On the Loose in Newmarket

A HIGHLIGHT of the Newmarket Village Carnival will be the performance of Republic of Loose on Saturday evening.
The group mightn’t be quite a household name but tunes like The Steady Song, Comeback Girl and You Know It have received a lot of airplay over the last few years.
Frontman Mick Pyro has won praise from the likes of Bono and Sinead O’Connor, while one reviewer described him as “an insane rock version of Robbie Williams with the voice of a young and drunk James Brown”.
Prominent for the last four years, Pyro says they have been together for much longer. “We were originally called Johnny Pyro but we changed our name around 2004. Johnny Pyro would have been around for a few years before that so we’ve been playing together for about 10 years.”
While they picked up a group of followers fairly quickly, their hits garnered new fans. “With the first album we got a hardcore group of people interested but when we had the hits on the radio, we obviously got a lot more people coming to our gigs. We started getting bigger gigs too.”
He says they are working on developing their profile abroad and have a number of new songs written.
“We’re releasing a compilation in Europe next month and we might release it here with some new songs on it or we might do a full new album, we’ll see what happens. We just had an album last year but we have enough songs for another album now, so we might go ahead and do one. The compilation will hopefully come out in the States as well.
“Hopefully we’ll go back over to the States in November. We’ve been in the UK and done a lot of tours there. We have to go back over to London too, but we want to tour Europe and get the album out there, Germany specifically, that’s where it seems to be getting the best reaction.”
As a teenager, he liked everything from Anthrax to Michael Jackson, but it took him quite a while to start playing in the style that Republic of Loose are known for.
“I started playing R&B in my early twenties because I had been too scared to do it before then. When we had the musicians we decided to go for it.”
Mick holds an MA in English and focussed on Renaissance literature. It’s something that has influenced Republic of Loose, he says.
“I did it a few years ago in my early 20s, I really enjoyed it. I studied a lot of renaissance poetry, things like John Milton and it reminded me of rap music to be honest. It seemed to have the same kind of elevated language and I started to listen to a lot of hip hop and rap type stuff.”
He has won plaudits for his abilities as a showman and says the group is still very motivated when it comes to playing live.
“It’s a big kick for us, we’ve always prided ourselves on our live shows. I like to entertain people, but obviously a lot of it depends on the crowd, if they’re into it then we get into it. We love playing live, it’s always invigorating. We’ve done a lot of gigs but it’s still fresh to us.”
Joining Republic of Loose for Saturday’s open air concert will be The Spikes, Thunderstruck, Keywest, Mike and the Scallywags, The Bad Pennies, Lou McMahon, Sticky Fingers and Gari Deegan. See www.villagecarnival.com for more details on the event.