As a young group of lads hailing from Cavan, Ireland, the subject of their relative youthfulness has rarely escaped an interview, yet with half the band’s members having now reached the age of majority, this particular focus seems entirely irrelevant. You need only look to their influences – the blues of the early Stones or Eddie Cochran, the raw punk of The Sex Pistols or The Undertones – to see that much musical greatness over the decades has come from the youth, for the youth.
“I guess it’s kind of fallen out of fashion for young bands to be getting their name out at our age,” offers The Strypes’ drummer Evan Walsh, when asked what he makes of it all. “Our big point of reference when people say that is you look at the punk rock bands, the majority of them were under 20 when they were making albums, The Undertones or even The Sex Pistols – I think Johnny Rotten was about 17 when they came out.
“That’s the whole point in that music movements are youth movements as well, so generally it’s about teenagers. Rock’n’roll, when it came out in the ’50s, that’s what the whole intention was: it was aimed at teenagers, but as generations have gone on, it’s a more broader age that people are interested in.”
Had their chosen genre been the mainstream manufactured pop of bands such as those generated by the X-Factor machine, perhaps their age would seem of no relevance to the media. Yet attempting to tackle the heart wrenching emotiveness of the blues (in its truest sense) is ambitious for a group of teenagers who, lacking the decades of emotional hardship experienced by other blues artists, might be taken as insincere. Walsh acknowledges this point, explaining that the blues simply forms the basis for what they are trying to express musically, while they delve into other genres to find a sound that’s truer to themselves.
“It’s kind of like treating the [blues] music in different ways: you can have the power and intensity of someone like Howlin’ Wolf, he can be really raw and passionate and blues howlin’ – we obviously can’t do that for a number of reasons – …[or] you can use the basis of it to create your own thing and your own songs. Generally the way we see it is to punk it up a wee bit and just do pretty fast, three chords/two minute songs,” he explains. “We kind of filtered it through a lot of the young English bands that took blues music and kind of did their thing with it, like Dr Feelgood or the early Stones; we filtered it through that in terms of the way we discovered [Blues music].”
There’s been something of a resurgence in the popularity of blues music in recent years, with contemporaries like Jack White and The Black Keys breathing new life into the genre. Walsh attributes this to “the power of the music”.
“It’s an incredibly emotive genre of music. As I said earlier, it has all that power and intensity, or you can treat it different ways as well – you can treat it in that kind of tight, two-minute punked-up expression of raw energy where you merge it with rock’n’roll or kind of punky edges; you can have really acoustic country blues or you can have heavy long blues jams. There’s a lot of room to play around inside of the genre of rhythm and blues or blues in general.”
The Strypes have always worn their influences from decades gone by on their musical sleeves (even the spelling of their name is a shoutout to bands like The Byrds and The Beatles), and while they find some of their contemporaries exciting musically, they strive not to be influenced by them.
“While there are people around that we like what they’re doing – Jack White, The Black Keys, Jake Bugg, and The Jim Jones Revue are an English rock’n’roll band that we all quite like,” Walsh offers, “[we] wouldn’t take a very strong influence from any contemporary bands because that would seem too easy, to say we’re influenced by some of the biggest bands at the minute. It would seem too obvious, I would think, or that you’re not digging too deep, not doing your own thing. You can be similar musically in some ways or play the same style, but to find our own unique influence is what we’d be interested in.
“We were [instead] influenced by the music that was around us growing up because our parents were big music fans, and we also started digging out stuff for ourselves. We got very heavily interested in rhythm and blues, early ’50s rock’n’roll, ’70s punk and new wave, bands like Dr Feelgood, the early Stones’ stuff, The Byrds and The Animals, and then more kind of punk bands like Johnny Thunders and The Undertones, as well as the original blues singers and real rock’n’rollers like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran.”
The Strypes’ own sort of homage to their earlier influences in the form of a four-track EP was what jump-started their career a couple of years ago. While their musical beginnings started out at a young age – Walsh himself started hitting the skins when he was merely three years old, with Josh McClorey and Peter O’Hanlon not far behind on the guitars when they were about five or six. It wasn’t until 2012 that they first put their sounds to record.
As Walsh tells it, “We were just kind of playing covers of all these songs that we liked and that we enjoyed playing, so we put four of them together on an EP in April 2012 and released it just ourselves, made a cover and put it out, managed to get a few shops in Dublin to take it.”
Practically overnight the EP went to #1 on the iTunes charts, with record company interest in Ireland quick to follow. “We initially put off the record companies because the sort of offers they were talking wasn’t [sic] really worth the risk that we’d be taking – dropping out of school, put your life on pause to see how this whole thing goes – so we put that off a while and just kept playing around.”
In September that year they had their first opportunity to head over to London to play a few shows, and with word of their success spreading fast, record label representatives turned out en masse to see what all the fuss was about – including Sir Elton John himself, whose management company, Rocket Music, offered to manage The Strypes.
“At that point it was only the four of us and my dad – he was our manager at the time – so we agreed because of the security of having people with that experience in the music on your side. We kind of made it a thing, though, that they sign the five of us really as opposed to just the four, so my dad became one of the co-managers of the band, along with Chris Difford from the ’70s band Squeeze. That’s how we got things properly set up in that respect; we were then able to go on to record labels with more experienced people on our side helping us out.”
They finally put ink to paper in December 2012 to sign a five-record contract with Mercury Records. It wasn’t long before we saw the release of their debut album, Snapshot, garner critical acclaim, reaching #2 on the charts in Ireland and #5 in the UK. Despite this, some groups might find the pressure of such a lengthy record deal daunting on their creative output, though Walsh assures that The Strypes are purely thinking in the short-term for now.
“Any kind of aspirations don’t lie much farther beyond the second album at the minute. I s’pose it’s the only way you can think in the kind of business that we’re in; everything’s thought out in the short term all the time, or it’s just about playing live and putting out the next album. The goalposts keep shifting so often that plans can change entirely so quickly. You can’t really plan anything out because it’s never going to go the way you planned it out exactly.”
BY ALI HAWKEN
