The Goo 1
Interview Words: Aaron Kavanagh Skinner By the ti
me “punk rock” was officially categorised and commodified in 1977 by a finally caught-up media, artists on both sides of the Atlantic were already expanding the new darling of the red tops’ iconoclastic freedom into experimental off-shoots that sought to push beyond its bare, dogmatically rock ‘n’ roll sonic parameters. Concurring with punk’s first proper wave were (in varying degrees of development) movements like post-punk, new wave, hardcore, goth, and New Romantic, as a few surface-level examples. In the past decade or so, we’ve seen an explosion of domestic and international acts showing a preference for post-punk, which, due to an overabundance of association, 8 has subsequently reduced that term to this generation’s equivalent of what “Alternative rock” became for Generation X: a nebulous catch-all that continually eroded any semblance of distinction the more it was applied. Despite the current conformity of post-punk revivalism, the Dublin-based musician Aaron Corcoran instead draws ink from the punk rock octopus’s other tentacles, citing influences from The B-52s’ retrofuturistic new wave, James Chance and the Contortionists’ funky no-wave and ESG’s dance-punk, as well as the Pixies’ minimalistic alt-rock (See? It’s an amorphous descriptor!) and Morphine’s perfect discography of jazz and bluesfused rock, for his project Skinner. Aaron’s background was in folk, which may seem atypical to the type of music he crafts with Skinner, but not to him. He explains, “Folk and country music are the birthplace of protest music and, for lack of a better term, punk music, I think, because it’s music based around rebellion and storytelling. “So, my dad was really big into Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Joan Baez - those people - so I grew up listening to them, and that kind of need to give out was instilled at a young age: that you can use music as a vehicle to express yourself and the things that annoy you.”