Republic of Loose | Trinity Rooms | October 10

LET IT LOOSE

Republic of Loose are back and brassier than ever | Guitarist Brez fills Ms Zoe in on news from the Republic

Republic of Loose Interview Part 01:
ROL; Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring; in Dublin drawl “ Hi, this is Mik. Leave a message.” Beep.
LEG leaves message; Hi Mik, ringing from Limerick for the interview, if you want to call me back my number is 087 %&*(£$@.

LEG leaves it a while, calls back, straight to message minder this time. LEG emails helpful manager who calls back and says that Mik Pyro has lost his phone, would I mind calling Brez the guitarist instead. Not at all. Cool, give him fifteen minutes.

Republic of Loose Interview Part 02:
ROL Brez: Ring ring, ring ring,
“Hi, is this Brez”
“It is yeah, how’s it going?
“Pretty good,  Thanks for taking the call, we haven’t talked to you in a while so it’s just catching up really and seeing how things have been going with the new album?”

“Yeah, it’s been great, I think once The Steady Song got picked up by the radio it kind of kicked it all off. We were gonna release that first initially, but we wrote I Like Music and we thought it wasn’t as strong as The Steady Song but it would be a good introduction back. It’s been selling ok and the downloads have been good and the gigs have been great. We’ve been selling out in most of the venues pretty much so we’re delighted. I think you’re supposed to be talking to Mik today but he’s actually crashed out because he was in studio til 5 last night. We all up to our eyeballs, since we finished off the studio stuff, making videos and touring we haven’t had a day off, except for a couple of weeks off in September, apart from that it’s been totally hectic, you know.”

Mmm, crashed out? Lost his phone? Which is it? It seems that the Loose frontman Mik Pyro may be unaccounted for, not for the first time we think.

Republic of Loose have been burning a funk inspired trail through the Irish music scene since the release of This is the Tomb of the Juice in 2004. Working a gospel. soul, funk, rock ‘a la the Rolling Stones’ style groove unlike any other band in the country, their third album, Vol IV; Johnny Pyro and The Dance of Evil released on their own Loaded Dice record label, contains sixteen bombastic tracks which could have soundtracked Tony Montana’s Miami. With seven core members they have been picking players up along the road as Brez explains, “Even since the last album we’ve grown, we have two girls now who we did loads of strings with on the album so they’ve been working with us live a bit as well, Cora Venus Lunney and a girl called Eimear who plays cello and then we brought in a brass section as well so we’ve been using them live, so the whole family has actually doubled, it’s mad. With three backing singers, percussion from time to time and then the strings it’s getting pretty crazy, you know. There’s different faces at every gig and it’s great to play with all these really talented musicians, the strings, the horns, the backing singers, they’re all really talented musicians themselves so it keeps it interesting and it’s always funny when you put all these people in a room.”

Vol IV is a polished piece of work from an accomplished collective who play masterfully with several genres. Although some of the rawness that empitomised their previous releases has been replaced by slick production, nothing has been lost, as the Loose sense of humour and general irreverance is still firmly to the fore, and they have come closer to their hip hop hearts with New York rapper Styles P adding vocals to songs like ‘I.R.I.S.H’ and ‘I Like Music.’

Going back to the early days I ask Brez how their unabashed American sound was received initially, “Originally in Dublin we had a really great sort of core following, like it just happened sort of immediately, people like The Mighty Stef and The Things and Humanzi and all those bands, they were our audience, they were the people who came to our gigs. It terms of the music circles, I think all the bands liked us, so we didn’t really get much flak off other bands initially, we were always the sort of band that other bands liked. But you know, we got flak from punters on forums and people just giving out online basically, I mean critics never really dissed us for having an American sound or anything it was just internet geeks really. … there was a certain amount of people who were kind of a bit ruffled by the fact that we weren’t doing straight chords and a straight rock sound.”

All the members have experience playing in various other bands who worked a more conventional indie sound, “We’ve all been in indie bands and rock bands since we were 12 or 13 years of age so we’d all been playing that kind of music for a long time anyway, it was just that it wasn’t going anywhere, so you know all those previous bands had broken up. I was in a band before who were pretty much about to sign to a major label and that was kind of an indie rock band called Goldrush, it was years ago, it was kind of soul influenced aswell but it pretty much came down to an indie sound. It’s not like we don’t like to play that music or listen to some of that music but it’s just that there is so much of it that is so bad. We decided that we wanted to do something that was a bit more suited to what we were all listening to at the time and still which is hiphop, soul and basically American music.”

The Loose live shows are a something special, with an energy emanating from on stage that infects the crowd. Remembering the first Limerick show back in Redrooms in ’04 I venture that early crowds had to acclimatise themselves to Mik’s onstage persona. “Mik went to the toilet half way through that gig.” Yes, he did, he also threw his mic and popped a mate of mine in the chest, hard. Brez continues, “Mik, back in the day, was a lot more sort of exuberant than he is now, not that he’s not now. I think he felt the need to kind of not make a scene, but yeah make a scene, you know. It’s still the same way, from the same school as Johnny Rotten, in that sort of sense, slightly maybe piss people off. I think he’s a ball of nervous energy so he just gets up there and let’s all the demons out, it’s that sort of classic thing that a lot of singers sort of do. It’s just a way of getting people’s attention, you’ve got to say this is who we are and this what we’re doing and if you don’t like it fuck off.”  Brez recounts tales of getting punches in the back from Mik during guitar solos, “He’s kind of tamed down the physical side, the aggressive physical side you know.”

So now that Irish music fans are flocking to the Republic are there any plans for going further afield. “We were supposed to go to New York in October for CMJ but it just wasn’t working out date wise so we’ll go over in November. We’ve got management over there now so hopefully it will be good. We did something over here with Styles P, the rapper, so hopefully we’ll do more stuff with him and there’s talk of doing something with some other big hiphop acts over there who’d be really big in New York, like royalty, but here people mightn’t know them aswell.” Can you give us any names?  “ Ah no, I don’t want to say anything yet until it’s confirmed and then we’ll let you know, big NY rappers and stuff. But we are gonna go over and do our set and try and bring them up on stage and do something completely different. I’m looking forward to NY, it’s gonna be great. There’s loads of Irish people there who always pop down to the gigs and it’s a great help when we get over there.”

But before New York comes Limerick, who in the Loose family will be making the trip? “ It will probably just be six of us and two backing singers, eight all together. When you’ve got a van there’s only a certain amount of people that you can squeeze into it.” So that’s the decider, how many you  people you can squeeze into the van?    “Yeah, pretty much and who ever else you pick up along the way. So there’ll be eight on stage in Limerick. It’s gonna be great.” I venture that Republic of Loose look like a crazy bunch of mother-funkers?  “Yeah, pretty much, I think, I dunno, when we get up on stage the adrenalin kicks in. We’re not really like that off stage at all, we’re actually quite boring. When ever anybody hangs out with us they are usually pretty dissappointed.”

Since they are not coming to Limerick to hang out but entertain with us an eight piece band and a bag of new tracks we will be spared any dissappointment. Let it Loose.

Republic of Loose play Trinity Rooms on Friday October 10
http://www.republicofloose.com
http://www.trinityrooms.ie