Taking the Pulzar

Aisling: “There’s a fella from Amsterdam who’s set up a website devoted to us. He knows everything about us, prints up our lyrics and analyses them. He’s coming over to see us play at Katy Daly’s next week. Annette’s been mailing him.

Annette: “Yeah, I don’t know what his real name is, it comes up as Wombcat. I don’t know if that’s what we’ll put down on the guest list.”

Kerry Ann: “I think we’re really going to have to take a good look at the company we’re keeping.”

Outside of gymnastics, 22-year-old veterans are pretty thin on the ground. But when you consider that Pulszar (the two Gallagher sisters Aisling and Kerrie Ann and their cousin Annette) had released a single and toured with Placebo before they had all left school, it’s fair to say that the Maghera rockers are old hands on the local music scene. It’s surprising then to learn that their new single ‘Out Of Time’, is their first new release in almost two years. What kept you?

“I think when we first started, we expected to do it for a year and then be mega famous,” says lead singer Kerrie Ann. “But we didn’t really put much work into it because we just got distracted. We’ve done an awful lot of drinking. We didn’t really drink until we were 18, so once we all started at university, we all went crazy. But now we don’t have that to fall back on. This is our life, so we better make it work.”

Which is not to say that the girls haven’t been spending their time productively. Anyone who’s stepped over them in a bar during that ‘long weekend’, will now be glad to know that they were actually involved in some heavy duty research and reconnaissance.

“Living in Belfast has been brilliant,” says Aisling. “We’re always going to see other bands around the place. There’s an awful lot of bands out there who we’ve seen and thought were really good, and it does give you a jolt and makes you more determined to get our act together. But it’s been a distraction as well. You don’t get many indie bands in Magherafelt, so it was all new. And we have now spent an awful lot of time in pubs.”

If you’ve ever stood in front of Kerrie Ann while she’s singing, you’ll be well aware of the gale-force velocity of her voice. In the past, this particular juggernaut has sometimes run amok with little thought for the safety of innocent bystanders. ‘Out Of Time’, though, suggests that during the period that they’ve been away a little bit more restraint has been added to the mix. Kerry Ann admits she sought help from an outside source.

“I took singing lessons a while back there and it’s been a big help to me,” she says. “It was something I think I had to do. We’d play four or five gigs in a row and I’d not be able to speak for days after it. It’s a lot stronger now and I’ve learnt a lot more about pacing myself, about dynamics and stuff. It’s been brilliant.”

And now (after nurturing obsessions with Queens Of The Stone Age, Royksopp and John Denver) it seems that Pulszar are determined to make up for lost time. They are currently tidying up their next single, with an eye on a possible April release, and intend getting back in the live groove, with shows planned throughout Ireland, and a stint in England looming as support for sleaze-core Strokes-acolyte, and onstage underpant-wearer Har Mar Superstar. That should be fun.

“We hope so,” smiles Aisling. “He’s a kind of bald, Frank Zappa lookalike who sings loads of songs about sex and young girls. We think we were just booked because we are young girls. But if he thinks we’re just showing up to be his bitches, he’s got another thing coming. If he tries anything we’ll send Kerry Ann out. That should fix him.”