There have been a lot of words bandied around about Dublin’s Fight Like Apes of late, but the Berlin blog Torture Garden seems to have summed them up better than most when they described the band as exciting and crazy in equal measure.
As the outfit's public face, vocalist May Kay and synth king Pockets have had to get used to dealing with people’s interpretation of their work. “People seem to think we’re the angriest people going. I wouldn’t really call myself angry as much as would say I was peeved. I just get annoyed sometimes but they’re more childish tantrums”.
“We’re very petty people”, interjects Pockets (get used to the interjections, they happen a lot).
In truth, though, there is an element of fury to the Fight Like Apes experience, although May Kay feels that it makes the odd appearance rather than a continual stream. “There’s a point in certain songs where it never fails to get me aggressive, shouting and screaming and stuff. The songs go up and down, we go in and out of moods. 'Jake Summers' is the best example, it starts off quite nicely and goes into a peak of aggression”. Pockets agrees. “The contrast makes it. If it was just aggression all the time it would become boring and expected, there’s no shock value left”.
The band’s ability to head off on a tangent has proved useful in their early days of playing live, when perhaps people weren’t paying as much attention as they should.
“That’s a massive thing we’ve noticed”, says Pockets. “People see us getting up onstage with keyboards and think, ‘oh God here come the ballads.’ Even having a female singer because there would be these preconceptions of what a female singer will sing”. Really? Still? “Maybe there haven’t been too many strong female singers in Ireland in recent years. Mary gets compared to people like Dolores O’Riordan just because she’s Irish and that’s lazy. Maybe it’s a cultural thing that we’re progressing a lot slower as a nation than everybody else.”
Note that it was the band who brought up the topic, not us. Surely we’d like to think that this sort of crap has passed now, but for May Kay it would seem to still be a depressingly regular experience.
“In interviews I always get asked if my influences are PJ Harvey, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Patti Smith; all of whom I like but people assume that I’m only going to take influence from other female fronted bands”.
You may have noticed talk of Mary just now and hereby lies some of the magic about Fight Like Apes, the sense that they inhabit a different world once they become the band. “There was one day when it all fell in place. The guys (completed by Tom on bass and Adrian on drums) kept saying to me that I wasn’t really coming up trumps as a frontwoman in rehearsal”.
Interjection time, again. “She wasn’t really being herself when she sang, not really putting herself into it. We’d decided on the band name but it didn’t sound like Fight Like Apes the way she was singing”.
“For maybe two months they kept at me”, the singer continues, “and I was going, leave me alone, it’s grand. Then one day I just thought, fuck it and I decided to blow their ears off and let go. It completely let something out”. “We were gigging within two weeks”, says Pockets (Jamie to his mum) and Mary became May Kay I suppose. Up until then it had taken us three months to get a set list together, after that it doubled in two weeks”.
For such a new band, Fight Like Apes have made a quite astonishing impact. Everybody is talking about them – bloggers, bands, promoters, magazines. For Pockets, it’s all a bit of a surprise. “We really didn’t expect to be releasing these tracks, we recorded them as demos for €300. Fifa approached us to release them as an EP, then we got management and suddenly we’re reading about ourselves everywhere. We were never trying to push it ourselves but people are now pushing it to other people and the results are amazing”.