Trading places

Kíla Vs The Thrills? It’s certainly one of the more outré HP editorial ideas, one that was hatched on Monday morning and executed by Wednesday midday: take two bands whose musical sensibilities and career trajectories could not be more diametrically opposed and let them loose in a studio to remix songs from each other’s respective new albums. A mash-up? More like an all-out brawl.

If Kíla couldn’t be anything only an Irish act, albeit the kind whose musical remit can incorporate Asian, African, Jamaican and Brazilian forms, then The Thrills were weaned on pop esperanto, a tight unit with a clearly defined sound based on classic ‘60s Brit-pop and sun-dappled American harmonies.
“I’m not writing your article for you,” says Kíla singer and percussionist Rónán O’Snodaigh at one point. “But it mightn’t be about the similarities so much as the differences between us.”
White man speaketh the truth.
Kíla came of age in the late ‘80s alongside their comrades The Frames and The Mary Janes, a cottage-industrious travelling carnival that fermented a mongrel approach to Irish indigenous music over the course of some nine studio albums, culminating in the forthcoming Gamblers’ Ballet, a mature but still brazen record that spices up trad virtuosity with rogue elements of Andulasian dancehall (‘Fir Bolg’), Mexarcana guitar (‘Seo Mo Leaba’) and Motown-meets-Pacalbel’s Canon in D Major (‘Leath Ina Dhiaidh A Hocht’).
The Kíla mob were never press darlings, but nor did they have to endure the heady rise and divers’ bends The Thrills experienced with their first two albums, documented in unflinching detail in Danny O’Connor’s documentary The End Of Innocence. The Blackrock quintet emerged four years ago, in thrall to Brian Wilson, Neil Young and the sunny California idyll, and wasted no time in gatecrashing the UK top 20 with ‘One Horse Town’ and ‘Big Sur’ (although, as guitarist Daniel points out, they’d spent years in the rehearsal room honing their sound, and had been through at least one ill-fated record deal prior to signing with Virgin). The debut album So Much For The City, conjured from memories of a perfect summer spent bumming around San Diego, hit the number one slot in Ireland and went Top 3 in the UK, and the band found themselves being lauded by Robert Hillburn in the LA Times, rubbing shoulders with touring mates REM and the Chili Peppers, and, in the odious terminology of our times, livin’ the dream.
However, the follow up Let’s Bottle Bohemia, a solid album in need of a flagship single, stalled at a relatively disappointing number 9 in the UK and failed to capitalise on that initial Stateside headwind. The band forged ahead regardless, capping a year’s touring with a triumphant homecoming headliner at The Point before reconvening in a Rosslare beach house to write material for that crucial third album.
Teenager, released this month, finds The Thrills weathered but focused, the summery sheen replaced by autumnal mandolins and an air of bittersweet nostalgia. “Let’s walk through the park while the trees are still bare” Conor Deasy sings in the opening ‘The Midnight Choir’, while the title track, rather than being a delinquent call-to-arms, is a slow country lament. More than anything, Teenager is a clear-eyed collection of September songs that evokes an epigrammatical line from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “There is no such joy in the tavern as on the road thereto.”
And so, as you join us, Rónán O’ Snodaigh and Brian Hogan have just sat down for coffee with Conor Deasy and Daniel Ryan in the Library Bar. It’s noon on the last day of July. Later in the afternoon the Kíla crew will abscond to Karl Odlum’s Monkstown studio to pick the bones out of ‘Nothing Changes Around Here’ from Teenager, while The Thrills will saunter off to Apollo studios in Temple Bar to rebuild Kíla’s ‘Cabhraigí Léi’ from the ground up. The two acts meet for the first time even as the tape is rolling. Within seconds, they’ve granted each other a license to remix, re-record and rework each other’s tunes with impunity.
“No rules,” they decide. “Just jump into it.”
Seconds away.

Peter Murphy: Just about the only common ground I can find between Kíla and The Thrills is that both bands are from the southside of Dublin. Your respective case histories couldn’t be more different.
