Interviews | ||
Hot Press - February 25 2004At home with...Carol Keogh
Naturally, Carol Keogh of The Tycho Brahe loves, lives and breathes music, but for the vocalist in one of the most beguiling and innovative groups around, her abode happens to be without the one thing you’d expect every musician and music fan to own. “I’m probably the only musician you’ll meet who doesn’t have a stereo,” she confesses. “I do have a discman and a computer that plays CDs but I’m not the most avid collector in the world. Every so often, I selectively buy things and people play me stuff that they’ve bought, so I’m very aware of what’s going on. I’m fairly simple-living really and not terribly acquisitive. I mostly prefer used things to new, so a lot of my books are second-hand, and I love trawling thrift stores and charity shops for second-hand clothes. I’m sure that if I ever get around to learning to drive, my first car will be an old banger.” Having said that, Carol does have a very broad collection, ranging from Radiohead, Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell, Margaret O’Hara, The Blue Nile, Low, Red House Painters and many of her contemporaries including The Frames, The Jimmy Cake, BellX1, Ann Scott, The Dudley Corporation and The Last Post. “The last thing I bought was Fragments For A Rainy season by John Cale, which is a collection of his live performances,” Carol reveals. “ I also picked up Tapestry by Carole King which has been one of those albums that I’ve been meaning to buy for years. My Dad has some influence because he is a big jazz fanatic with a massive collection, so every so often I dip into that and borrow stuff, so I’ve got some classic jazz like Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. At the moment, I’m listening to a record called From Spirituals to Swing which was recorded in 1938/1939 in Carnegie Hall featuring relatively obscure jazz, blues and gospel artists of that era.” And of course, there’s lots of Tycho’s material around. “I’ve got tonnes of demo CDs and work in progress that I keep forgetting to throw away,” Carol says. “When it comes to looking for something I’m supposed to be working on I can never find it. I keep posters, flyers and laminates from pretty much everything these days. I used to be really bad for keeping mementos, but then I realised I couldn’t remember half the gigs I’ve played. I think I’m getting more sentimental in my old age. “Chez Carol has lots of book shelves and she is an avid reader. “I’ve just finished reading Brian Wilson’s autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, which was quite a trip!” she says. “I’ve got a lot of contemporary novels from Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Peter Ackroyd and Margaret Atwood which are some of my favourites. Also, I’ve quite a bit of poetry, my favourites being Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney and Walt Whitman. I always have Roget’s and the Oxford English Dictionary handy and a mini Times Atlas of the World which I bought this year so when I do finally get to travel in Europe this year, I’ll actually know what the map looks like.”
Many other well thumbed reads are concerned with people and places a lot more closer to home. “I like a lot of stuff about Dublin,” she states. “Such as a book called The Heart of the City by Peter Pearson who is one of the founders of the Civic Trust. He is so passionate and caring about heritage environment. I used to work for Drimnagh Castle where I grew up and he was one of the committee members there and one of the people who saved it “Myself and Kim Porcelli have pledged at least three times that we are going to finish Ulysses within a year and of course we haven’t yet!” Carol laughs. “Every so often I might read a few chapters and think I’m doing pretty well, but then I’ll put it down and you have to keep going with it. One of my favourite books is called Man On The Moon which I bought as a present for Donal a few years ago and surreptitiously took it back. It’s about space exploration and it was put together in 1953, so it’s years before man actually landed on the moon. It’s got all these drawings, projections and notions what space capsules and modules will look like and it’s really cute. Paul Noonan gave me a book called Bad Hair, but I don’t know whether it’s a comment on his hair or mine!” “My room mostly reflects what I do,” Keogh considers. “Apart from the music and the guitar and amp it’s mostly photographs everywhere because I take a lot. At the moment, they are mostly photographs of my niece. I have two cameras – a super-eight that must be twenty years old and still in working order, and my Minolta SLR that is about fifteen now. I dread the day when I have to replace them with new-fangled yokes, although I would love a digital video camera – so I’m not a complete Luddite! I also like to make my own things where possible. Knitting hats was a fad for a while. I make my own Christmas cards – none of that shop-bought Hallmark nonsense. Although I studied painting at college, I’ve only recently started painting again. But there are two paintings of mine from my college days that hang in the hallway of my house. I also have a painting of a duck by an artist called Madeleine Smith which I bought when the Blackfort Organic Gallery was shutting down where we played a gig which is really like the cover of Love Life.” “I suppose the most important thing in my room apart from my bed is the computer,” she reflects. “It’s a bit scary to think everything is in it but it keeps things a lot more tidy. A lot of people find it odd if you’re doing something like music and using a computer but I’ve got very used to it. I’m a faster typist than I am at handwriting and it’s more fluid for me to type. I have a TV and video that are not that often switched on, but Monday evenings at 8.30pm are reserved for University Challenge, so perhaps I’m a closet egghead.”
