Adjacent Meridian Point,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow
A63 V1F8
Justin McCann on keeping it real – and original – as Kiruu, Sun Shakers and his own Solar Foam take over The Whale for one night.
Ever since I first set foot in the Whale and thought ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Greystones!’ I’ve wanted to do my own tunes in the venue.
Thanks to the kind efforts of owner Ross McParland and booker Brian O’Regan, on the 18th of this month it will be my honour and privilege to do just that.
It’s taken a little while to get here. First there were the gigs accompanying local hero Dara MacMahon’s singing students, who put on a showcase at the end of each teaching term. Speaking of which, Dara’s absurdly talented son James Fennell is doing a short solo set to kick proceedings off on the 18th. Only eighteen and he makes it look so easy.
Next, I got my album tribute band Playback into the theatre a few times, doing recreations of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. We’ll be returning with the former in November.
At last I floated the idea of an originals gig, featuring my own band Mekkan Ju (now Solar Foam), plus a couple of other bands I’ve had the pleasure of playing with many times over the years, Sun Shakers and Kiruu. The combination made sense. Not only do the bands share members freely – guitarist Aidan Mulloy also plays with all three outfits – but we also have an unspoken joint ethos in common.
Well, unspoken till now: it’s time to spell it out. The songwriters of each band – that’s myself, Davina Brady, Aidan and Kieran Allen – are all melody people, not ‘atmosphere’ people. Forget your ambient drones, trip-hop synthfests and walls of guitar feedback: we believe that if you set a catchy tune to a solid groove, the atmosphere takes care of itself.
We all believe in the power of vocal harmonies to take a song to the next level. And we all really like a funky beat. Like they say, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’. So, whether the genre is soul, ska or soukous, the aim is to get people smiling and shaking their limbs around.
Lastly, we all like to get diverse with our influences. Sun Shakers’ psychedelic soul is an umbrella term for a hybrid of funk, pop, classic rock, Jeff Buckley-esque guitar figures and Janis Joplin-style howls of elation. (Yes, Davina’s vocals really are that good.)
Meanwhile, Kiruu’s music is completely uncategorisable, mixing different languages together and drawing from genres from all over the world. More or less what you’d expect from a songwriter with English and Irish heritage who was raised in Tanzania and spent years living in Spain.
Maybe most surprising of all is how each band manages to turn these varied roots into a consistent sound that marries technical complexity with the feelgood simplicity of solid pop hooks. It’s a lot harder than they make it look!
As for Solar Foam, our sound is an aggressively high-energy combination of a wide range of musical styles I love, from Beck’s hip-hop/rock fusion to Bob Dylan’s Sprechgesang to the Beatles’ joyful choruses to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat to Stevie Wonder’s funk-pop to the Roots’ melancholic jazz-rap to uptempo Curtis Mayfield soul to Congolese soukous. I’m easygoing enough in everyday life, but in music I don’t believe in half-measures: your job is to express the ecstatic highs of living, the aching lows, or both at once.
Use the right brain to pull from your deepest wells. Use the left to put some kind of a shape on it that hopefully doesn’t sound like everything – or if you’re lucky, anything – else. Hone away. Then forget all the planning, take a good look at your audience and improvise something a little off the wall.
The band covers all the above emotional and musical terrain on our forthcoming debut album The Hindu Valley, with emotional peaks like Hear the Music Play’s soukous-folk and Wide Horizon’s reggae-to-soul-to-gospel balanced out by valleys like the raging prog-rock of Black Dog. On top of our basic piano, guitar, bass and drums attack, you’ll hear a diverse range of percussion from myself and Ronan Slater, frequent contributions from the stunning vocal talents of Playback’s Paula Size and Louise Carley, a modest helping of synths, drum loops and arpeggiators, and even the occasional theremin.
The whole thing has taken a lot of doing, but what an incredibly rewarding process.
The album’s been in the works since recording sessions started last summer – we’re currently finishing up editing and mixing – but in another sense it’s been coming together for nearly ten years, since I started writing the songs and Mekkan Ju had their first gig in 2016. A lot has changed in that time, with beloved old venues closing their doors and new hopefuls springing up to take their place. It’s been a rocky few years for the band since Covid hit and redrew the map of the music scene, though at least lockdown gave me a chance to work on a few new songs. But the band’s been reinvigorated since we decided to pick some of our favourite tunes from over the years and get into the studio to lay them down.
All that said, there’s only so much Logic Pro tweaking and tweezing a man can take. It’s time to get out there again, and remind ourselves what it feels like to share our music with other people in real time. So we’re incredibly psyched for October 18th. After Sun Shakers and Kiruu do the things they do so well, we’ll be taking to the stage to play Hindu Valley in full – the setlist’s first outing in a year. We’d love to see you there.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: live music takes you back to the innocent joy of life in the womb. Sound and movement enter your experience long before sight comes on the scene. The background hum of the world outside. The sound of your mother’s voice. But especially that rhythm, that incessant 1-2, 1-2 of the heart. Is it any wonder most of the music we like is grouped into 2s and 4s? Those beats are like thrumming heartbeats we can all listen to at the same time. When we twirl and whirl away to them, we’re returning to a time before we had to think about anything, judge anything or be anything – where all we had to do was hear, feel and move. That’s close enough to the meaning of life in my opinion.
If feeling into the meaning of life sounds like your idea of a good time, please support local homegrown music this Friday week and join Solar Foam, Sun Shakers and Kiruu in the Whale. We’ll save you a seat. But if we do our jobs right, you won’t be spending much time in it.
Songs Of The Rising Sun with Kiruu, Sun Shakes and Solar Foam – is at The Whale on Friday, October 18th, tickets here: https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873648516/events/128563044