The day after Fight Like Apes’s final gig in December 2016, Jamie Fox’s electric blanket went on fire. If it was a message from a higher power, he still can’t quite decide whether it was a good or a bad omen.
“I was like, ‘What is that smell?’” he recalls with a gruff chuckle. “There was definitely something metaphorical going on.” He pauses, weighing up the trauma of being accidentally set on fire against the knowledge that his band were finished. “There was probably a little bit of relief that the gig went well, but there was definitely a sadness. The band was our whole lives. It was our entire 20s.”
The Dublin band fronted by Mary-Kate “MayKay” Geraghty, who co-wrote their songs with Jamie “Pockets” Fox, reached dizzy heights during their decade-long tenure on the Irish and UK indie scene. Now they’re reuniting for two one-off gigs – one in London, one in Dublin – that were announced last year to mark the 15th anniversary of their debut album.
We meet in the bar of a Dublin hotel on a sunny, blustery afternoon that seems to sum up the pair’s disposition and their musical output: a combination of happy-go-lucky optimism and a jittery, unpredictable unease that they practised over the course of three considerable albums and a series of memorably named EPs (including Whigfield Sextape.) It seems like no time has passed since their split – the pair still bounce animatedly off each other – but they have moved on both professionally and personally.
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It wasn’t like we were at the peak of anything and then said ‘let’s leave it’. It was more or less like our relationship in the band had ended, and we just had to formalise it
MayKay has established herself as a regular presenter on Other Voices as well as collaborating with artists such as Elaine Mai and Kormac. Fox recently became a father, set up a piano “rebirthing” business called Fox and Wolf, and now works as a psychotherapist. They have come a long way from the heady, giddy, frazzled days of the late noughties, when Fight Like Apes did their bit to be the jagged needle that popped the mundane singer-songwriter and X Factor bubble dominating the charts.
They still agree that the decision to call time on Fight Like Apes in 2016 was the right one.
“We’d kind of shelved ourselves anyway, because by the time we finished, we were exhausted,” says MayKay, who admits the transition was made easier by joining electropop band Le Galaxie the following year. “It wasn’t like we were at the peak of anything and then said ‘let’s leave it’. It was more or less like our relationship in the band had ended, and we just had to formalise it, really.”
The pair first met as teenagers on a foreign holiday before deciding to start making music together, and had spent their “whole adult lives” in Fight Like Apes up to that point. MayKay admits that the pressures of the band – their parting salvo acknowledged the financial pressures to stay afloat as artists – had begun to affect their personal relationship.
We never said ‘leave me alone’ but we definitely needed to be able to live our own lives and meet other pals
“When the band started to decay, our friendship started to decay,” she says. “So when we wrapped things up, it sorted out so many things; we both had problems and we were able to figure them out. So the last show was kind of like, this is either going to be the end of us, or the start of a different type of ‘us’.” She grins. “But we definitely took a break from each other for a while. We never said ‘leave me alone’ but we definitely needed to be able to live our own lives and meet other pals.”
They have fond memories of their time in Fight Like Apes, including being personally invited to join The Prodigy on their UK tour by Liam Howlett, or walking out on stage at the Reading Festival and realising that there was a packed tent waiting to see them. Still, despite their burgeoning success on the UK scene and their ability to fill venues in Ireland, there was always a feeling of unfulfilled potential surrounding Fight Like Apes. Their debut album, recorded in Seattle with producer John Goodmanson (Death Cab for Cutie, Sleater-Kinney), set them on the path to stardom. They both have their theories about what happened next.
“I think we probably reacted to the criticism of our first album brattishly, and made a brattish second record,” says Fox. “In our heads, we had the mythology of an album like [Weezer’s] Pinkerton, where a band rebels and makes the record they want to make. Even though nobody forced us to make the first record that way, we loved it.” He smiles bittersweetly. “But it just shows the insecurities we had about that second album; it’s there in spades in the lyrics. I think if we’d made a different album, things maybe would have gone differently.” He grins, shrugging. “But I’m also proud of how bratty and insecure it sounds.”