Eamon Sweeney
The Event Guide - 2003Sheer Art Attack "Beautifully executed and elegantly packaged, 'Love Life' is the recently released second album by Dublin-based band The Tycho Brahe, and its ambitious, and totally satisfying collection of songs make up the double CD worth of material. Founder member Donal O'Mahony gives us some background details on its creation." Read the interview
LoopDiLoop - June 2003"The first thing you're likely to learn about Tycho Brahe is that he had a metal nose, that it was forever falling off and that he used to carry a little pot of nose glue in his pocket so he could stick it back on when it did. The second thing you should know about Tycho Brahe is that he was a c16th Danish astronomer. And the third thing you ought know about Tycho Brahe is that his is the name taken by an Irish band that used be known as the Plague Monkeys..." Read the interview
wow.ie - June 2003The first thing you're likely to learn about Tycho Brahe is that he had a metal nose, that it was forever falling off and that he used to carry a little pot of nose glue in his pocket so he could stick it back on when it did. The second thing you should know about Tycho Brahe is that he was a 16th Century Danish astronomer. And the third thing you ought know about Tycho Brahe is that his is the name taken by an Irish band that used be known as the Plague Monkeys. Let's do the Plague Monkeys bit first. Two excellent albums - Surface Tension and The Sunburn Index - into an all too brief career and just after having completed the soundtrack to Saltwater, Conor McPherson's follow up to the deservedly successful Irish-gangster-movie I Went Down, the Plague Monkeys disappeared. Just like that. Gone. Without a trace. What the hell happened? "It was just a sabbatical really," says Donal O Mahony, who with Carol Keogh and a few others made up the Plague Monkeys. But why a sabbatical, why then, when things were looking good? "The thing about the Plague Monkeys was that even though we said we didn't really need a record deal, we'd set ourselves up to really need a record deal. We needed the kind of finance that funded studios. That mentality meant that we were dependent on news about interest in the band, have we got a publishing deal, is someone flying over to see us. That kind of got in the way. That, combined with the fact that I'd done it for four or five years and it felt like I hadn't done anything else. So I went into a masters in multimedia. I think Carol was fatigued with that waiting game as well, and the whole talk about the next big thing." And so they split. But now Donal and Carol are back ("I thought I was making a break for good from working with Carol but it was hard to say no to it after a break") and, with the addition of the Jimmy Cake's Diarmuid Mac Diarmada the trio have formed The Tycho Brahe. The three had previously worked together before, in the early 90's, when they were the Low Babies. "Diarmuid's an old school buddy of mine. He fitted into the picture perfectly and that added to that atmosphere of you know what, this is meant to be fun. And it is. Even if we are doing it all ourselves, we're recording it ourselves, it's a pleasure." This Is, their debut long player, was recorded last summer and released in the autumn and has been generating a lot of interest, not just in Ireland but in the wider world of music too. "X-FM in London has just said they think we're one of the best Irish bands they've heard in years," says Donal. And the BBC loved Your House From Mine ("The Tycho Brahe take a sentiment and build it into something else through repetition.") and described the whole disc as "a self assured, beautiful and understated album". Beautiful and understated certainly describes This Is. But one of the difficulties the band present is that they make it hard for people like me when it comes to looking for a simple cliché to describe them. It does tend to come down to Carol's vocals, even though there's more to the music that a voice, you still can't help but drop out names like Kate Bush and Kristin Hersh and the like, even if the range of the band's music proves these too simple. But one name that does stick is Stina Nordenstam. "It's gas, we'd decided on the name, This Is, and I was working in a company that was doing Stina's multi-media stuff and then I realised, about a month after we'd decided on our own name, that that was the name of her album!" Serendipity aside, Stina has had some influence on Donal. "And She Closed Her Eyes, Stina's second album, I probably listened to that solid for a year and a lot of that has probably influenced my writing, music wise, and has influenced my production when it comes to that really intimate sound. So, yes, I totally ripped her off!" But Stina's not the only one he listens to. "Oh, there's Talk Talk, stuff like Cornelius. Low, I like No Twist as well, lots of stuff. Fleetwood Mac, I'm absolutely mental about Fleetwood Mac. And very early Queen." Influences though only take you so far and much of what makes The Tycho Brahe enjoyable to listen to - much of what made The Plague Monkeys enjoyable to listen to - is that they seem to be enjoying what they're doing. When The Sunburn Index came out, Donal described producing it as having had fewer constraints than Surface Tension had had. Here, a new band and a new beginning, and it seems like there's even fewer constraints, the production sounds even more relaxed. There's a casual air to it that's not quite unfinished, but is certainly character. "It's less anxious. I would definitely say that. By The Sunburn index myself and Carol had become very at ease with the fact that we were musicians and this was the thing we did best." Listening to it, you can almost hear the band enjoying making the music. Cardle And Machinery, Ink In The Moon's Milk, Performing Seal and Pop Rocks all weigh in at last than a minute but they're more than mere audio doodles separating the major tracks. Carol breaks into laughter during the recording of one track and that's the cut they run with. And Tycho Brahe itself, near the album's end, closes with a car alarm going off. "The window was open, it was being recorded in July, it was roasting hot. You get these happy little accidents and one of these was a car alarm going off in perfect tune and in perfect pitch to the outro of the song. If you turn it up you can hear Carol saying 'isn't that going to show up on tape?' and you can hear me off mike saying it doesn't matter." I mention Peadar O Riada's ambient-trad thing, where the sound of chickens in the yard or planes flying over head are allowed intrude into the recorded sound, Peadar preferring to record at home rather than in a studio. Donal mentions Beck, who "up until recently had never set foot into a recording studio to record any of his own music, he'd always worked with the right producers and had a condition of working in their sitting rooms, or their home studios, because he said 'why would I want to feel like I'm going to work and pass a receptionist who says good morning Beck?' That's a similar approach to ourselves." And James Yorkston merits a mention too. Yorkston was on the Galway Arts Festival bill with The Tycho Brahe last year and Donal likes the Astral Weeks-like approach he took to recording his album, Moving Up Country, which was done in a Scottish cottage over a week or two. "It really is one of the most remarkable albums of last year. You can almost feel and sense the house and the rooms that it was recorded in, instead of the clinical section-by-section, take-by-take feel that so many studio albums have." Whereas the Plague Monkeys had fallen into the trap of needing a deal, The Tycho Brahe are working to survive without the trappings of the music industry. Certainly the industry has changed, even in the last few years and it's more and more common for bands to DIY it and to get away with DIYing it. Donal cites Damien Rice, formerly of Juniper but now operating under his own name and creating a lot of interest outside of Ireland. "He's just signed off licensing under his own label for America, he's on Starbucks compilations and he's on Letterman, all under his own steam. In our case we're doing it ourselves and we're doing fine. This Is is doing well in Britain. The Plague Monkeys never got played on X-FM in London, which is the equivalent of Dave Fanning's show, except to that larger audience, twenty-four hours a day." Is that the route The Tycho Brahe want to take, the independent route? "We are talking to a major record label in America, a fairly big one, but nothing hinges on it. We're not being overly cautious, but if this all fell through tomorrow, we still exist, we still continue." So to the name then. What's that all about? Actually, forget that for a minute, first of all, how the hell do you pronounce it? "We say it as "the tie-co bra-hay". And it's wrong! The Germans pronounce it "the tick-o brau", which sounds like the thicko woman, in German. But the Czechs - which I believe is right, because Brahe worked there at the end of his career - they pronounce it "the tick-o bra-hay." "The name was meant to be a bit of fun. It was Carol's idea. She writes all the lyrics," says Donal. "Well, possibly with the exception of Hooga Chakka," he qualifies, with a laugh. Hooga Chakka is one of the tracks on This Is, an oddly alluring little number that begins off as a gentle instrumental and then develops a repeated chorus as meaningful to these ears as a Maori rain dance sung by monkeys - hooga chakka hooga chakka it goes, repetitively - before ending as gently as it began. "Carol is fascinated with science systems," Donal adds, and you only have to look back to Surface Tension and a track like Doppler effect to see that, I guess. "I think we're all three of us interested in science, we love that order and chaos element to it. Carol's fascinated particularly with astronomy." Which is where Brahe comes in. The real Tycho Brahe sounds like he's a character out of a Thomas Pynchon novel. He has appeared in fiction, several times. Kafka's mate, Max Brod wrote The Redemption Of Tycho Brahe. And even more