“Paul Simon, Megadeth, Anthrax, Billy Joel …”. The Revs are the first to admit that their influences are nothing if not diverse. Rory, Michael and John are three bright young things from Donegal, who are lined up to play the Witnness festival and are currently riding high on the success of their fiercely catchy debut single. ‘Wired To The Moon’ has entered the Irish chart at No. 18, and their video has been featured on all the main music programmes on TV.

Chilling out after one of their regular performances at the all-ages Blast gigs in the Temple Bar Music Centre, The Revs lead singer Rory Gallagher tells me all about it. “The video is great. We filmed it in Bundoran in Co. Donegal in both an amusement arcade, and in this weird old farmers pub in the middle of nowhere, which we covered in David Lynch felt and did up as a cool Twin Peaks kind of bar. We were lucky in a way ‘cause Niall Heery the guy who was directing it knew Tim Fleming, who does a lot of camera work for Ridley Scott and he filmed the video for us on 16 mm camera.”

“We’ve been going for thirteen months,” Rory says. “Myself and Michael knew each other from school, and John used to come to Donegal every summer from Dundalk, cause his father’s from the area.” “I was a blow-in,” laughs guitarist John McIntyre.

“We do a gig about once a week, anywhere we can get a gig around the country, small bars and whatever. We’ll probably have to gear it down a little bit now, as we have the single release and we don’t want to wear ourselves out with low-key gigs. It’s always the way, though, when you’re trying to be more professional, you end up making less money.”

The Revs have about seven tracks recorded, and hope to have an album out by September.

“What we’re going for is the kind of music that makes people jump around and enjoy themselves. There’s not enough of that on the alternative scene. We’re looking at a power pop kind of thing, like The Ramones, Blondie, The Undertones, that’s what we’re after. It’s gradually creeping back with the like of Wheatus, who are a bit shite and American. But they’re getting there.”

“At the start of every decade, you get bands who try to do something a bit different. At the start of the ’90s you had Nirvana, who totally blew away the likes of Bon Jovi and Whitesnake and all that crap. At the start of this decade, every band making it big seems to be very acoustic and Travis-y, and we don’t want to jump on that bandwagon. We prefer to try our own approach, but it might take a while to kick off.”

Surprisingly, most of The Revs’ pogo-tastic punk pop songs are of acoustic origin. “For most of the songs, me and John sit down with a guitar and jam it out. If you heard the set unplugged, you could see how they started out -there’s a basic melody and structure to all the songs,” according to Rory. John adds: “The songs that we do jam as a full band are more aggressive-sounding, which is not a bad thing.”

They have a cheeky song about the, er, downside of the Louis Walsh phenomenon in their set, “We don’t have anything against Louis Walsh – it’s against the general public, ‘cause they’re the ones that buy the records. Maybe the rock bands are as much to blame for not putting out the kind of material that people want to buy. We urge the young musicians of Ireland to stop whinging about boy bands and write some decent music,” Rory states.

“My parents were in pop bands in the ’70s and Louis Walsh used to look after them. He must have been crap then ‘cause they fired him. Even though he’s very good at what he does, and his bands nowadays are very successful, we’d never want that kind of management. We wouldn’t want to be pushed in any particular direction. At the moment we have our own company set up, but Robert Stephenson of Treasure Island is looking after us and helping us out big time.”

They’ve had their share of misfortune, according to Rory.“We played a gig in Dublin about six months ago and Michael’s car got stolen and burnt with all his gear in it. And the following week John drove his car into a lake. But the less said about that the better.” Since it might still be sub judice, we move swiftly on.

“We won the Spirit of Summer Big Issue competition last August.” Rory remembers. “We didn’t get any money out of it, but is was a good gig. Some of the gigs we’ve played in small venues have been really nice. If you get the right crowd, even if it’s only twenty people who are really into it, behind you the whole way, that’s better than having hundreds who couldn’t give a toss. It’s probably better craic than playing stadium gigs. Then again, we’re not going to turn down any stadium gigs!”

The Revs – coming soon to a stadium near

you.

The Revs play Witnness on 5th August, the TBMC on

10th August and the Ambassador, O’Connell St. on 28th with US band Reel Big Fish. The single ‘Wired to the Moon’ is available now through Treasure Island Recordings, and in all good record shops.

www.treasureisland.ie