The Dublin Community Blog

The August installment of Discovered in Dublin bears a more sombre tone than the previous articles. This time we are featuring an upcoming folk band, if you wanna call it like this. The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock are weaving rock sounds and traditional influences together into what the Evening Herald calls “haunted, rabble rousing folk” – I’d call it folkrock with a dark twist. Quite fittingly for a band who calls themselves after a haunted canal lock. After releasing their self-titled debut in 2008, the band played a tour in Japan in the beginning of this year and has played together with New York’s O’Death in Whelan’s recently. Dublinblog spoke to band-mastermind Allen Blighe.

Tell us sth. about the band – how you got together, how you write your songs, and about your debut album.

The Spook initially came together as a solo project based around some stripped down folks songs I had written when my old band had run out of steam back in 2004. At the time I started listening to a lot of Irish traditional music and Irish folk and wanted to do something in that style. I also saw potential to do a contemporary rock/ Irish folk fusion in a way that I felt hadn’t been done so much before, blending the one chord drone of trad and folk with the walls of guitar noise in shoegazing / drone rock and dexterous trad rhythms with prog or math rock time signatures. However fusing Irish folk with rock is something hazardous to attempt and there is a fine line to tread without slipping into cheese or cliché so I tried to walk carefully.

I asked a few friends to put together a full band set for a opening slot at a gig I organised for Josh T Pearson (ex Lift to Experience, Bella Union records) and we felt it worked well, so we kept working on it as a full band.

There’s no formula for writing songs in the Spook. Usually it starts with a series of riffs on guitar or banjo and it constructed and deconstructed into a full song arrangement.

When we started work on the self titled first album we were lucky enough to have Transduction records, and Irish/ Japanese label, take us under their wings. Transduction is great label that is best known for re-releasing some amazing experimental Japanese records over here (LITE being the most famous) but has also released records from Irish and UK acts. The album recording consisted of 4 days solid in the studio doing the basic tracking and numerous days over-dubbing there after, where we honed the ideas. Enda Bates (band bass player) acted as producer. It was released in April ’08 to a very positive reaction.

Do you think it is an advantage to hail from Dublin (or at least being labelled so)? And what was it like as a Indie-band from Ireland to play a tour in Japan?

We’re more of a Dublin based band. I’m from Sligo, Brian’s from Cork and Enda is from Tipperary. Only Donnchadh is actually a Dub. I don’t really see any advantage or disadvantage in being perceived as coming from any particular town.

It was an amazing experience touring Japan. We were touring with a great Danish band called Marvin’s Revolt. The Japanese audiences were really respectful and kind, we met a load of cool people and had a great time. We played with some amazing Japanese bands like LITE, Z and Kurucrew.

It was our first real tour and by the end of it we felt we could play our set backwards. With the jet lag and all the travel we were in bits for most of it. We saw very little apart from the venues and hotels/ people houses we were crashing in during the actual tour. On the last day we got the chance to do some sightseeing in Tokyo and that was amazing.

How important is the liveshow for the band and your sound? And do you always play live as a 4-piece?

Playing live is very important to us. It’s one thing to pull off something in the studio with time and less pressure, it’s another to be able to play it live with conviction. We seem to have a masochistic urge to write songs that are difficult to play, so it’s very satisfying to be able to play it right, after hours of practice.

One of the good things about our songs is that they can be played solo, in a quiet folk band arrangement or the full on rock set. Each variation requires a new arrangement but it allows you to think about the tunes differently and I feel this will inform the sound of the the next record.

What do you think about the current discussion about downloading, filesharing and copyrights? Is the web an advantage for new bands (with or without deal)?

There has always been a tradition of bootlegging since recorded music began so I guess that file sharing is a continuation of this. There is an argument that filesharing levels the field so that a band’s recordings are ultimately an advertisement for its live show, meaning that a band’s living ultimately comes from live concerts rather than record sales (as it might have been before recording superseded this) and that fans that file share ultimately support the band more so.

However speaking as a member of a small band where all of us work day jobs, file sharing makes it even harder to cover the costs of recording and releasing records. More often than not, it’s the smaller acts and labels who suffer most, as a given record is effectively devalued by filesharing. I can see it reducing the quality of local DIY releases as acts are forced to cut costs. Anyone you file shares a local independent release should be ashamed to do so.

Where can we find more information about the band and upcoming shows? And, is there anything the world needs to know about you?

We’re at:

http://www.thirteenthlock.net
http://www.myspace.com/thespookofthethirteenthlock
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Spook-of-the-Thirteenth-Lock/84629883172

Can’t think of anything the world needs to know about us to be honest!

If you are an artist/musician/band/busker who wants to be featured on “Discovered in Dublin”, please send an email to authors@dublinblog.ie