This is where it all began: a shed at the side of a barn in a farmyard a couple of miles off the beaten track in the heart of west Limerick. In a previous life, it was a coal shed, but it has been transformed into a compact studio and has been home to Bleeding Heart Pigeons for the past few years.
In this spot, far from the normal ebb and flow of the music business, these youngsters have honed their songs and recorded most of their beautifully poised and compelling debut album Is.
However, there comes a time when the outside world has to get a look in and today, Mícheál Keating, Cathal Histon and Brendan McInerney are gathered in the shed to tell their story so far.
The three met at a summer camp at the Croagh School of Music. Both singer and guitarist Keating and synth and sampler player Histon were in school in Newcastlewest, while drummer McInerney was going to school in Rathkeale.
“It was a band-orientated camp and we were put into groups to write a song,” remembers Keating.
“The majority of the people at the club lived miles away, so I stayed in contact with the lads afterwards because they were near enough,” says McInerney.
Back then, they were musically in thrall to the usual suspects. "My brother gave me The Strokes, Muse and Arctic Monkeys and I started off with that," says Keating. "Then I heard Radiohead's In Rainbows. That grew on me and had a huge effect on me. When I was 11, I would have thought Muse were quite experimental, but Radiohead changed all that."
Limewire and the internet also gave them plenty of steers. “I was jumping from one online find to the next,” says Keating. “I would read Thom Yorke talking about someone in a piece and I’d check them out. Then we decided to go back to the old stuff we’d missed like The Beatles.”
At the start, the trio stuck to the tried and tested. “We probably played our favourite Arctic Monkeys or Muse songs for the first year or so in this coal shed,” Histon says.
They entered a Blastbeat battle of the bands competition in 2009 (the band were then called Awol), won the first round, lost the second round and headed back to the shed to concentrate on writing.
It took time. "We were quite slow at writing," says Keating. "The first good song we wrote was Oak Tree which is on the album. That's the oldest song on there. I was 15 when I wrote it and it's pretty much the same now as it was then."
Odd, beguiling By 2012, the songs were taking shape and sounded nothing like anything else around. Odd, beguiling, shapely and distinctive, it was the sound of a band very much in their own world far removed from their peers.
“We were always very much in our own zone,” says Keating. “We were far from everything else that was going on and especially from any scene. We were just feeling our way around what we liked. I don’t think we were ever looking to other bands around us, we always looked further afield.”
That same year, 2012, also marked the initial sightings of Bleeding Heart Pigeons beyond the farmyard. They supported Little Green Cars in Limerick and Dublin, added a manager (Daniel Ryan who also looks after LGC) and began to get a lot of industry attention.
In December of that year, they signed to Virgin Records – “It was the day the world was supposed to end,” says Keating with a grin – although college courses (music, media and performance for Keating, law for Histon) and a Leaving Cert (McInerney) took a chunk of time out of 2013.
By now, their musical horizons had also expanded. Talk Talk, and specifically Laughing Stock, cast a spell on Keating. "It seemed perfect, very honest and raw and much higher and purer than anyone else."
The wild energy of Björk, the groove of Caribou and the drumming chops of various jazzers and Grizzly Bear also entered the picture.
The musical scope is not the only thing that has changed over the years. Keating’s lyrics, too, have found a new momentum with time and experience.
“I think myself the lyric writing has changed a lot over the last few years. The process has got better, but I still find it very hard to write the song if I’m not happy with the lyrics.
“I always write tons and tons and tons and it takes me a long time to find what works best and what fits in.”
What comes next is a lengthy process of bringing Bleeding Heart Pigeons and Is to the world. They're prepared for it, both the touring and the endless questions about why they named themselves after a bird from the Philippines.
“We’ll tour, but we don’t want to tour forever,” says Keating. “We definitely want people to hear the album after all the time we’ve spent on it.
“We want to leave it to other people now. We hope that people will listen to the album and process it. We hope some people will actually pay for it, but I’m okay with people taking it off the internet and hopefully they’ll come to a show, I don’t see why not.
“But when it’s all over,” Keating adds, “we just want to come back here and write new songs and record again.”
- Is is released on Virgin EMI on February 12th. Bleeding Heart Pigeons play Dolan's, Limerick, on March 11th and Whelan's (upstairs), Dublin, on March 12th. They also appear on Other Voices on RTÉ 2 on February 20th
