A mind of their own

Hal’s second album took seven years to make. There was no angst, just dedication to the music and a refusal to kowtow to the ‘suits’, says Ed Power

DAVE ALLEN is relaxed. His band, Hal, are releasing their second album, seven years after their debut. Many people have forgotten they existed. Reclining on an armchair in a Dublin hotel, he isn’t troubled. “It’s all about the music,” he says. “The record industry is fickle. Things are always going in and out of fashion. We didn’t want to put pressure on ourselves to fit into a scene. The goal was to create a document that would last forever.”

The Time, The Hour is no instant classic. But it is a fine album, the south Dublin four-piece channelling a love of late 1960s and early 1970s pop. While echoing the care-free spirit of their self-titled debut, it’s also more ambitious, stacked high with hooks and melodies.

“Because there were no expectations in terms of doing it in a hurry, we had the freedom to write the songs we wanted,” says Allen. “Nobody was looking over our shoulder, asking us when would it be finished.”

Actually, that’s not quite true, says keyboard player Stephen O’Brien. Early on, there was pressure from their management to crank out a second album as quickly as possible. Their response was to get a new manager.

“The old management might have been on the phone saying ‘you’ve got to get this done now’. Our answer was, ‘we’ll get it to you when we’re happy with it. We can’t go pleasing you. We have to please ourselves first’,” he says.

In 2005, Hal were launched upon the world in a whirlwind of hype.

A major cheerleader was Geoff Travis, of Rough Trade Records, who flew to Dublin to watch them perform in the backyard of Allen’s Killiney home.

With the media in a swoon over their Beach Boys-esque retro sound, success seemed assured. The Hal album was garlanded in four- and five-star reviews, and a Choice Music Prize nomination followed. Everything seemed to have fallen into place.

There was only one problem. Not enough people were buying the record.

“It didn’t make the money it needed to,” says O’Brien. “It didn’t explode. For Rough Trade, it was a case of cutting their losses. We were quite happy with that. Rough Trade were having some difficulties of their own. They weren’t going to finance our next record. It’s the way the system is at the moment. You have to set up your own label, get your own graphic designer, your own web producer. It takes time to do all of that well.”

Early on, Hal were likened endlessly to another south Dublin soft rock act, The Thrills. Neither Allen nor O’Connell can understand the comparison and are inclined to blame it on the UK media.

“They want to label something, to categorise it,” says Allen. “I suppose, when you go back, they had their record out a year before ours and it was very successful for them. It was another band who was doing music different from the ‘normal’ music. So maybe that explains it.”

“It annoyed me,” says O’Connell. “I remember speaking to a journalist from the NME. I said, ‘compare us the Beach Boys all you want, mention The Thrills again and I’ll break your legs’. And they printed it. Not that I have a problem with The Thrills. I know them. They’re friends of mine. But does Dave sing like [Thrills’ frontman] Conor Deasy? No.”

Hal’s debut may not have been the hit Rough Trade had hoped. Still, it brought the group exposure.

In Japan, especially, they were treated like stars.

“It was like the Beatles or something,” says O’Connell. “In Tokyo, we were actually booked into a hotel where the Beatles had been on their last tour there. There were all these people outside, looking for our photographs. We were like ‘how the hell do you know who we are?’. They had presents for each of us. It was bizarre.”

It would be easy to assume The Time, The Hour was a stereotypical difficult second album, which took far longer to record that it should have. Not so, says Allen. Very little angst or soul-searching went into the project.

“We had fun working. But recording was sporadic. We might have done two or three evenings a week. That adds up to one 16-hour day a month. It’s not as if we were in the studio for hours and hours on end. We spent months finishing the first record — four months of 12-hour days. We didn’t see the need to do that again,” he says.

That isn’t to say tensions didn’t arise. They seem very chummy today, but Allen and O’Connell had their disagreements. There were no punch-ups or even raised voices.

But sometimes they didn’t speak for days on end.

“If I was feeling grumpy, I might have gone off and turned my mobile phone off for the weekend,” says Allen. “I know that drives Stephen mad.”

“It’s true, there were some difficult moments,” says O’Connell. “It’s just the way it is — when you are working closely with friends, it’s not always easy. We’d cold shoulder one another occasionally.”

They toured their debut for 18 months. The plan is to do something similar with the new record. They are looking forward to going on the road and sharing the music. But you sense a distinct ambivalence about the grind that is life as a jobbing indie musician.

“We were away so long with the first record, we lost contact with a lot of people,” says Allen. “It’s better to stay grounded in the real world. That gives you something to write about. Also, when you go on tour, you get sick of Travel Lodges really quickly.”

* The Time, The Hour is released Apr 13. Hal play Button Factory, Dublin, Apr 20