Welcome to Carrickmacross, population 3,800 and best known as the home of Patrick Kavanagh, Ardal O’Hanlon and a mighty fine bypass.
More recently, the Co Monaghan town can boast of The Flaws, the local four-piece who are still celebrating after being signed at the end of last year. Signed? And not based in Dublin or Cork?, one may splutter. In fact, singer and guitarist Paul Finn cites the small town boredom as a major factor in his and best friend Stephen Finnegan’s decision to form a band.
“There was nothing much to do in Carrickmacross,” he begins, his accent mapping the town’s border county locale. “I was never really into sports like all my friends, and that was why I got more into music. If you don’t fit in anywhere, you have to invent your own wee scene and be really good at something a bit different. Although we were terrible at that stage!”
Speaking from Dundalk’s Tumbleweed studio, where the band recorded their The Flaws EPlast year, Paul elaborates on how much the quartet had to learn when they started out back in 2000.
He isn’t shy about revealing that, when the idea for the band came about, it was merely a minor hindrance that they couldn’t play their instruments (“I only played guitar a little and Stephen wanted to learn the drums”).
Later, when Dane McMahon has been recruited on bass and Shane Malone on guitar, they found themselves plying their trade as a covers band.
“We met up for one practice and we learnt a load of songs, but we quickly found out we were no good at them. We did about 10 gigs at 10 different venues, but none of them would ask us back,” he laughs. “I suppose that’s because we used to throw our own songs in the middle of the set. The whole place would just go quiet and think: ‘Bon Jovi never played that’.”
Yet publicly shooting themselves in the foot only increased their determination to write original material.
“We used to spend time figuring out our own stuff when we should have been concentrating on learning covers,” Finn recalls. “But playing our own songs was something we really wanted to do, and when you do what you love, it comes easy and quickly.”
The Flaws quickly inspired an A&R scrum, from which Polydor imprint Sound Foundation (home of Humanzi and CH-1) emerged victorious.
The seeds of this relationship began when The Thrills manager and label boss Alan Cullivan turned up to see them in Galway a few months before.
“We were just doing a short tour with Delorentos, with the Roisin Dubh being our first stop,” he explains, before pausing to take an audible drag of his cigarette. “The gig went really well, but what our manager didn’t tell us, in case we freaked out, was that Alan Cullivan and Daniel Ryan, The Thrills’ guitarist, were there. They thought we were deadly and put us forward to Polydor.”
The rewards come in the form of every fledgling band’s dream scenario. Currently, the band are tightening up their already-lauded live act with plenty of stage action around the country. Once on tip-top form, they’ll pay Grouse Lodge studio in Westmeath a visit in April to record their first album.
Their sound is also moulded by their aforementioned unfamiliarity with their instruments.
“None of us are brilliant musicians even now,” Finn admits. Funnily, this can sometimes work to their advantage.
“We can’t do long-winded solos, so we don’t even attempt them. That’s why there’s very little ‘wanking’ in the songs,” he explains. “They’re all quite straightforward. We’re always learning and branching out. We can’t wait to turn really pretentious. The more pretentious we get, the better!”