Ireland in 50 Albums, No 2: Stuck Together With God’s Glue, by Something Happens
Something Happens: From left, Ray Harman,
It’s good to be young at any time but those of us in our first flush around 1990 were especially fortunate. Ireland was changing, few could have suspected how much, and we not only had Italia 90 to jump up and down to — we also had a great crop of Irish bands. First, or certainly jostling near the front, amongst them were Something Happens who released their superb second album Stuck Together With God’s Glue that year. They were already great; they were surely going to be massive.
The Happens got together in the mid-Eighties, first as a two-piece with Eamonn Ryan on drums and Alan Byrne on bass. Guitarist Ray Harman responded to a Hot Press small ad and they got in touch with singer Tom Dunne who had recently finished up with previous outfit The End. Like every other band in history they gigged wherever they could.
“We did a residency in The Underground,” says Dunne, “and everything just clicked into place over those three weeks. We started getting a sense that maybe we had something.” Demos were recorded, sent to record companies, and also placed directly into the hands of those who might help.
“I was leaving RTÉ in my little Renault 5, going towards town,” Dave Fanning recalls. “At the first bus stop, these guys just jumped out and stopped my car. It was a band called Something Happens, who wanted to give me a demo tape. So they did. I remember it well, because ‘Burn Clear’ was on it and I thought it was pretty good. It was very R.E.M. — basically an Irish R.E.M. kind of thing — and that's what I liked about it.”
This was the time of the great Next U2 goldrush so A&R men were traversing the Irish Sea like prospectors across the Klondike. “Ronnie Gurr came over from Virgin Records. They offered us a deal. It was very exciting, a huge break,” is how Harman remembers it, although Dunne has a slightly different recollection.
“We had released the ‘Two Chances’ EP and done an RTÉ TV show that the head of Virgin A&R saw so he sent Ronnie over. They offered us a contract but the amount was paltry. We said no. Then we played the Trinity Ball and Ronnie came up the stairs with a tray of pints which he announced were for Virgin recording artists Something Happens. They offered a different deal and we took it.”
Debut album Been There, Seen That, Done That was released in 1988 but despite songs like ‘Forget Georgia’, ‘ and the aforementioned ‘Burn Clear’, the band weren’t entirely happy with the way it turned out. “When I listen back to it now, I cringe, ”Harman admits. “I don’t really like the sound of it although I think some of the songs are great.”
“Tommy Ramone wasn’t really the type of producer we needed,” Dunne explains. “He was used to working with more experienced bands like The Replacements who knew what they wanted in the studio, and we didn’t. It was very raw and when Virgin heard it they weren’t blown away.”
They also worked with Vic Malle, the hero who produced Motorhead’s Ace Of Spades, on songs like ‘Tall Girls Club’ and ‘Incoming’, which certainly sounded tougher. A delay prompted the release of the live at McGonagles mini-LP I Know Ray Harman and both records sold.
“They did well,” Dunne reminds me. “The live album really changed our profile. We sold out the two McGonagles shows and that very quickly led us to playing the SFX and we sold that out too, and it was spectacular.” You’re Gonna Have To Take Flight Constant touring, both on their own and as a support act for All About Eve and Julian Cope, followed, which made the band, according to Dunne, into “a different beast.”
They were song-writing on the road and additional breakthroughs came from Dunne buying a four-track recorder so he could work on ideas at home — and spot when he was going a bit flat — and Harman purchasing a piano.
“We hit this really good groove. The ideas were better. We did a four-track demo with ‘Hello, Hello’ and ‘What Now’. At the last moment we wrote ‘Parachute’ and added it in,” Dunne recalls. This was enough to convince Virgin to take them up on a second album option that they had been humming and hawing over.
The band had already made some inroads in America and knew that was where they wanted to make the next record. This time around, Harman remembers that they talked to potential producers as varied as Todd Rundgren and Steve Earle and even demoed ‘Hello’ with Tony Berg (Michael Penn, Aimee Mann).
Dunne takes up the story. “Collectively, we lost the plot. We replaced some of the guitar parts with mandolins. Seemed like a great idea at the time. Virgin were apoplectic. Tony felt we had ‘a different vision’.” They all agreed on Ed Stasium whose work with The Smithereens and Living Colour they greatly admired.
“I wanted the opportunity to go to the States and record. You’re a kid, you want to do the rock n’ roll thing,” says Harman, so the album was recorded in Rumbo Recorders in LA, owned by the Captain out of pop couple Captain & Tennille.
“Ed was great,” Harman continues. “He allowed us to play in the natural way, surging towards the chorus.” The recording of ‘Parachute’ brings up a clear memory to Harmon, a lovely man although one who would go out in the first round of Mastermind if he was to pick the history of Something Happens as his specialist subject.
