Shots From The Hip

IT'S STRANGE to be at last hooking up with Pelvis for a formal interview in Peter's Pub, in the heart of Dublin 2. Strange, because I first met guitarist Eddie Reynolds about 16 years ago, in the drills of a Wexford strawberry field, where the two of us used to make a few bob picking the fabled fruit every summer. In fact, it transpires that Ed was in the audience at the first gig I ever played as a drummer (recently recounted in the Tubthumper piece that ran in Hot Press a few weeks back). Weird and synchronicitous shit.

Singer/bassist Johnny Rowen and I don't go back quite as far, although when Pelvis were in their embryonic ® stage we often shared studios, stages, managers and, occasionally, beers at various Virgin Prunes-related parties.

But it's not surprising that we should occupy opposite sides of the tape-recorder: while I was always falling in with the right/wrong crowd, Pelvis were diligently writing, rehearsing, gigging and honing their sound. And now, the work is paying off - the band have just released one of the strongest and most fully formed Irish debut albums since God was a Boy, and, all biases aside, are one of the few domestic acts worth blathering about.

Although Who Are You Today is less an indigenous Dublin album than the recent Jubilee Allstars debut, it does reflect a very quirky side of the Liffey experience. ("I think Setanta might have liked us to do it in London," Johnny remarks, "but we're an Irish band, and didn't want to go away from Dublin when we had the facilities here to work.")

But whatever the source, such lovingly crafted, often elusive songs as 'Mistakes' and 'Driver To The Stars' would shine anywhere. And, more to the ballpoint, this trio are a sussed lot. Johnny is intense and thoughtful in equal measures, Eddie's got the cavalier guitarist demeanour down to a T, and drummer Mick Goss, the one Pelvic bone I don't know beyond nodding terms, seems quiet and considered, an almost studious exception to the Mad Bastard drummer stereotype.

For all its intoxicating properties, Who Are You Today's

kaleidoscopic range has baffled the hell out of certain criterati. Many of the tunes are unobvious and elliptical; indeed, all twelve songs require several elongated late-night listening sessions for their charms to become fully apparent. It's not so much a schizoid record as one with a dozen separate personalties.

"Everyone says it's quite a scattered album, which is why we gave it the title Who Are You Today," Johnny admits. "We kinda approach a song as we think it needs to be recorded, not to fulfil an overall sound that, for example, a punk band might have, where every song has to be punk influenced. As a result, some people don't really get what the album's about. That's something that will only come in time after a few listens, they'll start to get a grasp on it.

"It is essentially about how a person - not even in a lifetime, but in a week - can be so many different people, depending on if they're happy or sad. There'll obviously be all the same basic principles that you have in your lifestyle, but what we're attempting to do is approach the idea of the way a person can change and grow."

This onion effect is never more apparent than on the Bergman-esque (beautiful as Ingrid, twisted as Ingmar) 'It's All Too Much For Me', a song that milks a masterful string arrangement - courtesy of Divine Comedy maestro Joby Talbot - for maximum psyche-out value.

"Something will be kind of sombre and you'll think of a warm cello," Johnny explains, "it's like a rainy afternoon in a town, and you're walking around, and there's a lovely warmth; you feel very much isolated, but cosy. So you think, 'What sound would most match that, out of what we have to work with?' Not us as a threesome, but when we get to record."

While Johnny goes to the bar to take a phone call, Ed half-jokingly proposes that forcing people to fiddle with their graphic equalisers in order to make sense of a song as underwater as 'Hang My Hat' constitutes a return to "interactive" listening. He argues that such listening practices have been missing since vinyl went out: folk don't have to get up to turn the record over anymore.

When Johnny returns, he attempts to get to grips with my cockamamie analysis of his rather, er, idiosyncratic lyrics ("Hide behind a milkshake, watching you rave/To the people in the corner 'bout everything you give/I could kinda understand when someone whispered in your ear/How you've always been the greatest and you never got a fear/Except now/As you sip your Brown Cow" - 'What Makes You Dance').

"I loved what David Bowie could get in a song, when he'd pick up on detail," he reflects. "Like that bit in 'Five Years' - "I think I saw you in an ice cream parlour/Drinking milkshakes cold and long" - what a line! I love that, you're painting a picture with words for the listener, so if you're talking about a girl rubbing her finger around the top of a cracked cup, you can picture that completely."