Conor: Every band’s story is unique to the band. Comparisons are always going to be made, but the truth is, every time you make a record there is that sense of you have everything to prove, it is a chunk of your life. So almost every band knows what it’s like to put out a record and what’s at stake, your hopes and your fears all tied up in it, and that sense of this closure that you think it’ll give you or something.
Brian: It’s kind of scary. If you fuck it up or if it doesn’t get received well, it can change the whole path of what you’re doing.
Daniel: There’s nothing to measure it against. If you’re a sprinter you know when you’re training how you’re getting on. But (if you’re a musician) you only have the five people in the band. You can’t throw it out to people and say, “What do you think?”
Both your bands also grew up on the coast. A lot of Teenager was written in Rosslare.
Conor: We just did a small UK tour and we shot a video in Brighton, we’re big Morrissey fans and we always loved that kind of lost English seaside town thing.
So does Fionn Regan.
Rónán: You could’ve gone to Bray!
Conor: Well, Rosslare has a little bit of that. We spent a lot of our summers there growing up, but during the other seasons it’s pretty deserted and pretty lonely, which is great for playing ’til two in the morning and having some space. But an amount of cabin fever can set in after a while, because you feel a little bit unconnected.
Brian: There’s something about port towns. I grew up in Dun Laoghaire, you want to see it in winter. It was just cement. Very bleak. Brighton must’ve been like that. Brighton wasn’t always hip!
Unlike Kíla, The Thrills skipped the pub and club circuit and pretty much went straight to bigger venues. Any regrets?
Daniel: We were in Dublin for six years, but no-one knew!
Conor: It’s always easy to romanticise the shitty periods or setbacks and rejection, but the truth is, at the time there was nothing that great about it.
Considering your differences, one might be tempted to say that there’s no such thing as an an indigenous Dublin sound in the way there is in Manchester or Detroit.
Rónán: I used to think there was in the late ’80s. There was a look: the ponytail, the metal on the collars, the little string tie and the boots.
Brian: We were early ’80s boys. But we all grew up listening to AC/DC and Top Of The Pops.
Daniel: Did you like Christy Moore?
Rónán: Yeah, he was the king. That album Ordinary Man.
Daniel: That’s an amazing song.
Rónán: But for my family, it was like we were in a trad situation and listening to Top Of The Pops, so the stuff we were digesting was all the stuff on the telly. Everytime we’re playing, Rossa will go: “That’s a Blondie riff!”
In The End Of Innocence, Bob Geldof said that one of the things he liked about The Thrills is how unselfconsciously non-Irish sounding you are.
Conor: On our first album the only thing that was an explicit nod to Ireland was our first single ‘One Horse Town’.
Rónán: I loved that piano bit, I thought it was great.
Brian: The lads’ demeanour is very Irish I think. Just the way you carry yourselves. Even Geldof, he’d hate it, but he’s very Irish. He just hates what he remembers of being Irish.
Daniel: I think he likes to play that up.
Brian: Course he does. But it’s the cliches he’s trying to fight against. He’s coming from ’70s Ireland – a different place.
Conor: When you see Geldof over in London, his social class is not an issue. You’re just Irish in London. The British are even more class-conscious than the Irish are. I remember the first interview we did with the NME, and it was all, “Well-heeled boys from Black Rock.” Two words, capital B, capital R! But to be honest with you, there was never really too much of that (class thing) from the British press.
Daniel: Have Kíla ever done Japan?
Brian: Yeah, Japan was like Blade Runner during the day. Obsessive’s not the right word…
Rónán: Focused.
Brian: Everyone does what they’re meant to do.
Rónán: How long did you spend there?
Daniel: The first time was about eight days. The second time was just about four days. They cram everything in.
Brian: Yeah, they work you hard.
Conor: And all five of you have to be there for the interview. You can’t split up! I remember coming back the first time when Lost In Translation came out and I was like, “This is just uncanny!”
Daniel: The worst time was when we went down to Osaka and the translator for the interview seemed to have zero English. And you’d give quite a long answer, and say if you mentioned Blur or Morrissey, you wouldn’t hear any of the names mentioned in the translation!
Brian: Did you have to do all the autograph signing at the end? We had a table lined up, and Jean Butler was dancing with us, and we were doing autographs, and they made sure everyone was there, no ducking away. And then we looked up and I think everyone from the audience was in a queue. Everyone. We were there for about an hour.