“They had a great, hard-sounding piano in Rumbo that Elton John had used. There’s nothing to the keyboard part in ‘Parachute’, it’s all white keys, very simple shapes. I got away with it on the demo and sort of got away with it live but when we went to record it, I couldn’t do it. I’m left handed, so I had to record the right and left hand parts separately. It took a day and it was a long day! The assistant engineer referred to it as ‘piano hell’.”
Dunne has a good laugh at this memory but it was all worth it, they knew they were onto something. “Ed did a rough mix of ‘Parachute’ towards the end of the recording and I remember thinking, ‘Oh yeah, Christ, I can’t wait for people to hear this!’.
When the album came out — “in March or April, 1990” — critical reaction was strong. “They were one of the bands whose album I’d be waiting for,” says Fanning. “I remember thinking when I heard it how they had moved on. I reviewed the album for the , I don’t remember what I said but I really got lost in nonsense and Tom Dunne said to me, ‘Jaysus, thanks a million, that was a really great review, I didn’t understand a word of it!’”
The proper radio bang off ‘Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello (Petrol)’ — to give it its full and ludicrous title — was convincing, ‘Parachute’ was an instant classic, and the nation duly took an album which has more hooks — ‘What Now’, ‘Room 29’, ‘The Patience Business’ — than a pirate convention to its heart. “God’s Glue went to number one and the singles were all doing top ten, although ‘Hello’ was held off the top by the Glenroe theme!”
It helped that they appeared to be a band of decent skins who were having a good time. “There was a buzz about them,” says Fanning. “I liked the band, I liked the people, I got on with them and enjoyed their company. They were guitar based pop-rock as opposed to ‘real cool indie’, I liked that about them too. They were funny and I think one or two of them had probably read a book which is more than I can say for a lot of other bands.”
There was a wildly successful Irish tour and an appearance at the first Feile where they played the opening bars of ‘Hello’ and the whole place erupted. Things weren’t happening in England, however. There are stories of ‘Hello’ being unavailable in the shops when the NME awarded it Single Of The Week and a plausible recollection from Harman of there being “a reluctance to release ‘Parachute’ because of the first Gulf War and a sensitivity about any songs with a vague military reference!”
Luck doesn’t really get much worse or ridiculous than that but America, on the coasts at least, was warming up.
“I particularly remember playing in Boston,” says Dunne. “There was a newspaper headline saying ‘Irish Band On The Brink’ and it kind of felt that way walking on stage to about a thousand people, but then there were weeks in the inner sanctum of America that were hard. San Diego was sold out. We were onstage when Ireland were playing Holland [in Sicily for Italia 90] and we were relaying the results to the crowd who were mostly Irish and when they got the equaliser it went from an average gig to the best gig of your life. They went bananas.”
Dunne is philosophical about where it all started to go at least slightly wrong. “It’s kinda like juggling. You need to keep an awful lot of different balls in the air. You needed to keep the way you were writing going, keep the record company going well, you needed to be touring in the right place at the right time, you needed management to point you in the right direction. It all seemed to get more difficult. I think Bedlam A Go-Go was the wrong album to deliver at that point, the ‘experimental album’.
"Then Virgin were taken over by EMI so you were no longer dealing with the same A&R people, you were dealing with a guy who said something like, ‘So you guys are an INXS type band?’”
That third album, 92’s Bedlam A Go-Go, wasn’t met with quite the same praise as the previous one although it contained Fanning’s favourite, the brilliant ‘Daisyhead’. They were dropped, they kept going — “they’re wrong, and we’re right” — but the burgeoning pressures of adulthood and relationships that change us all were starting to have an effect. They recorded another two albums, but an American jaunt with Warren Zevon in 1995 made them think twice.
“Travelling with him we could kind of see that you could release another album in America and be successful, to a degree, but still be in the place he was in, touring America in ever decreasing circles and I think we all just got a sense of ‘I think I’ve had enough of this’. I did feel a bit defeated but you can’t put your life on hold hoping this thing is going to happen.”
Tom Dunne became a broadcaster and also writes a weekly column for the
Ray Harman composes soundtracks for movies and TV shows such as The Young Offenders and Love/Hate.
Alan Byrne is a director in RTÉ.
Eamonn Ryan works with promoters MCD.
World domination may have eluded them, but Something Happens were a huge success because, as Fanning says, they didn’t end up working in some office they didn’t want to be in.
“Yeah, we all went into things we wouldn’t have gone into otherwise,” Dunne agrees. “I’m still doing a million and one creative things and I get a lot of the gumption to do it from our past.”
Bono borrowed the album title for a lyric, and ‘Parachute’ has taken up a permanent and deserved position at the northern end of any Greatest Irish Songs Of All Time poll.
