Walls aim to Stop the Lights at Scariff Harbour Festival

THERE’S a treat for Clare rock fans this weekend when The Walls play at the Scariff Harbour Festival.

 

Ennistymon brothers Steve and Joe Wall are the crux of the group but it’s not a homecoming for them as Steve told The Clare Champion he’s never been to Scariff. “I don’t even know that part of Clare so I’m looking forward to discovering it,” he said.

They launched their album  Stop the Lights in the spring and the rather up-beat songs have been well received. “We’ve got fantastic reviews for it and really genuine people are sending us messages via Facebook and the band’s website, saying how much they love it and it’s really nice to get that kind of feedback. I think it’s a very positive record and we spent a long time working on it. The 11 songs on it were whittled down from around 40 so everything that’s on it deserves to be there.”

The logical thing to do after releasing an album is to tour but live music isn’t the draw it once was, with so many other demands on people’s money.

Steve says while they are doing shows, they’re not doing as many as they would like. “It’s noticeably quieter this summer around the country, there are definitely less gigs compared to previous years. This year you’d really notice it. It took a while to kick in, because people still like to go out and do things but we have definitely noticed it and a lot of bands are talking about it. This year, there are fewer festivals and very few indoor shows, there’s a lot less of that around the whole country. I hope this drought doesn’t last too long.”

With the amount of songs they had, a double album would have been a possibility but Steve feels it would not be sustainable. “I don’t think anyone releases double albums any more, unless it’s a live album or something. No one seems to do it and the reason is that CD sales have fallen. People, when they’re downloading, tend to download just one or two songs.”

With far less money being spent on recorded music, fewer people going to live shows and more competition among bands, it’s a hard time in the music business. Steve feels the public should get behind Irish bands, where possible. “I don’t want to be painting a depressing picture but all you can say to people is to try and support the Irish music business and support the bands.”

He says while people concentrate on the very big touring acts that stop off here, there’s a lot of quality Irish bands that find it very hard to get airplay or recognition nowadays.

While the Wall brothers are the mainstay of the group, Stop the Lights is something of a band album. “Some of the stuff on it, the band just got together and we were just jamming away, whereas normally it would be me and Joe coming in with more or less a complete song.

“The song Bird in a Cage came from the band just jamming. We did end up with hours and hours of tapes of jams and the hard part with some of it was to actually turn them into songs.”
Bird in a Cage has received quite a bit of airplay and is probably one of The Walls most recognised tunes by now.

Steve wrote it and the lyrics deal with the challenges he faced when moving to Ennistymon from Dublin at a young age. “Moving to Clare, while I didn’t know it at the time because I was only 13, it was a great well to dip into. All that childhood stuff is very powerful and it sticks in your memory, about what you were feeling at the time. Stunning songs like Frank the Tramp and Town for Sale were all very much inspired by living in Ennistymon.”

Town for Sale cast a cold eye on the Ennistymon of over 20 years ago but the theme is very applicable to the here and now. “It’s funny because there was a time when people didn’t like that song and I got some negative feedback to it during the Celtic Tiger years. People were saying ‘Ah, I don’t like that song, town is booming, business is flying’ all this kind of stuff and it’s funny how it comes around again.”

At the height of the boom, he also got a negative reaction to a song (Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone) he wrote about some of the changes being seen, which also went down badly in some quarters. “I remember thinking, and I’m not an economist, that this couldn’t last. I think anyone with common sense would go ‘how is this happening? It can’t sustain itself.’ I remember in Dublin at that time the skyline was just black with cranes and lots of towns were like that. There were a lot of normal people going ‘this is ridiculous, it can’t last, and that’s where that came out of.

“That song was based on WB Yeat’s September 1913 about the gombeen man, the Irish rackrenter. I was writing about what Yeats might have thought if he was live today and it was almost September 1913 revisited. That song was on the New Dawn Breaking album, which came out in 2005 and a couple of people said to us afterwards why are you being so miserable, you’re trying to spoil the party.

“Some people didn’t like it and it reminded me of the whole thing with Town for Sale. Another three years or so elapsed and that song became so relevant.

“One day, I posted it up on Facebook, that the song for the day was Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone and there were loads of comments on it.”

He didn’t think much of some of the Celtic Tiger behaviour. “I just saw a new breed of Irish person, who was arrogant and obstinate. I think people became very aware of having to have what other people had.”

That was disappointing to him. “I was surprised that Irish people had fallen for that because I thought we were a race that could be over cynical at times, but had some kind of sense of ourselves. Irish people that I knew growing up never really liked to show off that they had money. They didn’t like displays of wealth and all of a sudden you had this new breed of Irish person for whom displaying your worth was what it was all about.”

Attempts to spread the blame widely and by extension to blame no one for the collapse that followed, anger him.

“We didn’t realise how much the banks had lied to everybody and without getting into it all, I just think it was a bit ridiculous that the attitude was ‘oh we all went a bit crazy during the Celtic Tiger years’. No, we didn’t. Some people did, the bankers did but an awful lot of us didn’t and we’re all paying the price for it.”

For people of a certain age, Steve is probably best known as a former member of The Stunning but The Walls have many younger fans that only know him and his brother for their output of more recent years.

“Sometimes, I’d meet younger folk and they’d ask what do you do and I’d say I play in a couple of bands and they’d ask who. I’d say The Stunning and they’d shake their head, then I’d say The Walls and they’d know The Walls.

“That age group in their twenties all seem to know The Walls, fewer of them know The Stunning and The Stunning generally has an older audience. I’m happy with that, I’m just glad that younger age group are aware of us, because it shows our hard work is paying off.”