Red barmy

Remember Backwater – those polite Downpatrick boys who, along with their mates Ash, launched an unexpected South Down offensive on the mid-’90s indie charts?

Some of you do, some of you don’t! Backwater, after all, were hardly the type of band that stomped their feet to gain your attention. Their approach was altogether more low-key and mannered – content, it seemed, to work hard, appeal to a select few and hope that writing tunes of the quality of ‘Shady’ and ‘Earthly Faces And Alien Places’ would be enough to get them by. However, their timing was unfortunate. Cast, Northern Uproar et al loomed, and once the Britpop tsunami crashed ashore, driven as it was by big chords and unabashed populism, it wasn’t a surprise to find Backwater and their wistful take on the indie ideal eventually washed all out to sea.

That was three years ago. Since then Barry Peak, Ryan McAuley and Shaun Robinson have taken some time to get on with the business of life (they’re now all teachers) and reflect on what went before. And now they’re back with a cool new name a promising stash of new material and a generalised attitude overhaul.

“Here’s the thing with Backwater,” says stringy front-man Barry, ”Everybody thought Backwater were alright. I don’t want that. I want people to either love Torgas Valley Reds or hate us.”

As such the new moniker is an important pointer for anyone looking for differences between the trio’s alma mater and their noisy nu skool. The personnel may not have changed but, according to Barry, three years of productive inactivity and a new-found revisionist spirit had rendered the old name redundant.

“The shift from Backwater to now wasn’t evolutionary – it was a new thing completely – new songs, a different aesthetic. It was just important to have a different name. It’s a reference to a John Steinbeck book called In Dubious Battle – which is just one of my all-time favourite novels - and a group of political activists that appear in it. I think the name’s great because it could almost be the name of a baseball team. I just think it’s much more dynamic and exciting than Backwater – which carried so many negative connotations and just implied that we were stuck. And, on top of that, it looks dead cool on posters.”

This re-christening has also allowed them to side-step many of the problems encountered by long-haul bands who find their relevance evaporating with every gig. Backwater’s legacy may well have been limited, but it did exist. As far as Barry is concerned, though, the slate has now been wiped clean.

“We played our first gig and the audience was made up predominately of people that had seen us before, but, of course, times have moved on, and there are loads of people that know nothing about us. And that’s exciting. We can’t get involved in any kind of nostalgia trip. We have to do it for the right reasons – because we have something to say, because we have new music that we want to write.”

Which means zipping off in the straight-edge direction of Washington DC, stopping over for some ATDI fuzz rock in El Paso, before heading back via Mogwai’s gaff in Glasgow where everything’s quieter but a bit more scary. Add to the mix the kind of assured vocal presence that would have had the Peake of yore hiding behind the settee, and it isn’t difficult to imagine Torgas Valley Reds playing with the remnants of Backwater’s cocoon happily scattered around their feet.

“I had to take a step back and decide to write about things that I really cared about,” says Barry. “I can remember thinking about all the bands that I truly loved – La Tigra, Sonic Youth, Fugazi – and they were all writing about important things. They were all highly political, in a micro sense, and genuinely forward looking. And I was just churning out rubbish. Now, though, I think it stands up. I’ve got cable TV and just watching MTV for any length of time should remind you how disgracefully bad most of the music being made at the moment is. It’s just antiseptic crap that says nothing and, even if we’re only playing to 25 people in a bar in Belfast, we honestly feel we can challenge that.”

Once the reds start talking about year zero, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.