There was a time, not so long ago, when Walking on Cars used to hold weekly band meetings on Monday nights in a small room in Benner’s Hotel, a landmark on the main street of their hometown, Dingle, Co Kerry. The look on Patrick Sheehy and Sorcha Durham’s faces suggests that they recall those meetings with a mixture of amusement and dread.
“I think we had too many Monday meetings in Benner’s,” Durham winces.
“I think that room is haunted after those meetings,” her bandmate agrees. “I remember having a meeting about something that was really straightforward and simple, but just walking into that room was like, Oh! God, no . . . There were a lot of stressful decisions made in there.”
These days, most of those stressful decisions are taken out of their hands. When we meet in the plush boardroom of Universal Music in Dublin, it seems a long way from their ramshackle first gig in a Dingle youth cafe five years ago. After a long slog, they're preparing for the release of their debut album Everything This Way, but according to the band, Walking on Cars essentially formed because they were, well . . . bored.
“Pretty much, yeah,” says frontman and songwriter Sheehy. “We’d just been idle, some of us in part-time jobs, some of us had dropped out of college. We just got together and started playing music.”
After playing that first gig, the five-piece went their separate ways once again. It wasn’t until the following year – when Sheehy returned from college in London for Easter – that he decided to stay home and make a proper go of things. Sheehy – “Pa” to his friends – has a persona that’s far removed from the swarthy-voiced, confident frontman he becomes when he takes the stage. His shy, barely-there mumble that would make most journalists curse the quality of their recording devices, and when he’s asked what he thinks has drawn people to his band, he shyly shrugs and allows keyboardist Durham to answer for him.
“My mother was very cool about it. She was like, ‘You know what, if that’s what you wanna do, go for it; as long as you’re healthy and some way happy, it’s all good’,” he recalls of his decision to drop out. “But a few people around me were saying ‘What are you at? You only have three months left of your degree, why don’t you just finish it?’ I was like, ‘dunno’. Sometimes you just have to go with how you feel.”
Not about that bass
That leap of faith has paid off, but those initial steps as Walking on Cars found their feet as a band are amusingly painful for Durham and Sheehy to recount.
“I can’t imagine how bad we were – truly horrible,” says Sheehy. “We had three acoustic guitars in the band with five people; it didn’t make any sense. No bass. But we learned quickly after that; Paul [Flannery] picked up the bass, and then Dan [Devane] came home from Australia and he was the guitarist.”
On their way to the anthemic, emotional, radio-friendly indie-rock sphere that they now find themselves in, with songs such as new single Speeding Cars and Always Be With You, their spirits – and their profile – were given a decent boost when they won the Red Bull Bedroom Jam, a battle of the bands-style competition, in 2012.
"I know some people might look at anything branded or corporate and think, Oh god, why did they do that? But at the end of the day, we recorded the original Catch Me If You Can and Two Stones from [The Prize], we got a boost and got help with radio play and PR," says Durham. "I dunno if we would have managed that on our own. We needed a bit of encouragement, going forward."
As the band gathered momentum with those early singles and EPs –written in various remote cottages on the Dingle peninsula, where they’d decamp to write and “get away from distractions” – their profile in Ireland steadily grew. Within a couple of years, they were selling out venues as big as Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. A bidding war for their signatures got underway when they played a showcase for various UK labels at the Pavilion in Cork, and they eventually decided upon Virgin EMI after they were brought to Abbey Road studios to be schmoozed.
Braking bad
The album, they say, was ready for release this time last year but, on the advice of their label, they postponed that plan and concentrated on building their profile in the UK.
“We were ready then, but because we’re kind of new in the UK, the timing wasn’t right so it stalled a bit,” explains Durham. “We didn’t have enough of a fanbase, basically, to cause any major stir.”
“It was hard,” Sheehy admits. “The worst thing about it was that we re-released tracks that the UK hadn’t heard before, but our Irish fanbase had – so obviously, people here were like, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard that one. Give us something new.’ It was frustrating, especially knowing that you have new tunes in the bag.”
There was a constant worry that they would lose momentum, or that their fanbase would lose interest and move on.
"That was the fear," says Sheehy. "When we put the new video for Catch Me If You Can up, someone wrote in the comments: 'All right, heard this – prefer the old video.' I was like, 'We're sorry. We'll be back soon.' "
In the meantime, UK support tours with the likes of The Kooks brought yet more new experiences with them – although adjusting from playing sold-out venues in Ireland to comparative handfuls of people abroad was “definitely a change”, says Sheehy.
“When you walk into your own show, it’s your crowd and you’re just going to have a great time together. But in the UK, you really have to own it.”
Mini-market force
Still, there are no regrets about plumping for a UK major rather than an Irish label, or continuing down the independent route that they took for their initial releases.
“Ireland is just really small as a market,” says Durham. “You can tour Ireland in four days and if you want longevity I think you have to look outside and see how far you can go. I’d love to try and gig in Germany a bit. I’d love to try and get some European festivals during the summer.”
Walking on Cars aren’t short on ambition. “Do the festival circuit around Europe rather than just the UK, build a nice following in the UK and then come home to a 3Arena show,” declares Sheehy of his plans for the next 12 months, with a nonchalant shrug and a cheeky grin. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Sure if we’re dreaming, we might as well.”
Everything This Way is out on 4AD on January 29th
