Padraig Cooney, Land Lovers

Posted on 13th Dec 09 by Contributor | 2

With a well-received long-player Romance, Romance, the  memorable Immoveable Feet EP and a veritable smorgus board of gigs under their  belt, Land Lovers have cracked Ireland in most ways. Drop-d caught up with Land Lovers front-man Padraig Cooney, and looks back over a succesful debut year in the Irish music scene, frustrations over difficulties in cracking radio, what the future holds and what a Land Lover’s Christmas release might sound like…

Drop-d: You made it onto the top end of many 2009 “best of” lists here in Ireland. Do you ever cast your eye across the channel or to the continent?

Padraig Cooney: Well, Romance, Romance did get nice reviews, no doubt about that. We can attract a reasonable crowd to shows on very rare occasions like release parties, but mostly we’re just pricking around to varyingly-populated rooms like everyone else. We haven’t had any radio play to speak of, we’ve put out both of our records ourselves because we’re the only people who will do it. Also, I don’t think the kind of music we’ve been playing makes us an obvious match for most touring bands of the moment… violins.

We haven’t any concrete plans to tour abroad right now, but it’s definitely one of the prospects that keeps the whole endeavour interesting and I have been sussing out the practicalities. We may have to grab the attention of some deluded eccentrics who are willing to put us on in these places!

Padraig Cooney, Land Lovers

Drop-d: Many, many gigs under the belt across the country over the last 18months. Castlepalooza, Indiependence etc. Are you qualified to say what your favourite venue to perform at is?

PC: It’s probaby the Roisin Dubh in Galway. It’s just a great room, and the nearby apartment that the bands can stay in is an unrivalled perk.

Drop-d: Obviously you’re on guitar Padraig. What do you play? Do you name them?

PC: My main guitar, the one I usually play in gigs, is an Epiphone Riviera (name: CLIVE THOMAS). I love it, though it needs a bit of a set-up at the moment. It’s big and protective of its awkward owner and it has a lovely rich sound. I also have a cheap Danelectro (name: PICKLES THE DOG), which I’ve been playing a lot at home recently. It makes me bash through songs and generally play louder and messier than I normally would. It appeals to my latent garage rock sensibilities. Also along these lines is my DiPinto Mach IV (name: READER’S DIGEST), which is the coolest-looking guitar I own. It’s blue with white racing stripes. Yes, white racing stripes. I got it because I saw Jack White playing a red one years ago and I thought it looked deadly.

Drop-d: Favourite Land Lovers song?

PC: Among the ones that have seen the light of day at this point, I’d choose from Romance Romance, Stay in the City or Immovable Feet. I’m proud of the first and last because they’re very complete songs, I think, with a coherent interior logic to the lyrics. Stay in the City is the one that I think has the most imaginative arrangement; It’s the song that progressed the furthest from my mind/guitar to the reality of the final product. I imagined it as a Bruce Springsteen song but it became something more individual I think.

Drop-d: What are the prospects of a Land Lovers Christmas jingle? Is it in Land Lover’s genetic makeup to ever produce a krautrock album or that electro-clash VSA(very short album) ? Is the artistic course set in stone? 

PC: As for our ‘direction’, I’ll never do the same thing twice, at least not in a systematic manner! The plan at the moment is to have maybe 30 fully-developed demos and then decide to focus on 14 or 15 to record an album. We have 13 of those fully-developed demos at the moment. Of those 13 songs, I could point to a certain Latin influence; a harshness, noisiness and messiness that I want to retain; more visceral and obnoxious guitar playing mixed with the gentlest stuff we’ve done to date; a more developed nod to mid-20th century musicals; and an attempt to put more meat on the lyrical content without sacrificing the melody.

Drop-d: Which, over both the album and the EP, has been the hardest song to write musically/produce? Do you have an established songwriting method at this stage?

PC: Looking back, I think the good songs are really enjoyable to write. There’s a stage of what you might call inspiration, where a melody or a lyrical idea or both occurs to me and then it’s a fun process to build everything around that. It’s not difficult and it’s not a chore. To a point. In my experience, the problem songs early on are the ones that don’t work in the end. The worst thing I tend to do is to decide that a bad idea needs to be developed because it’s in a certain style that “we could do with more of”. It just leads to disaster. I’m thinking of Everything I Ever Did Wrong and Trouble for TV’s Favourite Couple, from the latest EP. Both are panicked attempts to wring something worthwhile out of sub-standard original ideas. But we persevered. Both have their positive qualities, and can be fun to play, but they’re lacking something fundamental from their earliest inception.

Drop-d: Where does the inspiration for the lyrics come from?

PC: Oh, it’s all drugs. A bag of drugs a day keeps the lyrics okay, as Julie Andrews sang. I mostly write characters, even if the song is in the first person. Oftentimes a seemingly arbitrary line will pop into my head along with a melody and I’ll sing it and sing it around it in my head for a few days. The original line will become the centre, acquiring meaning from the rest if the lyric. It’s in my nature that the lines suggest people to me and I just think them into the song.. I think the characters, if well drawn, should provide their own commentary on events, places, THINGS. Again, Paddy Works the Maglev is an exception, in that it is a more considered ‘idea’ song with one foot in an idiom, about the transience of power, futuristic railways, shiny overalls and so on and so forth. Paddy himself is really just a prop.

Previous to Romance, Romance, I had a tendency to be over-wordy and a bit meandering. It actually took someone to tell me that. I thought I was writing catchy stuff but I wasn’t. It’s pretty rare to find the accommodation of well-written lyrics within unforced pop melodies of the (relatively) modern type, and it is something that grabs me immediately when I hear it – hence my love for Elvis Costello, Luke Haines and some others – recently The Wave Pictures. Most people don’t care about their lyrics and they deserve whatever criticism they get for that

Drop-d: Which do you prefer? Listening to your own album, nay creation as meant to be on iPod, or as performed at that gig where everything goes right?

PC: The gig where everything goes right is very much a theoretical construct. In theory, the gig. That would be just super. Some songs are way more fun to play live than they are to listen to as recordings: the previously-disowned Everything I Ever Did Wrong is an example of this. On the other hand, Immovable Feet is a nicer listen than it is a live experience.

Land Lovers

Drop-d: What do you think about Villagers getting signed to Domino? Is there anyone else Domino et al would be wise to take a chance on?

PC: Fair play to them. It’s great to see Domino finally signing an Irish act and I suppose, it’s no surprise that it’s Villagers, given how things have developed for them over the last year. I liked The Immediate a lot but I haven’t really paid attention to Villagers’ music yet.  There are a whole bunch of people here that I’d love to see getting that kind of break. One thing that seems apparent to me is that it is a disadvantage to be moored over here where there really is no ‘industry’ to speak of – I think a band form Glasgow or Manchester or Boston has more opportunities from the start. Perhaps Mumblin’ Deaf Ro would be signed to Domino if he was Scottish. I dunno. I’d sign him.

Drop-d: What’s next for Land Lovers. Short to medium term? 

PC: Possibly a support slot or two in the next couple of months, some ‘live’ recording for our Super Free Christmas Special. There might be a couple of suprises in there too, readers. Don’t die of excitement..! 

Also, continued work on the writing and demoing of songs for our next album

Long term, record the second full-length album in 2010 and try to get somebody to put it out for us, and somebody else to help make us international stars of radio and television.

Land Lovers

Tags: Castlepalooza, Domino, Drop-D, Elvis Costello, Immoveable Feet EP, Indiependence, Julie Andrews, Luke Haines, padraig cooney, Romance, The Immediate, The Wave Pictures, Villagers