The Goo 1
Interview ADHAMH O’CAOIMH Over the last year, the
se cats have been the talk of the groupchat that serves as The Goo office, and for good reason.. After being urged to catch their live act innumerable times by my colleagues, I finally made it out twice in a week, at Whelans where an audience member was promoted to guitar tech, and then at the sterling ‘See You In A Year and a Half’ launch party at a swarming Sin É to celebrate the hotly tipped extended play. The live shows are immense, commanding vocals and fascinating textual guitar interplay underpinned by a dynamic pulse driving the clever, intimate songcraft that describes the record. I spoke with Eva, her cockapoo, and Luke about the record, the origin story and on one of my most anticipated shows of the year, their April 6th co-headlining The Grand Social date with frenzied pioneers, Nerves. Not so fresh from a well spent evening at Borderline festival, I advised them about coconut water and asked them about how they came to create such a magnificent beast. I’ve never seen someone recruit a tech from the crowd mid-set before. We were so lucky. Goonie had done tech work for us once or twice before. So when the string snapped, I just said to him, “there’s spares in my bag in the back, would…?”, and of course, when he gets back there, theres about fifty fuckin’ bags. Then I realized we had that other guitar we use in the set, which I ended up using because Goonie couldn’t find the things. We were able to kind of improvise and loop certain parts until everyone was ready to jump back in. To say that the anticipation for ‘See You In A Year And A Half’ was high would be an understatement. How did you finally get it down, and how do you write these expansive pieces? Eva: So we’ve been building this collection of songs for some time. We recorded with Chris Ryan, partly in his home studio and partly in Start Together, in Belfast. He was full of ideas that we would never have thought of. Luke: He’s a super hands-on producer. He was really good at getting us out of being stubborn, and encouraging us to try things we never would have thought of. He creates an atmosphere where nothing you try is silly. A lot of the stuff we loved came from that vibe he created of play and fun. Who had you guys been listening to when you were working on the material? Luke: I’d say a lot of Elliot Smith, in the songwriting, in the instrumentation. Big Thief too. Specifically, with guitar tone, we were very inspired by Ulrika Spacek, who we supported last year. We loved the DI tones they were using, so we used a blend of those with our amps. Talk to me about how you started out? Did you have a plan? Was this immense shoegaze sound there from the beginning or is it something you developed along the way? Eva: We didn’t have much of a plan. We started in college. I had this song I had written, ‘Wish You Were Real’, that was basically a pop song. I didn’t have the language for what I wanted to do with it, but I just wanted it to be “bigger”, so I asked Luke, who was my friend, to work on it with me. We just took what we liked about that and took those elements and developed it from there. These days, songs start every way, ‘Shoelaces’, for example, I’d written on guitar, and then we worked on it as a band and expanded it. Whereas B1 was the total opposite, and that was the third or fourth song we wrote, so there’s no set way a song starts. Luke: Eva writes a lot of hook driven, quite poppy songs, but in the room, ideas we have are informed by the fact that we love numetal, or we love noise bands, or shoegaze or folk. At its core, most of our songs are pop songs, so we make it noisy. .. ideas we have are informed by the fact that we love nu-metal, or we love noise bands, or shoegaze or folk.. See You In A Year And A Half is available now on all streaming platforms. CABL join Nerves and Affection to Rent at The Grand Social, April 6th. PAGE 39