If we’d known how to navigate the business, we would have done better than we did
MayKay, meanwhile, feels that they didn’t have the tools to cope mentally or emotionally with being in a successful band during the transitional period of their 20s.
“If we’d known how to navigate the business, we would have done better than we did,” she says. “When I look at bands today, in terms of how aware they are of their mental health, how aware they are of apportioning time to themselves, to the music, to the business, to all those different things; in many ways, the atmosphere and environment that musicians are in today seems to be a lot more conducive to sustaining a proper long-term career.”
She sighs, smiling now. “Things are so different now. It’s cool to be sober now; it’s cool to go to therapy now; it’s cool to be smartly and uniquely dressed now. Those things weren’t cool when we started. So that’s a big thing: vitamins, and stuff. What’s that all about?” she jokes. “So I suppose what we lost in terms of youth, we’ve made up tenfold in terms of vitamins and hydration.”
The two years of isolation during Covid “definitely played a part” in their decision to re-form, says Fox. His bandmate nods in agreement.
“It kind of took the ego out of it for me,” she says. “The whole possibility – which I suppose is always at our door – of the world ending, and all of the mad things that we had to focus on because there was nothing else to do during those lockdowns. [The band] didn’t seem like that much of a big deal to me any more. It was like, ‘This is something we’re really going to enjoy – let’s just do it’. I know that sounds basic, but it’s the truth. It was like, ‘What a mad thing, to stop ourselves doing something because we said we were finished’. No one who bought tickets cares that we said we were finished!”
They were never worried about filling the 3Olympia Theatre, which sold out pretty quickly. “And that’s not me being cocky,” says MayKay. “I knew that we had enough people to fill that room for one deadly night, for sure. And this is gonna be a dreamy thing for us. Obviously, we’re very loyal to Whelan’s – our first gig was in Whelan’s, as was our last official one. But this had to be ‘go big or go home’. It’s romanticising something, but we get to relive a bit of the glory we had on the biggest headline stage we’ve ever done.”
Although they have rekindled their creative partnership, they say that they haven’t even considered writing new material together. Not yet, at least.
“It’s funny, because we resigned that band to being a bratty, young person’s band,” the frontwoman says. “If we even did write together again, would you even put it out under Fight Like Apes? But the thing is, I would have said that about some of my favourite bands, like Yeah Yeah Yeahs: ‘That band can’t go into their later years like this’. But they did; they still take you on that journey with them. So ... I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either,” agrees Fox. “But I can’t imagine a lifetime’s going to pass without us making another song together. I mean, if you can write another chapter that works,” he says, raising an eyebrow, “... maybe?”
That’s the thing that we’ve always come back to: the songs are good songs. So we’re not reinventing the wheel for these gigs
For now, these forthcoming gigs will have their set lists drawn solely from the albums and EPs that the band released during their original lifespan. Despite a couple of “chronically bad” rehearsals, they are now on a roll and have “never rehearsed this much, ever”, according to MayKay.
“The thing is, I’ve kept singing and performing, but none of us have casually played these songs,” she adds. “You know when bands end, the singer might go off and do a few cheeky little acoustic numbers in a Mercedes dealership or something. Weirdly, no one tried to get me for that,” she deadpans. “Or Jamie might have gone off and done them in a different way – but neither of us did. But the great thing is that we never were accused of writing anything too complicated, so a lot of it was muscle memory.”
Returning to the songs of their youth has been therapeutic, she says, amusingly reminding Fox of a “shockingly bad” early run-through of the set list in his house. “It was just bashing out these songs that reminded me of so much stuff, but it was like, ‘Thank god they’re good!’,” she chuckles. “That’s the thing that we’ve always come back to: the songs are good songs. So we’re not reinventing the wheel for these gigs.”
“It’s going to be a really good wheel, though,” says Fox, a glint in his eye as he grins. “We’ve upgraded the wheel. There’s definitely a few coats of spray paint on there, at least.”
Fight Like Apes play the 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on March 24th
