Up Close & Personal

As situations go, it’s a pretty surreal one. hotpress is sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst a group of fifty or so Ocean Colour Scene fans, gathered in the encroaching darkness of a radio station boardroom, as evening falls outside.

The audience we’ve joined are all competition winners who have been presented with the chance of seeing one of their favourite bands playing what amounts to a gig in their living room. We’re here to witness the coming together of two musical phenomena, one British, one Irish. Of Ocean Colour Scene we’ll talk more later. Jon Richards, meanwhile, is rapidly developing into one of the unsung heroes of Irish music.
Operating within the frequently stifling environment of commercial radio, his Drivetime show on Galway Bay FM has become a showcase for developing national talent, not least through his series of live sessions – a body of work that has not only captured the recent creative explosion in this country but has produced four double albums in aid of local Galway charities along the way.

Tonight’s proceedings will take the concept a step further, introducing not only the biggest band to play an in-studio session so far but also a live audience for the first time. No wonder Richards is a ball of nervous and excited energy. Over the road in a typical rock’n’roll hotel, Ocean Colour Scene are also viewing the event with slight trepidation. For this occasion they have come in their stripped down, acoustic duo form of singer Simon Fowler and enigmatic drummer Oscar Harrison.

This trip marks the start of a period of gigs and publicity in support of their new North Atlantic Drift album – a promotional schedule that could last anything up to two years.
“I haven’t got a very strong constitution anymore,” explains Simon when asked how he views the prospect of all this. “I’ve been on the piss and everything else for so long now that I feel ill a lot of the time. But when you go out on the stage all that nervousness, feeling sick, it just goes.
“The crowd do pull you through it. Probably when I look back on my life, the best thing that I can think of is that I made people happy.”

Ocean Colour Scene have made a lot of people happy over the years. It pays to remember that, next to Blur and Oasis, they were probably the biggest band of the Britpop era. And it all seemed to happen virtually overnight.
“I remember I was living in a real shit hole of a flat, then suddenly it went wham and we were doing Top Of The Pops and the rest,” Fowles recalls. “I was going out to do something or other and this taxi came to pick me up. I got in and Radio 1 was on, the news programme, and suddenly it started talking about how successful we were and I just sat there and listened.”

Simon had a particular reason to be pensive…
“You see, in the back of my mind I didn’t want to be found out to be gay. It was a terrible, terrible worry.”
With the Britpop bands elevated to the level of tabloid stars, it was perhaps inevitable that his secret would emerge.
“It was in The Sun,” he says, matter-of-factly. “That was the worst day of my life, the worst day. I phoned my older brother, because he didn’t know. The band had known since day one but my family didn’t.
“That night I was meant to go over to my mum and dad’s for dinner. I sent my brother over, because my parents are quite old-fashioned. Forty minutes later the phone goes and it’s my dad and they were great about it.”

Did that make him realise that he could have come out way before?
“Oh, fuck yeah. What a waste. By that time I was 32. If The Sun hadn’t printed the story I wouldn’t have told them. The funny thing is I’ve been with the same person now for 15 years, longer than the group. Would we have lived together, how would we have explained that one away? So while at the time it seemed like my world had caved in, I am so grateful to them bastards on the tabloids. I told the bloke as well.”