recently, John Banville has him in two of his books, Kepler and the earlier Doctor Copernicus. "Frank Zappa has an opera about him. He's a very popular figure in music. Tony Iommi, the guitarist from Black Sabbath, has a range of guitar-pedals named after him." So who was Tycho Brahe then? Well, some back story first, a bit of science (I know, music interview, science bit, whadda hell is going on, but if they're going to pick such an exotic name, you can't expect me to just ignore it and tell you instead the myriad influences to be discerned on This Is, can you?). The Science bit then. Between Aristotle in about 350 BC and Ptolemy in about 150 AD (Ptolemy, by the by, is the guy responsible for one of the first maps of Ireland), well between those two it was generally held that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around us. Copernicus, on the other hand, he posited a system with the Sun at its centre and the Earth just another planet. This was in 1543, a couple or three years before Brahe was born. Brahe was a Danish astronomer, Working before the invention of the telescope. Galileo (Galileo figaro Magnifico? Too tenuous a music connection?) was one of the first astronomers to work with a telescope, which he constructed in the first decade of the c17th, just a few years after Brahe's death. Brahe himself had devised instruments that enabled him to determine the motions of the planets, even if he did still believe Copernicus was wrong and that the Vatican-favoured geocentric view of the solar system was right. Even so, much of the work he did on the motion of Mars was vital when Kepler came to formulating his laws of planetary motion a few years after Brahe's death. He's had quite an influence on astronomy, has Brahe. Anyway, that's the science bit. What's with the nose story? Well, it seems the young Tycho Brahe was a bit of a lad and he got himself into a duel when he was a student (was he fighting over some personal slight that had demeaned his character in the eyes of others? Was he hell, he was fighting over a mathematics argument - crazy name, crazy guy, eh?). During the duel, which apparently was conducted in the dark and after a Christmas party, the other guy's sword lopped off Brahe's snozzle. "He's a very colourful character, a big drinker and he had a habit of his metal nose falling off when he was chatting to the ladies at two in the morning. He had a little pot of glue in his pocket that he used to dab it and put it back on." There's all sorts of other stories about Brahe, about his many concubines, about him having a dwarf as a jester and keeping a pet elk (which - apparently - died after breaking a leg while going downstairs, drunk) and so on. When his patron the Danish king died, Brahe fell out of favour in his native Denmark and relocated to Prague, where he ultimately died. Which kind of brings us back to the band who, oddly enough, will be in Prague themselves shortly. Here's Donal again: "We were lining up gigs in Scandinavia and this guy, Yens, who's been a massive supporter of Irish music abroad, he recommended us to the promoter, who's the equivalent to John Peel in the Czech Republic. It's the ValMez festival, in the countryside just outside Prague and it's set up by a town that came up with the idea years ago to have a music festival to promote the place. And this year he selected us to go over. And as a result of that, people in Vienna who are promoting us over there, they asked us to play in Vienna, so we're doing two dates in Vienna as well, on the same trip." (Or, as Donal puns, on the same cheque.) Jumping back in time again we return to Conor McPherson and Saltwater. That was going to be released, as a soundtrack album, wasn't it? "It was going to be put out but then things got, shall we say, complicated. So it didn't happen, but you know, these things happen, it's great that it's on the movie, pick it up on DVD or whatever." How did McPherson get to picking the Plague Monkeys? "He'd come to a gig, he really liked the stuff, and he said 'I'm working on a movie in about a year's time and I need to involve you now.' Which is brilliant, particularly working on the film course in Dun Laoghaire now I know how neglected the score is, right until the last minute. He included us from the start. We worked really close with him, it was a hell of learning experience, it was brilliant fun, it really was, but we'd never really had to answer to anybody and there was no better person to answer to than Conor. We were answering to someone who was working on a major feature film and was a big fan of the band and was roughly the same age as us. We really got on with him." Moving swiftly along, without lingering on McPherson's latest flick, The Actors - Donal is a big fan of Michael Caine, I'm not a big fan of The Actors - the band have also done a "live soundtrack" with No Disco impresario Donal Dineen. "He approached us to play the Galway arts festival last year. It's going to happen again this year. He has a bed of visuals that we play over, we provide the score for his