Ireland In 50 Albums, No 11: The Talkies, by Girl Band
Now called Gilla Band, the four-piece released The Talkies in 2019 under their Girl Band moniker.
The 2019 release of Gilla Band’s second album The Talkies (under their former sobriquet of Girl Band) has arguably become a waypoint for a new generation of post-punk bands in Ireland.
But after the success of 2015’s debut album Holding Hands With Jamie, the hype around the Dublin band didn’t necessarily guarantee the album would happen at all, as mental-health issues within the band necessitated a hiatus shortly after its release. Lead vocalist Dara Kiely had been struggling, and the group thought it best cancel a number of gigs.
“It was a really big deal for us as a band, because we were putting it out on Rough Trade, we all really loved its legacy as a label,” says guitarist Alan Duggan. “We put it out, but then unfortunately the mental-health stuff came along. We were in the middle of an album tour, I think we were on the fourth show, then it came to a head, and we had to stop. So we stopped, and cancelled the rest of our tour dates for that year, 2015, and then in 2016, we had a lot of shows booked, but we ended up doing about maybe 30% of those shows - key ones to do."
They made a return of sorts in 2017, but it was all still a bit stop-start. “We did a few gigs, and encountered health issues again, so we just stopped and decided, this just isn't working, and we went on hiatus. About a year went by, and we decided 'okay, well, we were trying to figure out what worked, what we could actually do as a band', I guess. So we just started chipping away at it in 2018, and then we got to a point where we're like, 'this feels ready to record, whatever this thing is'.”
Putting a shape on musical ideas for what would become The Talkies was a process of not only refining existing ideas taken from tentative jams, but also to push themselves further, challenging themselves by playing with the very fundaments of accepted pop/rock songwriting form.
“We did start thinking about what we wanted to do differently, what we wanted to explore more," says Duggan. "Something that influenced us was concept albums, that had a bit more of a world that you could kind of get sucked into, whether that was musically or lyrically. For us, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, that was one we listened to a lot, the way the tracks move together, it's got a tonal sense.
“So with that, we decided like, 'well, why don't we try to keep all the tracks rooted around the note 'A'? We had two or three songs that were kind-of doing that, so we could try to do a whole album like that.
“We were talking about lyrics with Dara, and what could we do that puts the album in its own world, and Dara had the idea of not using any pronouns at all throughout the record - force it into a more abstract place. But then also, it means Dara won't really fall into any kind of clichés - immediately, it just makes it a little weirder.”
Having had it recommended by a friend of bassist/producer Daniel Fox, the four-piece set out to Ballintubbert House on Dublin’s outskirts, a stately home that the band inhabited for a week in which to record The Talkies. The setting, however, ended up inhabiting the record and its leanings toward concept.
“We had a lot of goodwill, so a lot of different engineers gave us a lend of a load of equipment. We had a really beautiful studio built, in terms of quality, there was amazing gear, so that was really, really cool," says Duggan.
“In terms of thinking about the house, some of the rooms were no-brainers; we wanted to have a really roomy drum sound and there was this cellar in the basement that had a huge echo chamber in it, with a really long delay. It would just be really stupid not to utilise that space.
“Guitars and bass - you could record them anywhere, the room just needs to be dead - just getting the sound of the amp. The big thing was the drums, the drums are so characteristic of so many albums, getting that sound right is really key.”
The impact of The Talkies was immediate - coinciding with the rise of a generation of fellow noisemakers influenced by the band’s early output, and following the events of its predecessor’s release, placing the band back on a trajectory of critical acclaim and full-time gigging.
Its ripple effect is being felt right across Irish music five years on - making a new and interesting space for ‘guitar music’ as the tectonic plates of artistic movements and genres continue to shift.
“We were just really happy to get it out at the time, and we were really proud of it as a record, so whatever way it would be received, doesn't really matter all that much,” muses Duggan.
“You'll have one publication say it's, like, the greatest Irish album of all time, and another give it three stars. It's really important as a musician to not pay much attention to it, because it's like, it's usually just two or three people's opinion, which ends up influencing, like, lots of people's opinions, which is kind-of mental.”
“There are bands that, intentionally or unintentionally, take the lead,” reckons Dan Hegarty, of RTÉ 2FM’s The Alternative, when speaking about the album from an external perspective.
“You can hear that sound [of Gilla Band] filtering through. I don't want to use the term 'watershed moments', but it was one of those moments where they just consolidated everything that everyone felt that they could be. With The Talkies, they really achieved that. It was a statement of an album, if you want to call it that,” says the broadcaster.
“This was the first time we actually sat down and said 'let's write a whole album',” Duggan concludes. “It took us a while, but I think we're all really proud of it as a piece of work. There was lots of stuff that we were happy with, and lots of stuff that we wanted to improve on, but it felt good.”
