Stars and strypes

INSIDE STORY: “We were in Cavan worrying over when the oil would run out, when Elton [John] rang...” Niall Walsh, band manager to The Strypes spoke to Seamus Enright about his own music career in the 90s and looking after one of the hottest properties in the Irish music industry...

“It’s great, call it a perk of the job,” laughs Niall in his interview with the Celt as he rattles through some of the highs of managing the fourpiece - including Sunday dinner with Elton John and breakfast at 'Modfather’ Paul Weller’s.
Before Evan and The Strypes, Niall was part of the 90s’ power-pop act 'The Fireflys’. The youngest of six siblings, he grew up influenced by his older brother Dermot, listening to bands like The Beatles and 60s’ rock n’ roll.
“We weren’t big radio people in our house. My mother listened to RTÉ One. So it was grown up stuff, the Angelus at 12 and six. There wasn’t a lot of music that interested me. I remember after the news they’d say: 'If you must sing, sing an Irish song’. So, in other words, don’t be bloody singing!

True Aim
“My first memory of what I consider 'real music’ was getting my hands on 'My Aim is True’ by Elvis Costello and, in the same week, buying Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ first album. Suddenly, there was something I could identify with.”
With his now wife Ann, Niall says they were part of a “set”, “the same dozen or so people” who attended every local gig.
“Joe (Keenan) was brilliant. I didn’t know him well at the time, we became really close friends later on and ran gigs together, but he kept things going. I mean, there wasn’t the venues you have now. It was the Sports Centre, Killeshandra Hall, or the Carraig Springs. Thin Lizzy played the Town Hall.
“We use to go to dancing in the Community Hall in Ballinagh on Saturday nights and they’d clear it quickly to put the chairs out for Mass the next morning.”

'Too easy’
Niall believes audiences today, in an era of instant downloads and even quicker deletes “have it easy”.
“What I find now, because the only gigs I go to outside of being with the boys is with my daughter Becky, is crowds are like ants, constantly moving getting burgers or beers. When we were at gigs, my memory is being stuck in a sweaty mosh of people and never taking your eyes off the stage. You were engaged.”
Niall is therefore understandably proud of not just what his son Evan and The Strypes have achieved, but of how they’ve done it.
“My wife said it best. We went to see the boys gig in London and she said she’d waited 20 years to see a proper gig again ...and it was my own son - that thing of the crowd moshing, chanting, the band giving it socks, the whole night teeters on a point of pure energy, knowing it could all fall apart at any moment but trying to keep it going for just one more minute.”

Be different
Niall himself is no stranger to the stage, and a piece of advice he learned from his days in band, The Fireflys, has helped set The Strypes on the right track too. “Be different, and do it well!”
He freely admits his own foray into the industry came more by “fluke” than determination.
“My routine in school to come home and, when my mother thought I was doing homework, lie on the bed reading album sleeves. In those days I could tell you who made the tea in the studios,” he recalls.
With an acoustic guitar bought by wife Ann, he embarked on tentative foray with a local pub act before joining cousins John and Barry Walsh, and drummer Paul Cox from the now disbanded, C60.
“All I knew was three chords, which is about all I still know, so I played Bass. We loved the Blades, Costello, The Clash, and these are the songs we’d play. It was completely different from taking drunken pub requests for Foster and Allen.”

Flying high
Practice honed their combined talents to the point that an inaugural gig at McGonagle’s in Dublin saw 'The Fireflys’ light up the stage in their own right.
“We were going to be known as Rufus T and The Fireflys, from the Marx Brother’s film 'Ducksoup’, but no one wanted to be Rufus T. So we just became The Fireflys. It really annoyed us when people put in '..ies’, the old rock n’ roll trick of misspelling the name. The Strypes did it too.”
With two well-received releases, 'Judgement Day/ Lovetrain’ and 'Sticks and Stones/ Weekend Paradise’, The Flyflys played across the Ireland and the UK, as well as making appearances on RTÉ’s Action Station Saturday and The Late Late Show, before going their separate ways.
“We did well, but we never got signed. We came close, but it didn’t materialise. I have never considered myself a musician. I was lucky. I didn’t have to be a virtuoso, the other lads were good enough to cover my mistakes.”
A health service employee for many years, Niall made the jump to The Strypes’ band manager, with friend Joe, around 2011 when the youthful Cavan quartet played the Clones’ Flat Lake Festival, followed by their now historic national début on The Late Late Toy Show.
“With Evan, we knew he was a drummer from a very young age because he’d tap a beat on everything including his sister’s head, much to her annoyance. He had little toy kits and my mum, in a very Irish way, sold a field and bought all her grandkids presents, and at age three bought Evan his first drum kit.”

