“ANOTHER DAY, another riot, burn the banks and burn the bills/People like you can’t keep quiet/People like me don’t get ill.”
The opening line of the title track of one of the greatest songs ever produced by any Galway band, and finally, after almost 30 years, it can be heard again.
Toasted Heretic, one of the brightest and most original bands of the Irish indie scene of the late 1980s and 1990s, have remastered and will re-release their 1992 album, Another Day, Another Riot, on Tuesday May 18, to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the burning at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition of the oldest heretic in Europe - Maria Barbara Carillo, aged 95, in Madrid.
“It’s a rerelease in the modern style,” says band singer, Julian Gough, now a successful novelist. “We're making it available to all the streaming services for the first time. We saw that Amazon's cheapest listing for a second-hand copy of the CD was $905, which was kind of ridiculous, and people had been asking us how to get it for years, so we finally got our arse in gear.”
Not only this, but the band is also releasing a new song, ‘Satellite Dishes’, which Julian calls “the ideal single for these times: about sitting in a room with only the hum of electronics for company. Should cheer everyone up”.
Another time, another place
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The Ireland into which Another Day, Another Riot originally emerged was a very different place from the country it is being re-released into.
“When Toasted Heretic formed, the Catholic Church still ruled Ireland,” says Julian. “Abortion was illegal, gay marriage was illegal, divorce was illegal. Indeed, when Another Day Another Riot was first released, homosexual acts between men were still illegal in Ireland. Homosexual acts between women were so unthinkable, no one had even thought to pass a law against them.”
'These songs from a different time sound strangely potent in this new moment'
For Toasted Heretic, it was very much a time of transition. “By the time we recorded Another Day, Another Riot, we’d sold thousands of albums, we were in a real studio, and we had a Top 10 hit in Ireland with ‘Galway and Los Angeles’. We were packing out lively little venues like the Baggot Inn on consecutive nights, we were Single of the Week in Melody Maker in the UK, we were getting national airplay in France…I was worried we might get famous, and worried what that might do to me, and us. I didn’t feel ready for it; I didn’t feel stable enough to handle it. Luckily we avoided that catastrophe!
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“Anyway, these songs from a different time sound strangely potent in this new moment. I hope the people that liked them the first time round enjoy rehearing them, after several decades. I hope some new people will hear them for the first time, and find something of use to them, in their complicated modern lives.”
‘Satellite Dishes’
Julian admits that it is “a perversely Toasted Heretic thing to do” to wait until the world “has ADHD and an attention span measured in nanoseconds”, and then finally release an incredibly slow, six minute long single, with no chorus.
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“It is a beautiful song that should have come out 30 years ago,” he says, “but, in many ways, it works better now. Declan Collins’s guitar playing is astonishingly emotive. I wrote the words. It’s about. Yearning, I guess; for someone, for something. A good song to listen to, a year into a pandemic.”
Dan Hegarty of 2FM has picked Another Day, Another Riot as his album of the week, starting May 17, and will be playing songs from it that week on his show, The Alternative, on 2FM.
