Taking Flight

Like so many before them, Cuckoo are a Derry band who play taut and tuneful guitar-based rock ’n’ roll. However, there’s nothing humdrum or nondescript about this quartet. The band may have signed to the Geffen label at the beginning of last year, but rest assured, despite the big bucks behind their recently released debut album Breathing Lessons, Cuckoo aren’t willing to sit back and let the machine take over.

“Geffen signed us because they believed they could make money out of us,” guitarist Andrew Ferris reasons. “That’s something we went into with our eyes open and belonging to that machinery is as destructive as it is constructive, but we signed a very small deal, our advance was miniscule. Without getting into figures, they cleared our debts, we bought equipment, recorded an album, and then the money ran out. The recoupability trap is something we’ve spent 18 months avoiding. All our goals are attainable. We’d have made this album anyway; the production wouldn’t have sounded so good, but the heart and soul would’ve been the same and we would’ve had it out a lot quicker.”

Cuckoo singer/bassist Ruairi O’ Doherty is equally pragmatic.

“One of the main reasons we signed such a small deal is because we’ve seen Irish bands in particular, who we know personally, who’ve paid themselves 150 quid a week,” he explains, “and after a year they’re fucked out on their ear because they’ll never make it back.”

Only in rock ‘n’ roll could somebody consider £150 a week an extravagant wage. However, the band are determined to steer clear of the traps that have crippled bands with more money than sense.

“Maybe we’re cuttin’ off our noses to spite our faces,” Andrew concedes, “but we’re in this for the long haul. We choose to live at home. When we tour, we don’t stay in hotels, we sleep on a bus. All these things aren’t done out of nobility, they’re done out of far-sightedness and an extremely tight manager. But we like that, because we’re not selling any records, so how dare we pay ourselves any money? Whenever we start selling records we’ll reward ourselves, not until then.”

Cuckoo also apply this philosophy of frugality to their art as well as their commerce. Breathing Lessons, produced by Suede, Boo Radleys and Pulp producer Ed Buller, is a masterclass in economy and simplicity. One would be hard pressed to find an ounce of surplus baggage on songs like ‘What’s It All About’ or ‘Blackmail’; indeed, there’s scarcely a second wasted throughout the record’s 38-minute duration.

“It took us two and a half years to be able to find the confidence in ourselves to write songs like ‘What’s It All About?’” Ruairi admits. “It took a lot of listening to bands like Weezer and Nirvana to grasp that pop sensibility.”

“Ed himself calls it ‘sumptuous minimalism’,” Andrew elaborates, “and that’s something that’s very hard to achieve. Martin Hannet did it with Joy Division, the fact that a floor tom on its own for eight seconds can sound like the most wondrous thing. And the verses in ‘Atmosphere’ being just one bass note and a vocal.

“Cuckoo are not that sort of band, but you can adopt that philosophy of economy in anything, in the way you live - that’s the sort of people we are, we’re quite tidy. We like everything dead-ahead, direct, tight, angular, strict and punchy, because we think that makes passionate music. That was one thing Ed was fantastic at, he said, ‘The song has to stand up on its own’, which all these songs do.”

Although Cuckoo may be justifiably proud of Breathing Lessons, they still hanker after some of the frills and embellishments that characterised their early music.

“Our main resentment about the album would be that it’s so barren,” Andrew concedes. “There’s not a lot of technique on it at all, and as musicians we admire other musicians. But that’s also the beauty about it.”

Despite a healthy budget, Cuckoo were adamant that the songs on Breathing Lessons wouldn’t be burdened with unnecessary pomp and circumstance. Ruairi accepts my suggestion that, on many of the rock ‘n’ roll albums released last year, strings were the new comedy.

“The record company were listening to stuff like ‘Blackmail’ and going, ‘That’ll be the big American single, we’ll get some strings on it and turn it into a real ballad,’” he attests. “And we were like, ‘Fuck off! There’s no strings goin’ near this album!’ Bands like Ash were getting into that territory and Embrace going into Abbey Road with a 40-piece orchestra was quite offensive to us at that time.”

“The album was abandoned rather than finished,” Andrew adds, “because we couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“It had to be,” Ruairi pipes up, “otherwise you’d start stickin’ strings and fuckin’ didgeredoos on it.”

All the same, Andrew admits that when the band finally surrendered the masters to Geffen, it was somewhat disconcerting to have the album entered into a year-long corporate queue for a release date and a marketing campaign.

“You start to feel really self-conscious whenever it goes through so many people for justification and validation,” he confesses. “The fact that it’s played at a meeting with 20 marketing people going, ‘What can we do with this?’ that’s really scary for us, ’cos you wouldn’t want one of your children put up on a stage and examined and scrutinised, with people going, ‘How should we educate this child to turn in into a good citizen?’ which is what they do with albums.”

“I was talking to a guy who runs a fanzine in England,” Ruairi muses, “and he summed it up, he said, ‘When you start suckin’ corporate cock you have to expect a bit of a bad taste, a bit of cheese or whatever.’ So we’ve gotten a wee bit used to the taste of it now!”

Like so many Ulster acts, Cuckoo freely admit to feeling much more of an affinity with US underground bands like Husker Du, The Replacements and the Afghan Whigs rather than their European contemporaries.

“ In Ireland there isn’t one thousandth of the good musicians there are in America,” Andrew claims. “Band musicianship is an art that’s lost on us. Ireland’s an island of poets really, we’re a very emotional and grief stricken people, stuck in a very barren place and we’ve had a tough time of it. So why would we bother spending eight or nine hours practicing guitar when there’s life to deal with? Americans are a lot more comfortable and fat.”

I’m not sure Hendrix or Coltrane would’ve agreed with the latter statement, but Andrew has an interesting, if arguable, point there. One borne out by the paucity of truly gifted rock virtuosos in the Rory Gallagher Best Musician category at the 1998 Hot Press Awards, an event which, it must be said, provided Cuckoo (nominees for Best New Band) with an exceedingly good excuse for a piss-up.

“We were lunatics,” Andrew admits, shaking his head. “We were getting photographs and kisses and hugs and things signed off everyone. Our drummer asked Bono for a tenner! We were talking to Ash, Mani, it was just a great night.”

The first of many, no doubt. Cuckoo, while not being the most cutting edge act in the world, have guts, brains and an impressive appetite for hard work. As Andrew concludes: “There’s no harm in us looking towards other people for inspiration. To be as tight as the Foo Fighters and as gutsy as the Pixies, that’s where we wanna get to.”

Humble aspirations to some but no less noble for all of that.

- Breathing Lessons is out now on Geffen, distributed by Universal.