Go your own way
He denies any suggestion Evan or the other band members were coerced from a young age to become musicians, instead believing them to be products of their respective environments.
“There’s always been music in all our households. People maybe thought, given their age that it was all a bit manufactured, it couldn’t be true and I was some kind of showbiz dad.
“I always compare it to me being a football fan, (Manchester) United, and Evan’s not! So if he was forced to do anything by me it would’ve been that. I see it, if he’d been a footballer, soccer or GAA, I’d have still done the same thing, driving to matches and all that. But for me it was going to gig venues instead.”

The signing
The Strypes have come a long way from their initial four-track home-recorded EP of covers, 'Young Gifted & Blue’, that got the band first noticed by record companies. In that time frame it has been not only a steep learning curve for the band, but for Niall as manager as well.
“Growing up a music fan, reading all the horror stories, it’s your son and your friends’ kids, it’s a lot of responsibility! We were being wined and dined by everybody. The boys got a hell of a lot of free stuff.
“I remember one lawyer saying to me, 'Niall, just sign the f**kin’ deal’. But I kept saying, 'what if it’s the wrong deal?’. It was too much. I lost weight, I had sleepless nights. It was hugely stressful!”
Working with Squeeze singer Chris Difford put Niall and the band in touch with Rocket Music Management, owned by Sir Elton John, and after that, in December 2012, the band chose to sign with Mercury Records.
“We were in Cavan wondering when the oil would run out, when Elton rang. He was just lovely, he just yapped. He supports Watford so football came into it, and he invited the lads for dinner.
“We flew from a gig in Italy to London and on to Elton’s house in Windsor for Sunday lunch. I’d said keep things plain, roast chicken or whatever, spuds and all that, and it was... but it was the nicest Sunday lunch you could ever imagine! It was a pretty spectacular situation.
“He’d been through it all, as Reg Dwight before Elton John. He’d driven the van, been ripped off, so he knew the pitfalls. You have this image of a manager cutting a deal for you in a dingy toilet somewhere doing a line, some shark, and I was terrified of that. This was far more civilised!”
Niall admits there are moments that still stop him in his tracks from the now famous manic Ronnie Scott’s gig story, to the band recently playing to 30,000 baying fans at a festival in France, belting back every word louder than lead singer Ross’s lungs could muster.
“It’s been a rollercoaster. But like anything, as much for the boys as myself, you get on with it, and you get used to it. I used to idolise Chris Difford. Now I’m on the phone to him maybe 10 times a day.
“Weller was another one, a hero of mine. He offered the boys a gig in Abbey Road, in Studio 2, so we went over for rehearsals. He has a studio in his house and said we could stay there.
“So we got in late the night before, and the next morning got up and were in the kitchen making breakfast when Weller walks in. We had no idea he was even in the house, and here we were standing there eating his cornflakes!”

Tough business
But despite all the perceived glamour, Niall admits the music industry is a “tough business”.
“There’s a promotional tour coming up. You’re constantly thinking of everything that has to be organised, bags packed, accommodation sorted, chocolate biscuits for Evan. And when you get there, organise getting to the venue, on time, is everyone well, all that.
“What makes me even more proud is that the boys are surviving, they’ve their second album out and have achieved things people their age and bands twice their age can only dream of. Even to get one record out is an achievement.
“The new album is called 'Little Victories’ because anything you get in this industry is a little victory. We want to do our own material. That’s a little victory. We don’t want to collaborate with some pop star, wear this or do that, they’re all little victories. You have to stand up for yourself a lot. Yes you’re doing something you love, you’re living the dream, a fairytale, but it’s one that’s set in reality.”