Walking on air
Dingle five-piece Walking on Cars have come far since their first gig in a youth cafe
Monday mornings are to musicians what Kryptonite is to Superman. Any interview with a band conducted at the onset of the week should entail bleary eyes, pounding heads and copious amounts of caffeine — particularly if they’ve been gigging the previous evening. Walking on Cars, however, aren’t the cliched young upstarts you expect of band on the rise. “We’re actually not that cool,” protests keyboardist Sorcha Durham, shaking her head. “We’re not,” confirms her bandmate, guitarist and vocalist Pa Sheehy. “I usually spend about an hour in the green room after the gig, have a cup of tea, then I go to bed. I’m such a loser.”
All right, so the previous night’s gig was at the Rose of Tralee festival — this makes more sense when you learn the band are from nearby Dingle — but there is an unashamed lack of bad behaviour within the quintet’s ranks: no doing shots with Dáithí O Sé at the bar, no fussy demands for their backstage rider. We sip tea in a bustling cafe in Cork city, the clank of the coffee machine making it necessary to strain to hear Sheehy’s low, shy mumble. Not to be confused with Little Green Cars (the young indie-folk-pop Dubliners also comprised of four young men and a woman), the Dingle troupe — all former schoolmates from the Kerry town —formed four years ago after a variety of abandoned college degrees in Cork and London (Sheehy) and temporary jobs in local restaurants (Durham).
“Dingle is tiny, so everybody knows each other,” explains Durham. “The other three members had been in bands together as teenagers, so everybody had played with each other at various times, apart from me. I had just done classical piano, mostly, and written my own stuff. Then Pa rang me out of the blue one day after coming home from London, and we got together and started playing tunes. Then the lads came along and we decided to start a band, really.”
Their no-nonsense approach has paid dividends. After spending months rehearsing in bassist Paul Flannery’s “messy kitchen” and playing their first gig in a Dingle youth cafe, they spent time honing their craft and writing songs. Their debut single Catch Me If You Can proved moderately successful in the charts and was playlisted by several regional radio stations when it was released in May last year. Subsequent singles, and songs from their latest EP, Hand in Hand, have been similarly well received. They reckon their burgeoning popularity is primarily down to the support of regional radio rather than the internet or social networking.
“When we used to play gigs in Dingle, there’d be 40 or 50 people squeezed into a little bar called McCarthy’s, and we’d be delighted, thinking, ‘This is the job — this is unreal,’ ” recalls Sheehy, laughing.
“A year later, we’re going to Dublin and playing a venue that holds 850 people and it’s like, what the hell is happening? It was all down to little regional stations playlisting Catch Me If You Can. RedFM, BeatFM, iRadio, Spin South West — they’ve all been amazing to us.”
“Our videos have done quite well,” Durham adds. “Last year we did loads of gigs around the country. The first time we played Waterford, for example, there was a 200-capacity venue; the next time it was 1,000. So we’ve started small and our fanbase has kept building since then.”
The lifeblood of Dingle’s music scene is the Other Voices gig series, which has run for 12 years. “I’ve seen those musicians around Dingle for 10 years — since they were boys and girls, really,” says Other Voices organiser Philip King. “They came to Other Voices and saw various different people come and play. But they also come from a place that has real music in it, which might give Walking on Cars a unique sensibility in the world of pop music.”
Sheehy agrees that seeing international bands play tiny venues down the road had an impact on Walking on Cars. “It’s been such a huge part of us, growing up,” he nods. “Other Voices started when I was about 16, and the bands I’ve seen going through Dingle — the likes of Elbow, Bell X1, James Morrison, Amy Winehouse — it’s crazy, the amount of superstars who’ve come to Dingle over the years. It was inspiring.”
Several labels had been courting the quintet, impressed by the maturity of their sound, as well as Sheehy’s swarthy voice and thoughtful lyrics. The band had considered signing with Universal Ireland, but were aware of how limiting an Irish label might be. “We were flattered when they came along — but there was always that question: if we sign to a label in Ireland, how far can we go with them?” Sheehy says. “It wasn’t long after that some UK interest came along, so we weighed up our options and it seemed to make more sense.”
Having signed with Virgin EMI after a lunch in Abbey Road Studios, Walking on Cars spent most of this summer between Dingle and London, recording tracks for their debut album, which is tentatively scheduled for release early next year. Their first London gig next month is already sold out; dates in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are pencilled in for September. There seems no reason why they should not follow in the recent footsteps of Irish acts such as Kodaline, Hozier and James Vincent McMorrow, whom they name as a big influence. Their forthcoming date at Electric Picnic will be their biggest to date, and is something they are excited about — even though Sheehy admits he’s never been to the festival.
“I told you, I’m such a loser,” he groans, pulling the peak of his baseball cap over his eyes in mock-embarrassment.
“There’s this music shop in Dingle, and Maz, the woman who owns it, does these podcasts,” explains Durham. “She had us in to do a session one day and she asked us, ‘So, what are the things you want to have done in the next few years?’ ‘Play Electric Picnic’ was one of them; another one was ‘record a CD and put it out’. And basically everything we said to her, we’ve achieved this year.”
What, then, are the band’s newly formed ambitions and goals for the coming year? “I try not to think too far ahead or too big, because you set yourself up for disappointment,” says Durham, sensibly. ”A No 1 album would be nice, but you don’t wanna say it out loud.”
“I think we just want to accomplish elsewhere; do what we’ve done here in the UK, Europe, the US. That’s the goal,” adds Sheehy with a shrug.
“We’re at the stage now where we’re ready to play in other places and release stuff. We’re just going to keep writing and releasing and see what happens, rather than aiming for this or that market. Fingers crossed, we’re just gonna go for it.”