visuals, we improvised. It was our first live gig, in July last year, in front of a really big crowd, the equivalent of the Savoy 1 in Galway. We improvised over a thirty minute movie, we provided the soundtrack. It went down a storm. Diarmuid was on the road with David Kitt, so we worked with three session musicians, Kim Porcelli [from Northiglight Razorblade], John Dermody, the drummer from the Jimmy Cake, and Dip, who's the bass player from the Jimmy Cake. Improvising was fine, we knew what we sounded like and we went up and did a version of one of the songs off the album, The Internal Life Of Animals. Donal [Dineen] knew that that was the tone of the song and he did visuals based on that song and we just improvised right the way through, and did variations of it for thirty minutes. It was great, great to do something different." So what else lies ahead of the band, once they return from Eastern Europe? "In September or October we'll have our second album out, we're seventy five percent of the way through it, it's going fine." And what'll the album sound like? Will it be as hard to pin down as This Is? "It'll be the same again, only bigger! It has a lot more drum kit on it, one or two of the songs have an epic feel to them. The arrangement is braver on some of the songs and the confidence is growing but it's still the intimacy of This Is. As for different influences and different genres on the next one, there's going to be still as many troublesome influences." Still as many troublesome influences - at this stage that's what I like about The Tycho Brahe the most I think, that they make describing their music so difficult that the only think you can do is go out and buy it and try to categorise it yourself. And you should, you'll hopefully enjoy it as the much as Donal, Carol and Diarmuid obviously do. ---- The Tycho Brahe play The Village on June 12th. You can keep uptodate on other gigs they may have later in the Summer through WOW! What's On Where's music listings, as well as through the band's own web-site, www.thetychobrahe.com
Feargal McKay
Hot Press - November 21 2003The Brahe Wanderer “I write a lot on the hoof when I’m walking,” reveals Carol Keogh, which may explain why The Tycho Brahe’s love life is one of the more satisfying sonic and emotional journeys of the year. "There’s quite a lot there to digest”, says The Tycho Brahe’s Donal O’Mahony as he gives me the package on a wet November night. He’s not wrong. A 24-hour crash course in the Dublin trio involves not only last year’s This Is debut but also their current, expansive double album Love Life. Thank heavens for crappy traffic and long drives home. When I meet up with vocalist Carol Keogh the next day (Donal is elsewhere, as is Diarmuid MacDiarmada) the first obvious point to make is that, given that they’ve only been together some 18 months, to produce three albums worth of material is pretty good going. “There’s probably more than that knocking about as well,” she smiles. “We all have different methods of working, there’s pockets of activity going on in these different places which sort of triples what actually comes out. That’s the main reason… that and the fact that I think we’re addicted to writing songs.” Recording at home also helps. “There are very few restrictions apart from having to sleep,” she confirms. “There’s nobody watching the clock, saying we’re over time and losing money. But because there’s so much for people to digest on this album we realise that we’re going to have to plug it for a year, year and a half maybe. We’ll just have to sit on the new material we have for a while or find some other way to sneak things out. I love playing live and the fact that we now have ample material to choose from live, but I really start itching to start in the studio again.” So Love Life could have been longer! “Pretty much, we were writing songs up to a few weeks before finishing the recording. We’d agreed a release date so we knew that if we didn’t get it out by October at the latest we’d have to hold off until next year and we didn’t want to do that. We thought we were finished and then we went off to the Czech Republic and I came back and wrote another song so right up until we had it mastered we were adding bits. It’s just like making a jigsaw – it’s not until you get down to the final pieces that you can see the whole picture.” To come up with such a weighty work on a second album suggests to me a great confidence within the band. “It could be a great folly too,” she laughs, “I don’t know. We’re confident in each other’s abilities and that’s where the excitement comes from. I know if I hand something to the other two they’ll come back and surprise me and I’ll like it. We’ve all been around long enough to trust each other’s instincts as well as our own.” Love Life isn’t a record that you’ll get straight away, it requires a bit of investment on the part of the listener before the full extent of its many joys are revealed. That, according to Carol, was part of the plan. “You should be able to live with an album for a long time