Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Queens of the Irish scene remind me why I joined a band
Pillow Queens have produced one of the best Irish albums of the year.
I have been in a band all of my adult life. Actually longer, I’ve been in one for 72% of my life. All my major life events have been viewed through that lens: Weddings, funerals, births, big birthdays, illnesses, career moves. I’m not saying potential life partners have needed to meet the band’s approval, but they all like the current Mrs Dunne.
At times I feel I am in The Magnificent Seven. One minute I am with my family. It is an ordinary domestic day. But then a car pulls up outside. I put on a jacket I haven’t worn since the Pillow Queens were in school and leave. "Daddy has to go," I say cryptically, "don’t wait up."
Hours later I could be anywhere in Ireland: Newmarket, Nenagh, Culdaff, you name it. I’m not ‘daddy’ here, I’m the ‘singer’ and a heaving sweaty mass of people are singing our songs. Hands are touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you! Well, they were before March.
It’s hard to come down after a night in Nenagh. Hard to slip back into civilian life after those highs. You can seem distant, remote. Your family are trying to talk to you but all you can think of is the back stage catering. "Did you ever see so many ham sandwiches?” you say suddenly and laugh. But no one is listening.
I was reminded of all this, the secret life we ‘band of brothers’ share when talking to the aforementioned Pillow Queens’ Sarah Corcoran (vocals, guitar, bass) this week. Their new album is a gem. It would be easy to say ‘Pixies-inspired,’ and they do profess to loving the Pixies, but it wouldn’t be fair. Pillow Queens are uniquely themselves, a singular, passionate voice all of their own.
Sarah was telling me that when they started two of their number were musically a little less advanced than the others. They had all previously fronted bands, but, and I hope this won’t shock you, it is quite possible to front a band and not quiet know the difference between A sharp minor and Arthur Scargill.
Cynics, raised on The Voice or Shetland’s Got Talent would at this point say “just get in others who can play!” They would be missing the entire point of being in a band. It is the chemistry, the friendship, the shared musical ambition, the values, the unity in a common cause. It is all of you believing that this is the most important thing on earth.
So, in early Pillow Queens rehearsals, the two more advanced band members took time to tutor the others. It was, Sarah said, like being given homework! The result four years later is a band that fits together like a glove, whose chemistry leaps from the record and who have delivered one of the albums of the year.
I hope they enjoy the ride as I have. Having met my three in 1984, I am now bonded to them at the hip. We have experienced incredible highs and some lows together, but we do something together, something I think is great, that we can’t do apart or with other people. That in itself is pretty amazing.
And there are odd bonuses. I can no longer count the times that TDs, business men, sports people, artists, comedians or listeners have, in the moment before the mic goes live, suddenly said to me, ‘I was in a band myself.’ At times it seems that more people have been in bands than haven’t.
I joined in ‘84 having left a previous band in ‘82. I met up with my then girlfriend afterwards. I felt different being back in a band. I felt freer. I wanted different clothes. I felt reconnected to my record collection. She said she could see it in me. The ‘old Tom’ is back she said.
But it can go wrong. A good friend, also a frontman, once described being painfully excluded from his own band.
“I’d formed that band because I wanted friends. The music was just part of that. But I walked in on them one day on tour and they all stopped laughing and talking. I realised, bitterly, that I wasn’t even a member of my own gang anymore.”
For that is life in a band. You could possibly pick better musicians but it wouldn’t be the same. You have to make it work with these people, and if you do, you are U2, REM or, beautifully, Pillow Queens.
