Can The Thrills top the all-conquering 'So Much For The City'? Singer Conor Deasy tells Tony Clayton-Lea about contradictions, luck and breaking out of a musical box
The Thrills came, looked around and conquered. Some would say the southside Dublin band did all three too much, too soon and in far to casual a manner. The truth, as ever, is somewhat more prosaic, as the band had been planning their "overnight" success for the best part of a decade.
Playing cover versions for a living gradually mutated into a spurt of original songwriting that eventually got them signed to the Virgin/EMI label, sealed with a lawyer's kiss and delivered to the public some two years ago.
Lead singer Conor Deasy is reflecting on the two-year blur that has been The Thrills' path from total obscurity to become Ireland's latest valid and valuable success story. Reclining on a leather sofa in his record company office, he looks the part of an elegant, wastrel rock star: straggly hair and Charles Manson beard, a smart grey jacket hiding a white T-shirt and a hairy chest, untidy Converse runners loosely laced. His long fingers shape lazy patterns on his jeans throughout our conversation, but there's little else about Deasy that could in any way be construed as abstract or wayward. His accent is part Blackrock, part Big Sur; it's a hybrid that comes across as equal parts silly affectation and natural assimilation.
Deasy's obvious sense of good character, however, ultimately keeps him grounded.
"You can leave a bad impression on people when they see you getting positive press and magazine covers very soon," he says, "because if you haven't got the songs to back the coverage, they can always turn around and say 'I told you so'. Even if you make a good record, it's not enough for some people. So yes, success might have seemed quick for us, but don't forget we've been playing in one band or another since we were 16. In some people's eyes we haven't paid our dues, but we've been through it all, the record deals, the usual music industry crap. What we hadn't done was to play the Irish circuit, build up a local following, do the local hero thing."
In Europe and the US, says Deasy, people seem not to mind about the background of bands once their records are good. In the UK and Ireland, he admits, there's an overriding preoccupation as to where a band has come from and what they've been doing. "I thought we might have been on the receiving end of begrudgery and all of that, but the positive feeling has far outweighed the negative, and the responses from the entire country are beyond anything we would have ever hoped."
The band's new album, Let's Bottle Bohemia, comes hot on the tail of their much-praised début, So Much For The City. While the latter quickly infiltrated the airwaves with its blend of California dreaming and Brian Wilson hooks (in many ways it became the soundtrack to the summer of 2003) its ubiquity soon phased itself out.
The follow-up is important for a number of reasons: it will be a temporary respite from the over-familiar likes of One Horse Town, Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far) and Big Sur, and it will act as an impetus for The Thrills to keep up the momentum provided by the international success of the début. It will also, perhaps, silence the critics who have claimed that So Much For The City self-defined and placed the band into a box they could never escape from.
"Whether you like it or not, So Much For The City has a strong sense of identity, and was therefore very easy to typecast," says Deasy. "A lot of the time we gracelessly tripped head first into it, so it was infuriating when people went on about how the record defined everything we did."
The most important thing when you're creating anything of artistic value, says Deasy, is perspective. It's almost as important as content, he argues, because without it you've got nothing. "We kept the level of perspective throughout the making of So Much For The City, but even we didn't realise the linked themes until we got to a certain point. Yes, we could have diluted it here and tinkered with it there, but there's a part of me that's glad we left it the way it was - a natural reflection of our state of mind at the time. If we'd leaned the record a particular way, we could easily have avoided certain angles the media took.
"You can be your own worst enemy if you take that route - the fact remains it genuinely reflected that time in our lives when we were in Dublin, miserable and fed up, feeling that the city was so small. We love the place, but we had the itch to leave and we did in a real escapist way."
Hence time spent in California hanging around areas that subsequently made their way into the band's romanticised songs. Accusations of contrivance have abounded since then, despite the fact that every other band at the time wanted to sound like The Strokes or some other mixture of the revitalised New York punk scene.
"All I can say was that we didn't have the sense of self-awareness to have seen the bigger picture," admits Deasy. "To me, the début couldn't have been a less contrived record, primarily because we were hardly jumping on to any bandwagons. It felt like what we were doing was from the heart, from what we were listening to at the time and what we wanted to do. What might have been a step too far was the imagery of us on the beaches of California, and the photographs, but at the time we were just happy to be there. We knew there was going to be a certain amount of typecasting thrown at us, but shooting videos on a sunny beach in California appealed to us. Wouldn't that appeal to most people?
"I'm certainly not trying to imply that our début was flawless, but what I do think is that it has a naive charm and it works as a record in that it captures quite unselfconscious moments. And that's got to be a good thing."
From then to now, The Thrills haven't stopped. Not content to allow the door of opportunity to shut itself on the band's collective face, Deasy admits the main challenge that faced them in the lead-up to writing and recording the new record was to avoid self-consciousness. The songs evolved naturally, he says, and the mix is eclectic: "It doesn't seem as if there's a turning point, because some songs feel as if they could have been on the début and others that wouldn't have fitted at all."
The past 18 months, he says, have been a combination of whizzing days, weeks and months and the feeling that - despite hard work and chart songs - luck was perhaps the deciding factor in The Thrills success. What with a Mercury Prize nomination and a raft of "best new band" awards, it still hasn't fully sunk in how fortunate they are. Misfortune will surely arrive, Deasy concedes, if the band ever turns into a human jukebox.
Certainly, much has changed for The Thrills from their first Irish tour in January, 2003, to playing at The Point in December. "I remember that Irish tour, five dates in quite small venues; intimate places, but great moments. In a lot of ways our rise has been quick. The sad thing is, a lot of the factors that decide your fate as a successful artist are totally outside your control." He recalls a period some years back in the gestation of The Thrills when they said they'd give it one more year. If it didn't happen, then they would forget about trying to make it. As the year came to an end, with nothing happening for them, they backtracked and gave themselves an extra 12 months.
"As luck would have it, within a few months, we were on our way. I'm not sure when we would have thrown in the towel, because it's hard to let go. If the person looking into the mirror is saying they just want to make music, then it's fine. But if they want major success as well, it's incredibly hard to know exactly what route to take."
The Thrills, says Deasy, his long fingers tracing yet another curlicue design on denim, had the worst kind of ambition. "In our typical pig-headed fashion we wanted to make exactly the kind of records we wanted to make, and we wanted them tobe commercially successful as well."
That's a lot to ask for, I suggest. In fact it's downright foolhardy. "It makes you a heap of contradictions," he admits. "As a band, The Thrills is no different from anyone else in that regard."
• Let's Bottle Bohemia is released September 13th. The Thrills play The Point, Dublin, on December 21st