It took two years for Wayne Murray and Thorum Magnusdottir to record their first album. But little by little, The Honeymoon are catching on nicely, one fan at a time, writes Jim Carroll.
Apologies if the following reads like the plot to a Hugh Grant film, but this is how it goes. . . He is an earnest young man with a burning passion to make music. He lives in London, he has a guitar, he has played with lots of dodgy bands but he still hasn't found what he's looking for. She is the striking young woman with a burning desire to sing. She has blonde hair, she is from Iceland, she has been involved in a couple of dodgy music projects and she has just moved to London to find fame, fortune and a good winter coat.
They meet in a pub, they hit it off, they exchange telephone numbers and they start working together. Little by little, they realise that when they sing, they sound a little like The Carpenters; when they make music, it sounds a little like Fleetwood Mac; and when they produce songs, these sound tailormade for lazy Sunday mornings. Cue trumpets, ticker-tape and much cheering before the credits begin to roll.
Of course, were this plot to feature Grant and his unfeasibly floppy hair tearing around London, much bumbling would ensue and the finished record would look and sound like a dog's dinner. Such a description cannot be applied to Dialogue, the album that London boy Wayne Murray and Icelandic girl Thorum Magnusdottir have produced together as The Honeymoon.
The pair met in London in a similar fashion to what you have just read and, after quickly realising that they could write, sing and perform songs, decided to make an album. Since its release earlier this summer, Dialogue has quietly made its presence felt, attracting comparisons mostly with music which has stood the test of time. Should Dialogue find itself in a similar position 10 years from now, you feel that neither boy nor girl would be too unhappy with such an outcome.
After an unusually lengthy gestation period by today's standards - the album was two years in the works and the duo were signed to BMG on the back of demos rather than live shows - The Honeymoon now find that they must sing for their suppers.Seeing as how the company they originally signed to is now a mouthful called Sony-BMG, both are robustly positive about the business side of things.
"If you're a musician, there's only so much time you can afford to think about that sort of thing," says Murray. "It's not for us to worry about what the label are doing. It's nice to have money to go into studio or to come over here and do promotion, but it's not money on the Westlife scale. Yes, there is a fear that the changes at Sony-BMG might have an effect or that they might market us in the wrong way, but we're fairly strong characters so I can think we could survive whatever happens."
Murray knows how lucky The Honeymoon have been with BMG's patronage, but he also knows that they could produce an album without ever decamping to a residential studio for weeks at a time. "You don't have to spend loads of money to come up with classics. I just realised the other day that so many of the albums which have inspired me the most were recorded in places that were not conventional studios, like Elliot Smith's Either Or or David Gray's White Ladder."
At the outset, Magnusdottir believed you didn't have to spend lots of time to come up with classics. "We didn't really know each other when we started out, but our first songs came so easily so that we decided there and then that we would record the album in a month. That idea soon changed \ and instead, it took a year and a half."
After putting the final touches to the finished CD, the real work began. A series of UK in-stores and support dates with the likes of Simple Kid, the Webb Brothers, Nelly Furtado and Paddy Casey have seen them add ones and twos - and even threes and fours - to their fanbase. As The Honeymoon discuss future plans and possibilities, it's clear that neither intends to let other people pull the strings for them.
"When you're signed to a major, there's a lot of sitting around waiting for something to happen," says Magnusdottir. "When you're not signed, you're eager to get out there and do this and knock on doors and meet people. I think when you are signed, you should still think you're not, because you should never lose that sense of wanting people to know who you are and what you're about.
"You can't leave that up to the record company because you're competing with everyone else on the label."
The Honeymoon play Crawdaddy, Dublin on September 10th. Dialogue is out now on RCA