It's all the more interesting to witness a band admitting their steals ("That's called ripping somebody off very subtly!" Johnny corrects me), when the influences are not so blatantly obvious. However, if Pelvis develop at the rate Who Are You Today suggests they can, they'll soon be regarded as a formidable influence themselves.

And if that happens, yarns of strawberry fields forever will earn me countless free drinks from young whippersnappers hungry to know what that Pelvis guitarist was really like as a young pup . . .

PELVIS - The Hiperati

SETANTA RECORDS (Keith Cullen's ultra-hip cottage conglomerate, home to Pelvis, The Divine Comedy, The Frank & Walters, Edwyn Collins and scores more.)

Johnny: "You can have all sorts of cleverly thought-out ideas, but at the end of the day I think we just liked the people on the label. Keith was extremely down to earth and had the clout to get things done. We liked the idea of being on an independent label, so you can get to know everyone. But what really sold them to us at the end of the day - because they were looking to sign us for about a year - was the fact that they signed the worldwide distribution deal with Sony. We had a great offer from an independent label with major distribution. You can't really get better than that. And they absolutely loved the album."

Mick: "Keith was quoted as saying that it's the strongest debut album released by Setanta. That's a huge compliment to us."

JOBY TALBOT (Arranged the strings on Who Are You Today.)

Johnny: "I heard The Divine Comedy's album Casanova, and really got into it, I was a huge fan. There were only three songs that I wasn't really sure of, but I loved the rest, and I loved the orchestration. I said, 'Look, I really want to have strings on this stuff', and Keith turned around and said: 'Oh yeah, well, Joby'll do that'. And I went, 'Joby Talbot? Wow!'"

FLOOD (Executive producer on Who Are You Today, also engineered U2, Nick Cave, The Virgin Prunes, Depeche Mode, PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails, Barry Adamson.)

Eddie: "The first time we met him, he was carrying our amps with us. We met him on the street with Rob. His angles were brilliant in the studio. And he drank an awful lot of coffee! He was great for songs that we had put down and he'd come in and be, as he'd say himself, 'the filter'. He'd filter the good ideas from a mish-mash of loads. He put the whole mood and the whole feel factor into 'Night And Day', right down to the guitar pieces, and to the way Johnny would sing the song."

Johnny: "Flood sat down and said, 'Well, what is it you think about the song?' And I was explaining that the night I wrote it, I was in a sad mood - an awful lot of the songs are written from this point of, not trying to redeem myself, but trying to turn around from a point that I'd been and to promise to be me, and the better side of me. And he said, 'So what about if this song was played in a sombre way, you've done your gig, it's two in the morning, everybody's gone home, and at this stage your playing the song just for yourselves, and the vibe is very laid back, very downbeat.'

"He was such a natural person, he kinda helped the human side of the songs. He knew how to bring it out of us. He said, 'A good producer doesn't make you do things, a good producer finds out how you want to express yourselves and tries to bring that out very naturally. There was no aura about him or anything."

THE VIRGIN PRUNES (The original Irish art-rock terrorists featured Johnny's older brothers Guggi and Strongman in their ranks. Strongman now manages Pelvis, who played and co-wrote much of the material on peripheral Prune Dave-Id Busaras' Smegma 'Structions Don't Rhyme album.)

Johnny: "When they were going around, I never really understood them. The only kind of thing I had was me dad goin': 'The Virgin Prunes, did you ever hear such a name! Tccch!' And 'cos I was a child, I never got their music, I was listening to the Beatles and maybe Billy Swan, Abba. The Prunes to me wasn't really music: you know, the first thing a child will get when they're listening to a song is the melody of a song. It's funny, I only started listening to If I Die, I Die about a year ago, and I really liked it. It's great when someone has the spirit to experiment and be themselves. But yet, they had Iggy Pop records and they were big Bowie fans and all that kinda crack. But they were rooted in their approach, they weren't even listening to other bands who went off on a tangent. It's funny, Flood engineered If I Die, I Die. But I didn't pick up on them at all, they may as well have not have been in a band except for the odd postcard." n