Dublin's Hard Working Class Heroes festival is making the hard-nosed muso world sit up and take notice. Kevin Courtney finds out why.
IT'S amazing how far you can get with a little hard work and a lot of talent. Three years ago, Brian Carroll launched the first ever Hard Working Class Heroes festival with just 40 bands playing in a single venue over a couple of nights. Next week, the fourth Hard Working Class Heroes festival kicks off with nearly 100 bands playing in six venues around the Temple Bar/Liffey Street area, in a festival that's fast becoming Dublin's own South by South West.
Carroll and his co-organiser Angela Dorgan have put in a lot of hard work to bring us the talent this year. But it's been worth the effort, says Dorgan, to see HWCH growing into the city's most concentrated weekend of indie rock, and to see an increasing number of industry people putting the festival into their diaries. "It's working. There's people getting signed out of it, it's ticking over," says Dorgan.
Carroll believes that the line-up for this year's HWCH is the best yet, and who could argue with a list that includes such talented young bands as The Immediate, The Things, The Marshals, The Radio, Superjimenez, Scott Maher, The Urges, Cowboy X, Delorentos and Iain Archer?
It's not a randomly selected list either - bands were chosen by a panel of international judges, who were able to assess the talent on offer from the comfort of their own home computers. The selection process was carried out online, with bands registering via "Sonicbids".
"We had more than 700 demos," says Dorgan. "And everybody applied electronically, so it was like having our own electronic judging booths. Every judge got 25 electronic press kits online, so they got all the information, they got biogs, they got photos, they got tracks, and they could look at them on MySpace."
"It meant we could have judges in the US, Canada and the UK," says Carroll. "It's just not feasible to be sending CDs to them and waiting on them to come back and stuff, but to get online and to be able to do things on the internet, for any band, it's a good thing. You sell your CDs online, and your fanbase is all online these days, so to try and get bands into that way of thinking, HWCH is really good, because it's industry-heavy, and the chances of being spotted by someone in the industry are much greater."
For Carroll and Dorgan, Hard Working Class Heroes is a labour of love, and they're not expecting to be sitting back enjoying the fruits of their labour anytime soon. Financially, it may be unrewarding, but the satisfaction they get from seeing good Irish bands getting the exposure they deserve is worth the slog. And when the international judges' opinions of the bands on offer coincide with Dorgan's and Carroll's.
"It's making us feel that what we do is worthwhile, because we feel we know what's good, and it's nice to get a tap on the back from the judges. A lot of them are saying that the standard has gone up a notch this year."
It's not all guitars, either, at this year's HWCH festival. With any number of bands incorporating electro and dance into their sounds, you're likely to see a lot of synths onstage, as Irish acts get down with the nu-digital rock revolution. Another timely strand to this years festival is the "Canadian invasion", which sees six emerging acts from Canada hoping to follow the likes of Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene into the bigtime. Also coming over from Canada is X-rated pop singer Peaches, who is guaranteed to bring shock and awe to Irish shores. If you're easily offended, then give Meeting House Square a wide berth between 11pm and midnight on Sunday 15th.
Peaches is not the only well-known artist on the bill for next weekend. Corkman Simple Kid, who's been doing quite nicely thank you on the international circuit, will be appearing on Sunday 15th, as will Ballymena singer Iain Archer, who made his first appearance at HWCH two years ago, and returns with a fine new album, Magnetic North, and an Ivor Novello award for his co-writing work on Snow Patrol's Final Straw.
And, as for that other indie showcase in Austin, Texas, has HWCH any ambitions to replace SXSW as the number one festival on the indie rock calendar?
"I will put my hand on my heart and say, yes, we'd love to be the new South by South West," says Dorgan. "In fact, we're probably the baby South by South West, in the way that it's somewhere you can break bands, but here it's the punters who drive the festival. They're coming out to the gigs and saying, I want to see tomorrow's Snow Patrol, I want to see tomorrow's Hot Chip."