Daniel: How was Jean Butler with you?
Brian: She was great, we’d known her for a couple of years, basically we picked some sections from songs and she worked out a piece.
Rónán: Technically it was dead awkward. Soundchecks took forever: mikes under her shoes and mikes under the board, compared to the volume we were playing at. She could only go up so high and loads of frequencies had to be taken out of her shoes ’cos she’d just feedback. A lot of times we had to change tunes or just play quieter.
How do you deal with the kind of difficulties involved in existing at close quarters with bandmates?
Daniel: I don’t know what it’s like in Kíla, but if you’re in The Thrills you have to get used to being told to fuck off and not hold grudges.
Brian: Well, we’ve got two sets of brothers and two extras and a soundman. One tour manager said to me in America that looking after a band is like herding chickens. There’s a bubble of unreality around a band, and people would space off if they’re allowed space off sometimes, it’s kind of like a retarded way of doing things, and that’s why you have to gather everyone. So, in closed confined spaces, tensions build up and you have to learn how to defuse them and not go too far. It’s a diplomatic thing.
Rónán: If you go too far often enough, when you hit that argument again, you realise, “Aw yeah, this is the one that goes all the way there and we don’t talk for five years. We’ve done that one, so let’s try a different tack.” If you stick it out you just learn to accept each other.
Within music, even if you’re in the middle of a row, there’s something that goes on. When the gig starts, if you’re playing the same song, you’re in communication, even if you don’t talk. How do I explain it? If someone drops a beat, there’s no time to talk about it, you have to cover his ass anyway. You’re in motion. Everyone’s attached by an invisible cord, so even if you want to turn around and shoot them afterwards, everyone has to do it. There’s a sort of interdependence that can’t really be broken unless someone throws a strop and walks, and that happens, but generally you have to get to the other side, working with each other.
Daniel: We did a tour with The Pixies. They don’t really talk.
Brian: You can see it, though. That’s a shame.
Conor: But there’s something quite refreshingly honest about it. They said at the start of the tour, “We’re together for the money.” Like, they never made that much money, you talk to the drummer David, he’ll tell stories about being beyond down and out.
Daniel: He was queueing up to get a personal loan.
Conor: And Charles calls him up and says: “Arenas.” And they come onstage and play all the songs people want to hear, the only nod they do to showmanship is they walk to the front of the stage and people scream at them for three minutes. And it’s quite workmanlike, but it’s still amazing.
Would Kíla ever consider doing a documentary film?
Rónán: Lance is pushing for that in a big way. He’s got great ideas about films. I come up with all the daftest ideas to make sure it’s humourous.
Brian: There’s a DVD coming out of a concert from last Christmas at Vicar Street, and over the years we have done various bits of film.
Rónán: It just hasn’t morphed into a big documentary. We’re still talking about how to do something about that.
Brian: We’re thinking of Gaelic porn. With subtitles!
Did The Thrills eventually become immune to the cameras, or were they a constant pain in the butt?
Daniel: The fellow who did it, Danny O’Connor, we met him very early on, and it was never a case of, “We’re actually doing this.” It wasn’t until six months ago he said, “I want to do this,” so we weren’t thinking, “Oh, here they are today.” There were no plans to do a film until he rang up one day and said, “Y’know, I’ve got so much footage, I’m going to start editing.”
Conor: I think that’s why he has all the little petty arguments and stuff captured, because he became a friend, he was an Englishman who considers himself an Irishman. He used to work for the BBC, and when the BBC finally lifted that ban on using the true voices of Sinn Féin, he did the first inteview with Gerry Adams with his real voice. He’s a real character, and he’s done lots of interesting things.
Daniel: He got the first question in when Brian Clough retired. He said, “Why?” and Brian Clough said, “Have you got a mortgage?!!”
Watching the trajectory of The Thrills, you could argue that you didn’t really become a band until you’d gone through the relative disappointment of the Let’s Bottle Bohemia era.