and still find new things when you go back to it,” she says. “I do think some of the songs are more immediate than others and they’ll be the ones that get replayed initially but I like the idea that people will have to spend time with it, which gives it more longevity and greater currency.” Does she see Love Life as two separate albums? “I don’t like to put too fine a point on it because you can’t separate love from life anyway, but the Love album is possibly more intimate and the Life part of things has maybe more spontaneity.” At this point we should probably mention just what a fantastic record Love Life is. Ranging from gentle ambience to feedback-drenched guitar, from simplicity to complex drama, it pulls off the difficult trick of achieving a massive scope while maintaining an overall – and highly individual – identity. “I do think it holds up,” Carol says. “I don’t think you can begin to explore themes as ridiculously huge and all encompassing as love and life without having a kind of schizophrenic thing going on. Bits of it are funny, some of it is lump in the throat stuff but it’s all done with a good heart. I suppose because we work for the most part intuitively our identity is going to come through, our individual personalities and whatever we form as a whole. “Some people expected it to be more or less the same as the Plague Monkeys (Donal and Carol’s old band) and there are elements of course but I think we’ve diversified a lot since then in what we’re capable of doing. That’s as much from taking a break and coming back to it fresh, and also the fact that we have individually done different things that have developed and we have put into the music now. You bring it all back to the table. We don’t want to become bored with what we’re doing ourselves, want to keep ourselves challenged.” Both the press releases for ‘This Is’ and Love Life make mention of a, not immediately obvious, influence. Fleetwood Mac. Carol looks a little sheepish. “We are all fans… Donal is the biggest fan of all,” she says, shifting the blame. “We’re all going to see them the night before our Olympia gig so we’re going to be geed up on the Mac. They would be an influence on the sound rather than the songwriting.” Still don’t see it myself, although there is a folk thing going on here somewhere. “I was in college with Diarmuid and he introduced me to Steeleye Span, I think it was part of his parents’ record collection. I do like that pure vocal sound. When I’m singing I don’t think of it as folky but it has been said, maybe it’s just a quality in the voice. Plus I get compared to all the usual people…” Does that rile her? “It used to. It’s not so frequent now but for years I had the Liz Fraser thing like an albatross around my neck. She’s a wonderful singer, that’s not the problem, but I have my own identity. Then there’s Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell. They’re all brilliant. I’m OK with it, I just go yeah, yeah, whatever…” The hope now is that Love Life will start to put these to rest. “It will cancel out any of the immediate comparisons. I don’t think if anyone listens to this album from start to finish that they’re going to easily compare us to anyone else anyway.” One of the key factors is the use of strings, not just as some shortcut to drama but as a genuine element in their overall character. “On occasion we’ve deliberately shied away from using strings when it would have been obvious to do so. Kim Porcelli did amazing work on ‘Made In The Fire’, she transformed that song. She came in with this eight part cello arrangement in her head. I didn’t hear it until we were mastering the album but it knocked me out.” Although Carol doesn’t consider Love Life to be a distinctively Dublin record, the place does have some degree of influence on her writing. “I’ve lived here all my life so I’m very much defined by this city. There’s at least one song that refers to Dublin (‘Spike And The Wheel’). I write a lot on the hoof when I’m walking so I can actually pinpoint each song in terms of location, where it was conceived or where it was written. I don’t know how obvious that would be to anyone listening though. “It’s something I think about a lot, the huge changes that the city’s gone through over the past few years. To be honest I don’t like most of it. It’s nice to be able to get a really good cup of coffee but otherwise… it’s become a bit hackneyed at this stage but it has lost a certain amount of character. I think people have become a lot gruffer because their lives and priorities have changed and sometimes that feels forced, not natural. We had problems before when we were in recession and people were on the dole but it was a different kind of thing, it wasn’t as aggressive. I could go on but I don’t want to put the city down because I love it. What’s happening in music is the most healthy thing about the city right now.” Ah yes, the feted Dublin scene. While it is certainly the most vibrant it’s been for a while, how much of an effect is it actually having in the world of daytime radio and