The sons always shines in NYC

In New York, in November, Ken Griffin is everywhere. At a recent Raconteurs after-show, Jack White made a point of slapping Griffin’s new band, The Favourite Sons, on the stereo. The city’s music press, for its part, can’t have enough of the one-time Rollerskate Skinny frontman, who nowadays strums a mean acoustic guitar and winces at the term ‘art-rock’. During New York fashion week, meanwhile, designer Cynthia Rowley debuted her fall collection to the strains of Down Beside Your Beauty, the Favourite Sons’ debut album. The big time never felt so big.

“All the attention does seem strange because for a while I'd given up on music almost entirely,” says Griffin, back in Dublin to shill for Down Beside Your Beauty, ahead of the record’s European release. “I was working in a bar in Brooklyn. Music felt like something in my past.”
Griffin admits to being scarred by the failure of Rollerskate Skinny, an orchestral pop band that, in a world fairer than this, might have sold a million records: “Looking back, we never had a chance. From the start, people were going on about [drummer] Jimi because his brother was Kevin Shields out of My Bloody Valentine. That connection seemed to sink us, although Jimi only played on one album.”
Following the demise of Skinny, Griffin pursued a girlfriend to Brooklyn, put together an obtuse art-rock threesome called Kid Silver and dared the music industry to do its worst.
“Actually, Kid Silver was largely an excuse to get me to America. I’d signed to a US label and they agreed to fly me out to New York to make the record. The band itself was never meant to be a success. I wanted to do something even artier than Rollerskate Skinny, simply for the heck of it.”
Even when tending bar in Brooklyn , Griffin was still writing songs, mostly, he admits, for his own amusement. It was at this point that documentary-maker Mark Cassar suggested the pair collaborate on a feature: the rockumentary would chronicle Griffin’s attempt to resurrect his musical ambitions.
“I’d heard of Rollerskate Skinny and I knew Ken, but it had never occurred to me that they were the same person,” says Cassar, who is filming Griffin throughout our interview (he plans on releasing the finished movie next year).
Seeking to put his career back on track while the camera rolled really put it up to Griffin: “At the start it was like a parody. It was just me, in my flat talking about one day having a band again. You would have laughed, it was so pathetic. I thought ‘I’ve got to make a go of this or I’m going to look really, really stupid’."
Not long afterwards, he made the acquaintaince of Aspera, an avant-grunge outfit originally from Philadelphia. With their lead singer recently departed, they were looking for a frontman. Griffin recognised an opportunity.
“What we’ve got in common is that having done all sorts of experimental stuff down the years," Griffin avers, "we now want to explore old-fashioned songwriting. A good song is timeless. It doesn’t have to be complicated or clever. It just has to be honest.”
A decade after the fact, does Griffin look back at Rollerskate Skinny and experience a flush of pride? They may not have sold many records but today one can arguably hear the group’s influence in everyone from Bell X1 (whose ‘Rocky Took A Lover’ has an unabashed Skinny feel) to the art-rockisms of Broken Social Scene.
“Rollerskate Skinny were one of those bands that weren’t big enough to sustain what they were doing but were popular enough to crop up on people’s radar,” Griffin concludes. “Listening to those songs now, we sound like a bunch of kids trying to take on the world. I’m proud of the music but I could never go back.”