DECEMBER IS going to be a amazing month for music fans in the city as three of Ireland’s leading bands - Two Door Cinema Club, Villagers, and The Coronas - come to Galway for a series of major ‘Róisín Dubh presents...’ concerts.
The Coronas - Danny O’Reilly (vocals, rhythm guitar ), Dave McPhillips (lead guitar ), Graham Knox (bass ), Conor Egan (drums ) - play The Black Box Theatre, Dyke Road, on Sunday December 19 at 8pm, and they are looking forward to coming back west.
“The Galway crowd has always been good to us and playing Galway is a night you always look forward to,” Danny tells me as I sit with the band in the Luna Café on a Wednesday morning for the interview.
“I remember when we played the Volvo Ocean Race. We’d been out of the country for a while so we didn’t realise how big it was. Then we got on the stage and there were just people for miles, cheering. It was amazing.”
At the show the band are certain to play ‘Grace, Don’t Wait!’, ‘San Diego Song’, ‘Heroes Or Ghosts’, and ‘Listen Dear’, which the audience will no doubt be singing along to. What is it like for The Coronas to have hundreds of people singing one of their own songs back at them?
“As a songwriter it’s unbelievable,” says Dave. “People ask ‘Are you not sick of singing ‘San Diego Song’ and singing about drinkin’ for the last six years?’ and we would if it didn’t get the reaction it does. The buzz of having the crowd singing the song will never get old.”
That The Coronas are one of the most popular bands in the country is beyond doubt, but they are also a band you either adore or you don’t. There is no sitting on the fence about them.
“There’s nothing worse than indifference,” says Danny. “We are a pop band that gets songs played on the radio. We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel with our music. We’re not everyone’s cup of tea and maybe we don’t have a cool vibe but we’re very lucky that we are getting to do what we like and we’re lucky that we get to do that as a job.”
Far from here
The Coronas now have ambitions to spread their wings and make an impact abroad and it just might be that things are starting to happen for them.
“Ireland has exceeded our expectations,” says Dave, “and now we’ve just been signed to a management team in the US and we’ll be touring in February in North America.”
“We’ve done tours of Asia and it would be great to get a proper record deal overseas,” says Danny. “We did everything ourselves in Ireland but Ireland is small enough to do college radio, press, but if you are to crack other markets you need a record company and if we can do a good enough third album we can’t be ignored and it just makes us want to be so much better.”
The band did a short tour of Australia in May this year and in many ways found it a worthwhile and enjoyable experience.
“We just really enjoyed the tour, the people we met, the weather, it’s just a really nice country,” says Danny. “We played Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and there were mostly good turn outs at the shows, except Adelaide. There were only 80 people at the show but it was great gig, everyone really got into it.”
Says Dave: “People were singing back the songs to us and we’re not known there. We had to start from scratch in Australia and that is a good experience. It makes you play tighter and with determination and it was really satisfying to be able to win people over and it’s heartening for the future.”
Touring has also provided the band with some very memorable experiences - such as surviving a highly eccentric bus driver and having the chance to play support to Paul McCartney in June.
In 2008 the band did a tour of the US and the experience inspired the song ‘Tony Was An Ex-Con’. Dave McPhillips takes up the story:
“Tony was our bus driver during the tour. We funded it ourselves and hired a crap bus and Tony was the driver that came with it. At first we thought he was very quiet but eventually we began to think he was quite weird.
“We’d be going to a gig in New York and he would start driving in the opposite direction. He would drive around with no headlights on in the dark and every car that came towards us would be flashing their lights at us and swerving out of the way. One night we just had to bail out in the middle of the road. It wasn’t safe anymore.
“We found out he was an ex-con after our trailer broke. We stopped at a place that was selling them and Tony went in to buy one. He came out a few minutes later and said they were out of trailers, but we could see that in the back there was about 3-400 for sale. We went into the shop to ask what the problem was and we were told they could not be sold to him as he was an ex-con.”
How did The Coronas land the support slot with Macca?
“Our English manager called us on the Wednesday before his gig in the RDS and said ‘How would you like to play support to Paul McCartney?’” says Danny. “We’d seen him in the O2 and he was amazing, but then in the RDS we got to watch him soundcheck for two and a half hours and he was playing songs that he didn’t even include in his live set.”
Did they get to meet the great man?
“We were in our dressing room and Macca’s security guys came down to us and said ‘Do you want to meet him?’ We were walking down to his room and then we saw that he was coming towards us. ‘Oh I was going up to meet you!’ he said. We were just staring at him. I mean what do you say to a Beatle? We are massive Beatles fans and we will never forget that.”
The next album?
The band recently released the single ‘Won’t Leave You Alone’, the fourth from their second album Tony Was An Ex-Con. However thoughts are now turning to album number three.
Graham Knox says the band have a number of songs written but the band are still exploring and ideas and trying out various sounds.
“At the moment we can’t tell what it will sound like,” he says. “At the moment it’s folk-rock and upbeat. We have not demoed anything yet but when that is done we will then step back and listen and it will start to make sense.”
Songwriting is something that Danny O’Reilly was encouraged to do from a young age by his mother - Mary Black, one of Ireland’s most revered singers.
“She would always encourage me to write my own stuff from a young age,” says Danny. “She always felt lucky to have songwriters like Noel Brazil and Jimmy McCarthy but I think she regretted not writing her own songs as she would have loved to have done it. She encouraged me to write and that was a great help.”
Mary Black released her first album in 1983 and now as she watches her son and his friends in The Coronas, she has been able to offer them plenty of solid advice from almost 30 years’ experience in the business.
“She always made me realise how hard the music industry can be and that there are really talented songwriters and singers who don’t make it,” says Danny.
“An important piece of advice she gave us,” says Graham Knox, “is always appreciate the people who work around you like sound engineers, as they are as much to do with the recording of an album as you are.”
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
