend to work on something for a while, lose interest, move on to a new idea and then come back to the original one. This was one of them. It really took on a new life when tracking in the studio. We added synth to the chorus and gave it a more electro, dance feel and then we asked Linley Hamilton to play trumpet on the outro – giving the song a real burst of energy to finish.”
‘Electric Sea’: (Ciaran) “This started in one of our bedrooms. We were 17/18 at the time and had yet to flee the nest, so our only option was to stay in and write a song. It was just with an acoustic guitar and bass at the start, but it has evolved over the years. We ditched the acoustic and added lots more guitar noise and really built the song up with the drums. The name comes from one of the amps we were using. It was a beaten up 15 watt bass amp. It was pretty crap.”
‘What A Secret’: (Ciaran) “We had all moved into a big house in the middle of nowhere, and this is one of the first songs we wrote there. Lyrically, it’s about questioning certain things – things you’re brought up to believe but eventually realise hold no relevance to your own life. It all came very naturally and didn’t take very long to finish, it was all pieced together pretty quickly.”
‘Kill Cock Robin’: (Ciaran) “We were sitting in our manager’s house at the time, ‘reading’ a ‘60s edition of Mayfair. I just remember seeing ‘Kill Cock Robin’ written down. I can’t remember anything else about the story, but we liked the sound of those three words side by side. At the time, we were practising in an old dungeon-like room in the oldest building in the city; and it was also partly written on acoustic guitar and acoustic bass, whilst sitting on a war memorial statue – I think that helps to explain the atmosphere of the song.”
‘We Should Just Runaway’: (Mike) “This track started as a bit of an experiment. I set myself the test of writing purposefully predictable chorus chords, and was thinking, ‘This sounds like the Ting Tings’. Then an edgier melody and lyrical idea just landed in my head. I took a synth programing idea I had from a few years back, slapped them together and – boom it was there.”
‘Pill Pigeon’: (Mike) “Verse, chorus, skip a beat, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus and outro. It’s so energetic and fun to play and real nice to be rockin’ out and shouting a message of how sunshine is good for the soul.”
‘Bones’: (Mike) “It’s all about the importance of friends, and surrounding yourself with people you trust and not ‘the wrong crowd’. The verse lyrics are written, in a slightly biographical way, about someone growing up, experiencing life’s problems, but then realising that all is okay – as long as their bones are in the right place.”
‘Colour Of The Bear’: (Mike) “This was a significant change in sound for us. The production relies a lot on programmed synths. We started to play it in the set and it was actually the first track we recorded for the album. It’s probably the most accessible thing on the album. I think it shows that Mojo Fury have some sort of pop sensibility... from time to time.”

Visiting Hours Of A Travelling Circus will be launched at the Spring & Airbrake, Belfast on May 14.