With a new album, and a base in London, the future's looking bright for The Cast of Cheers. Guitarist Neil Adams gives LAUREN MURPHYthe lowdown
After the success of your debut album Chariot, you relocated from Dublin to London . . .
Yeah, we’ve been here nearly a year now. We got signed to a London-based record label, School Boy Error, and they suggested that we relocate because it’s much easier to tour the UK. At the time, we’d played loads of gigs across Ireland and we were doing pretty well there, but the label wanted to see if we could build a fan base over here. We didn’t want to keep doing the same thing [in Ireland], or be seen as one-trick-ponies. The move has definitely been a positive thing for the band.
I’m imagining The Monkees: living together, writing songs over the breakfast table . . .
(Laughs) No, no. It’s nothing like that – it’s just your typical house, and we don’t even have our instruments here, they’re in our rehearsal room. Music is banned in the house! No, it’s not, actually. But we mostly just listen to tunes here. We all got to quit our jobs after the record deal – our “real” jobs back in Ireland – so we figured we’d treat this as a job. Before we did the new album, we’d be in the rehearsal room from nine to five, Monday to Friday, and take the weekends off.
How did the deal with School Boy Error for the release of your new album, Family, come about?
Chariot was released as a free digital download, and loads of blogs in Ireland caught on to it and started re-posting it. A Northern Irish band called Kowalski got their hands on it, and the brother of Kev Baird from Two Door Cinema Club is in Kowalski . . . so they heard it, and TDCC invited us to support them at one of their sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire gigs back in 2010. A few of their management team were there, and they were setting up the record label that would become School Boy Error. They liked us, came to a few more gigs and that’s really how that came about.
Giving Chariot away for free obviously sped the process up a great deal . . .
Yeah, I think so. At the time, a lot of people were saying “What a great marketing or PR move”, but it was more of an accident really. We’d been in bands with other people for 10 years in Dublin, and wed made records that were good, but no one was buying them. Asking someone to pay €5 or €10 for a record by a band they’d never heard of was kind of steep. So by the time The Cast of Cheers came about, we decided there was no way we were gonna make the same mistake again. We just wanted a fan base, really, so we cut our losses and gave it away free.
You recorded your debut in a small studio in suburban Dublin for €3,000. Family was done with ex-Clor guitarist Luke Smith.
It was a completely different process for us; Chariot was recorded with a very strong DIY ethic and was kind of self-produced. With Luke, we chose 10 or 12 songs from the big batch we’d written and with some of them it was just a case of beefing up the demos, or whatever. But with a good few of them, he’d take it and say “this needs to be reworked”, and his method of doing that was to take one acoustic guitar and take away all the loops and effects and all that stuff – just break it down to the chords, the vocals and melodies, and then build it back up from there. So some of the songs became very different. Some of them were cobbled from older sessions and had a bit of a heavier, Smashing Pumpkins sort of feel, but they’re completely different songs now. It was really inspiring to see him work, because he has such a great vision. Sometimes, you’re in the studio for eight hours or 10 hours a day, your head kind of gets melted and you don’t know if what you’re doing is complete horse crap – but Luke would always stop the session and play some record to refresh your head and re-focus you. He was great at pushing us.
You’re off to Australia with Django Django soon; you’ve been played by all the biggest indie radio DJs in the UK – the future’s looking bright.
We’re a bit nervous. We don’t know what people will think, especially back home in Ireland. Over here, it’s a new market for us; most people have never heard Chariot, and we’re a brand new band with a debut album. But back home, a lot of people will compare it to Chariot. I hope it goes down well. We want to have a really hectic touring schedule and if the album takes off, our own headline tour. I just hope the fanbase builds enough to enable us to play to decent-sized crowds.
* Family is released on School Boy Error on June 15
