Despite a lack of interest from the domestic music industry, Pugwash are attracting attention abroad, writes Tony Clayton-Lea
Some band's skills and talents fly under the circular swoosh of the radar. Pugwash aren't even on the screen. You might have heard the name, you might not. Pugwash aren't one of Ireland's best-kept secrets. The band are not furiously chasing the zeitgeist. You will not be seeing them on magazine covers any time soon or even among next year's nominees for the Mercury Music Prize. Pugwash aren't an Irish act that will have A&R people jostling to sign them on the dotted line. As for Paul McGuinness and his managerial ilk, well, Pugwash would like to have someone talking on their behalf simply because the band are tired of representing themselves.
"I can't pay anyone that helps me, because I'm only earning enough to get by," says Thomas Walsh, the man who is, to all intents and purposes, Pugwash. "It would be great to have someone to come in and pay the odd bill. I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy - I want a Brian Epstein to come along and slam his briefcase down on tables and talk on my behalf. I want to be ripped off! If you're being ripped off you know you're doing something right!"
The 30-year-old is the type of straight-up musician who boycotts the cigar-club aesthetic ("I'll never be going to Lillie's Bordello and hanging out in the poxy library, and I know that will hinder my progress, because that's where the deals are done") and who cares little about the demise of the No Disco fraternity ("experimentalists who think that singing out of tune is edgy") and the rise of the copycat singer-songwriter scene ("there's a lot of enforced angst in this country, with people actually wanting to be Jeff Buckley. Imagine wanting to have that man's trauma, his depression").
Walsh's background is working class through and through, and informed by the twin thrills of rock music and football. The first record he bought was an Electric Light Orchestra EP from a Dublin market. An obsession with ELO followed; when his mother asked him on December 8th, 1980, which famous musician had been shot dead, young Walsh replied: "Please don't tell me it was Jeff Lynne!" Walsh's life from then on was a merry-go-round of music fanaticism.
He says he bypassed the Dublin band scene from the late 1980s onwards, preferring to make music in his garden shed (à la Andy Partridge of XTC, another musical icon of Walsh's) on a four-track recorder. This was the beginning of an era when a nine-to-five working schedule simply didn't impact on his life and when he wrote songs in his head as he walked to and from home. "I once worked in a shoe shop for three hours. It was Euro '88, the day England were beaten by Holland 3-1. I remember rushing home to see it and getting a phone call that evening telling me not to go back in the next day. Well, I made the effort, didn't I?"
Come 1993, Pugwash as we now know it was formed. Walsh and a committed if fluctuating band of musicians came together to hone the collected works of ELO, The Beatles, XTC and numerous other US and British pop and rock acts into a distinctive, direct hit to the senses. Nothing happened with Pugwash, of course, but Walsh continued through the years, connecting up with unlikely music-business characters such as renowned LA-based industry figure Kim Fowley ("not many people say too good things about him, but I'm here to set the record straight - he's a wonderful man") and singer-songwriter Andy White ("he didn't pay, but it was a learning process").
Come the late 1990s, Pugwash became part of a Dublin music scene that was sidelined in favour of the No Disco coterie. The band's debut album, Almond Tea, was released to critical acclaim and to public indifference, but Walsh had made contact with one of America's finest power-pop songwriters, Jason Falkner. Years passed without Pugwash being taken to the hearts of the public at large, and come June 2002 another album, Almanac, was released to, ho hum, critical acclaim and public indifference. "The music scene in this country is like plankton," says Walsh. "The Irish public swims along, gobbling up whatever is thrown at them."
Someone thousands of miles away, however, was listening to Pugwash and their brand of supremely melodic pop-rock: John Kilby of Sydney-based Karmic Hit records. A brother of The Church's Steve Kilby, John pricked up his ears when he heard Pugwash's two albums (sent to him by a Dublin-based promoter) and before you could sing Across The Universe he had signed the band.
The result is an introductory compilation, Earworm, with tracks from both Pugwash albums. Sales and reviews down under are healthy (it's stocked in HMV Sydney, although you'd be hard pushed to find either Pugwash album in any big Dublin-based record store), and it's finally looking as if Walsh and company will be obtaining more than day-release passes for a gander outside the musical ghetto they find themselves in Ireland.
"The potential is there," says Walsh. "If this music got out to the audience that it should get out to it would sell and do well, and I wouldn't be living in a bedsit barely able to pay the rent. The reason why I'm still here is that deep down I'm a musician - and so many people who are in any of the scenes aren't: they just get into it, trash it out for a while and then find their real niche in serving people drinks or driving a taxi."
Nobody is asking for special treatment, says Walsh, yet try to tell people on daytime radio and in the Irish music industry that Pugwash make good, solid pop and rock built on foundations of tried and tested commercial products and they'll give you a look that's equal parts sneer and bewilderment. "Liking Jeff Lynne? That's always going to go against you, isn't it?"
• Almond Tea, Almanac and Earworm are available from www.pugwashthe band.com. Earworm is also available from www.karmichit.com. Pugwash will be playing at the International Pop Overthrow Festival in Liverpool, October 13th-19th
