The Goo 1
Interview JOHN BRERETON Columbia Mills There aren
’t many bands that would have the selfeffacement to name themselves after an old nondescript building that once stood on the banks of the Liffey but Columbia Mills are salt of the earth Dubliners with no pretensions or delusions of grandeur. Saying the old Columbia Mills building was nondescript is a bit of an outlier I should admit. It was, in its day, a hive of musical activity. A 300 cap live music venue - The Waterfront - also housed the legendary dance night club Funk Off and was the location for the RTE live music series On the Waterfront and for the final live scenes in The Commitments. As the band navigates new waters by embracing technology to set their musical stall a little bit more in the dance camp, maybe the bond between band name and defunkt cultural venue isn’t so random after all. Anyways, back to the venue for the interview, Uisneagh’s car (the bar where we scheduled the interview was heaving so after a quick brush down of shedding dog hairs we were face to face - literally - and ready to roll) where I asked the trio of Fiachra Treacy, Ste Ward and Uisneagh Tracy about the making of their fantastic new album Heart Of a Nation. Every interview I’ve done recently has been about the pandemic and its effect on the making of the said album but hopefully we’ll be out of that line of questioning soon. You looked upon it a little differently? Fiachra: Yeah, I consciously made sure that lyrically I didn’t write about the pandemic or the lock downs. We envisaged this album coming out now so we wanted people to flip and enjoy dancing and singing about stuff that people can relate to. Obviously it’s the one common theme at the moment and I know how difficult it all was, but I reckoned it would be the last thing you would want to hear about. Have you a new modus operandi for writing? Fiachra: Yeah, like everyone else we had to adapt so we all got the software and found ways of using the software and learned how we could all put down our ideas separately, in different rooms while not arguing with each other. You could live with it for a while and maybe build on it and give it a bit more time to breathe, which usually ended up being to our benefit. Also for this album we wrote all the music first, which we’ve never done before. So the lyrics and vocals came second, which I found challenging but ultimately it was a new way of working that I really enjoyed. PAGE 8 HEART OF A NATION OUT NOW Uisneagh: This is gonna be the most positive album that we’ve ever made. We actually never played the songs live so when we went into the studio, it was the first time that we’d ever performed the songs. Before that we always had the songs written and knew what we were doing. We played them live in a rehearsal space and then went in and recorded them, but this time, we didn’t have that opportunity. We talked a lot about what we really wanted with this record. We were all on the same page. We were thinking about Gorillaz, Joy Division and The Cure and we were definitely going down a particular road with those influences. It’s a very cohesive record, a lot dancier than your previous material too. Ste: We would have been afraid to do that on previous records. For this one we agreed that we should wear our influences and just go for it. Fiachra: We worked with producers on our first album and we allowed them to influence us because we were paying them. They were focussing on the feel of the work, which was cool but I’m mad into dance music which is produced mathematically so we felt we could do this ourselves this time. Be methodical and think more about beats and rhythms and how the track could make people dance. How are you translating that to a live setting now? Uisneagh: We’ve programmed a lot of the stuff so we are triggering different electronic beats and then we have a live drummer Jamie Duff, who’s joined the band now. He’s got a cocktail kit which he stands behind so the electronic beats are pushed out to the front while he adds stuff on to it to give it a live feed. It’s really electronic, but you still have that organic feel. It’s the best sound that we’ve ever had. It’s really enjoyable. We weren’t sure whether it was going to work or not but we gave it a shot and have just come back from the UK where the shows went brilliantly. Manchester was sold out and the general feedback was very, very positive. Did self producing the record give you a new lease of life and a greater sense of artistic freedom?