Cork duo bringing down the house

Fish Go Deep’s layered second album is a riposte to dance music’s repetitive beats, says Ed Power

GREG Dowling sounds faintly depressed as he contemplates modern dance music.

“Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta ... it doesn’t mean much to me,” says the DJ and producer. “Acts like those don’t have any effect on our world. Maybe it will trickle down — perhaps people will want to hear something with more substance.”

If fans of mainstream electro and techno want to widen their knowledge of the genre, they should listen to the second album Dowling and his musical partner, Shane Johnson, have released as Fish Go Deep.

Draw The Line is a sophisticated, nuanced collection of, by turns, slow and fast tunes. It challenges the orthodoxy that dance artists can’t make interesting long-players. It is far from a collection of mindless beats.

“I rarely put on most house albums, because there’s so little variety,” says Dowling. “With this, there’s a start, a middle and a finish. It began when we came up with some tunes that sounded very different to what we normally do. We thought ‘let’s make a record around these.’ We wanted to show there was more to us than putting on house tracks all the time.”

In Cork, the pair are famous DJs. Their ’90s residency at the defunct Sir Henry’s, on South Main Street, turned the Leeside dance scene into the hottest in the country. While they continue to man the turntables every fortnight at The Pavilion, writing music, rather than playing other artists’ songs, has become their chief passion.

“We’ve always been fascinated with the production end of things,” says Dowling. “And when you are playing songs all of the time, you tend to develop an interest in how they are put together. That’s not to say every DJ is necessarily good at production. There are lots of very well-known DJs and it’s obvious production isn’t their thing. It is, however, something that fascinates us.”

As they transitioned from DJs to composers, any misapprehensions they may have had about life as musicians were quickly shattered.

“If you are serious about music, then you have to approach it as a full-time job. Music is what we do all the time. We start in the morning and stay at it all day. To write good music, you have to write it constantly, I think. That’s the only way to do anything worthwhile,” he says.

As Fish Go Deep, they had their big break in 2003, with The Cure and the Cause, a super-catchy hook-up with Tralee’s Tracey Kelleher. Having charted around the world, the tune has had a curious afterlife. It’s cropped up on everything from television sports montages to Fashion TV. In the house scene, it is considered a monster smash.

“It did well for us. Our music sells away all the time,” says Dowling. “You suddenly find yourself in a place you’d never imagined. When you see The Cure and the Cause on the insert for a football show [Match of the Day], it’s a great feeling. You’re stepping outside your normal world. The house scene can be a closed place. It’s good to break out.”

Ironically, when they aren’t DJing, Fish Go Deep tend not to listen to a great deal of house. “I grew up in the 1970s and my first love was guitar music, people like David Bowie,” says Dowling. “Nowadays, I’m big into people like The xx. We immerse ourselves in all sorts of stuff. ”

That isn’t to say they don’t maintain a keen interest in emerging trends in dance. The duo’s Red FM radio show is syndicated world-wide and they are in constant contact with new artists.

“There are always micro scenes developing in house,” he says. “It’s vital that you pay attention to what is happening. If you don’t keep it fresh, as a DJ there is a danger you can fall into a rut. You want to stay engaged.”

No matter how successful they are as Fish Goes Deep, in Cork City Dowling and Johnson will be forever synonymous with ‘Henrys’ and house music’s golden age. Dowling has fond memories but says the Sir Henry’s era couldn’t go on forever

“It was over,” he says, of the club’s closure in early 2001. “I just knew the thing was finished. We both felt it should have ended a few years earlier, if anything. There were all sorts of difficulties at the end. It was time to move on.”

* Draw The Line is out now.

Fish Go Deep play the Indiependence festival in Mitchelstown on Sunday, Aug 5