mainstream media? “You have to chip away at it for a while,” says Carol. “It’s getting easier, there are more opportunities for exposure. It is possible to break through and break out and we are going to do our damnedest to do that and be realistic about it at the same time. I don’t think any of the bands around would be happy to be just selling a certain amount of records within a catchment area. I don’t see any reason why our music wouldn’t travel. It has to get through, it just has to… because it’s just good and if there’s enough of it and we keep doing it for long enough then somebody’s going to notice. Love Life is out now on Konstantin Records. The Tycho Brahe play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin (Nov 21 – late show); The Warwick, Galway (27); Spirit Store, Dundalk (29) and Zoo Club, Kilkenny (Dec 13) Phil Udell
Hot Press - November 19 2002The Tycho Brahe are a trio of musicians/artists who are among the leading lights of Dublin’s new musical underground. “I couldn’t move out of home ’til I was 27. That’s insane! But I wasn’t in a position where I knew I could move out and meet the rent every month.” So says Carol Keogh of The Tycho Brahe. Government Health Warning: musical pipe dreaming can restrict your personal growth. It’s not even as if Carol ever fell for the whole rock ’n’ roll holy grail routine. Even with The Plague Monkeys, a (slightly) more commercial proposition than the Tycho Brahe’s recent debut This Is, she and her writing partner Donal O’Mahony held hard to an uncompromising visual and musical aesthetic. Mind you, in the latter years of the Monkey, this had come to be tempered with a pragmatic approach involving getting a day-job to support the nocturnal habit. The third member and wild card in The Tycho Brahe is one Diarmuid Mac Diarmada, multi-instrumentalist, subterranean activist and chief architect of the Dublin underground sound, known for his work with The Jimmy Cake, David Kitt and countless others. “I met Diarmuid in my first year at college and he dropped out, but we kept in touch,” Carol explains. “I met Donal through him ’cos they were school friends going back to 12 or 13. Diarmuid at that time was beginning to learn to play guitar, but he always had a vast record collection, he was always one of those people who’s like a musical detective. He finds a thread, and then another one, and then another. He could write an alternative history of music if he put his mind to it. “Donal, Diarmuid and myself started a band called Low Babies the year I finished college in ’94 and it sort of imploded very quickly, we just diversified in terms of influence and what we wanted to do. We have heaps of recordings that sound really interesting now, that we’re going to release probably under the Low Babies name. Then myself and Donal formed the Plague Monkeys and Diarmuid went off and learned loads of instruments and started playing. He’s almost been the lynchpin of this sort of movement.” A movement defined almost by what it’s not: a fluid, arts-first, non-record company sponsored ideology, unconcerned with what Tom Waits called “the furniture of rock ’n’ roll”. The Tycho Brahe are on the fringes of this scene (if something as fluxed up and diffuse can be termed so), a nexus of Wonky shadow players championed by some as the greatest thing to happen to the domestic music industry in two decades, sniped at by others as unambitious and insular, the scene that celebrates itself. And maybe it does, but its code of conduct is admirable: stay small and agile; mutate and survive. And feed on the bones of the dinosaurs. As Carol puts it: “When you, with resignation, say, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna sell all those millions of records’, you then have to make qualitative decisions about how you’re gonna conduct yourself and how much you’re willing to sacrifice for what this music is about. I’m not prepared to give up my day job and live in a van and not wash for three days – especially if I were the only girl on the bus. I never really bought that rock ‘n’ roll mythology.” Like someone once said a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: Fuck rock, let’s art. Peter Murphy
Hot Press - December 3 2002Gear: Diarmuid Mac Diarmada, multi-instrumentalist Multitalented noisemaker with The Jimmy Cake, The Tycho Brahe, David Kitt and lord knows who else tells us what gear and instruments float his boat.
What's your guitar/drum kit/bass/piano/whatever (make & model)?
Where did you buy it?
If you had an unlimited budget, what would you buy?
Who and what song did you play air guitar to as a kid?
What instruments can you knock a tune out of (however bad it may be)?
What's your favourite studio effect and why?
Did you ever get piano/any-other-instrument lessons when you were a kid and do you have any fond memories of them?
What's the most rock n roll thing you've ever done to an instrument?
What's your favourite Irish musical instrument shop and why?
What's your favourite place to record and why? | ||
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