Conor: It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been paying your dues on the quiet, it’s not until you’ve a record out that people are going to start sizing you up. So even though we’ve been in a band for a long time, we knew that in a lot of people’s eyes we were just another in a line of new things with a lot to prove. And I still feel like a new band with everything to prove, there’s not even a slight sense of resting on our laurels. But to be honest with you, if the band doesn’t have that almost healthy chip on its shoulder, or that restless spirit, you’ve got nothing really, you have to have that something that spurs you on.
Brian: It’s too much work otherwise.
Daniel: It’s very easy for other people to imagine what being in a band is like. They kind of think you show up on stage at half nine, and that’s it.
Rónán: Let’s keep ’em thinking that!

With that, Conor and Ronan depart for the HP offices to pose, preen and abuse bodhrans for photographer Graham Keogh’s cover shot. Rónán advises Conor to loosen up. Conor retorts, “How can I loosen up with an instrument I’ve never played before?!!”
Like we said, the devil is in the difference…
30 hours later, The Thrills have just deplaned in Manchester to do a Mark Radcliffe radio session, having completed the Kíla remix. Conor Deasy is somewhat rattled by reports that the Kila crew’s recasting of ‘Nothing Changes Around Here’ became a marathon session that concluded at three in the am, before restarting again mere hours later. He does, however, sound audibly juiced about The Thrills’ participation.
“They had a head start on us, and a bit more time by the sounds of it,” he says. “The last text I got from them was this morning, saying they were still at it. Our studio got put back ’til six o’ clock, so it was a rigged boxing match, if that’s what it is! No, it was very interesting. Brian from Bell X1 was engineering it for us. ‘Cabhraigí Léi’ seemed like the most melodic of the few songs I was listening to, but it was limited to two chords, so the song had this almost kind of mantric approach, building to a climax halfway through the song and different instruments coming in and out, which is something that we don’t really do, usually we have too many chords for our own good.
“But I think the challenge was this,” he continues, barely pausing for breath, “at first we started putting down ideas, like a shaker or a banjo, but then I realised some of these ideas could have been things that they could have done. So when we came up with this almost Rod Stewart/Faces guitar riff we thought, ‘Okay, this is obviously something different.’ And then we got this sort of banjo melody, which was to me straight out of the High Llamas. Then Ben got this drumbeat that was like something off Kid A, and we began moving parts around where it wasn’t really musically appropriate, and that gave it a slightly, I wouldn’t say avant garde, but quite a loose feel.
“So we stripped away some of the elements of the song that were quite earthy, and we also took away their more contemporary flourishes like phasey guitars, but the vocal track was so dominant, there was never any danger of losing the song. At one point we thought about putting harmonies down, but while it might have been interesting on a conceptual level, West Coast harmonies mixed with Rónán’s voice, ultimately I thought it wouldn’t have worked.
“What was interesting was there were plenty of heads in the room who hadn’t listened to the original version, and now and then I could sense a little bit of anxiety with people wondering if maybe we were wandering too far off. But I like the fact that at first it sounds quite like Kíla, but as the song starts to reach its first climax the texture changes and it becomes clear that the song’s been fucked with a little bit. The bodhran was the first thing I wanted to take out, because it’s very traditional and what most people associate with them.”
The remix sessions, Conor admits, were not without their share of mutual mischief.
“I remember we were texting each other backwards and forwards,” he says, “because the Kíla guys had told me about this nasty saxophone solo hidden in the mix, and not to bring it up, so I taking the piss and saying we were looping it and opening up with it. And I was the same, after the first chorus in ‘Nothing Changes Around Here’ there’s a kind of synth line that comes in, and I could never at the time work out if it was absolute genius or absolutely atrocious, but all I know is we didn’t use it, so I was imagining the look on their faces when they heard that! So there were all kinds of skeletons in the closet being exposed.
“But Kíla have just emailed me their version of ‘Nothing Changes Around Here’, which apparently involves a poem spoken over the song at some point, and a fiddle solo, so I’m kind of going insane, I can’t really imagine what it’s going to sound like, and we’re very much looking forward to hearing it. But we all agreed it was a great idea. Kíla are such a nice bunch of guys, and it was good fun. I’d encourage you to do it with other bands.”

Teenager is out now on Virgin. Gamblers' Ballet will be released on Kíla Records, August 10.