A
Almodis
Guest
From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-989898,00.html
Rock: Keep it in the family
Mark Cullen is back home with new band Pony Club, but not everyone is happy, says Hugh Ormond
There’s a certain romance to recording an album alone in a bedroom and on a computer. There’s the appealing image of rising young guerrilla musicians crafting dizzyingly experimental work free from mercenary temptations and the constraints of the music industry.
The situation, however, is somewhat drained of its romance when the bedroom measures just 10ft x 8ft; when it’s the bedroom in which you slept as a child with two brothers; when you return to it, newly married, with your wife, after several years of self-imposed exile; and when your wife and mother are engaged in open warfare. Welcome to the world of Mark Cullen, aka Pony Club.
In the mid-1990s, Cullen and his two brothers left home in Dublin’s working-class suburb of Finglas. Their band, Bawl, was one of the more promising ones to emerge in the bleak landscape that was 1990s’ Irish rock. They left for London giddy at the prospect of a career on a top label — A&M — yet realistic enough to keep their ambitions trimmed, having watched a succession of Irish bands crash and burn after signing with majors.
Although Bawl quickly became darlings of the music press, the praise failed to translate into sales. After a couple of albums on A&M, Bawl moved to Mercury, then reinvented themselves as Fixed Stars. Nothing worked. Eventually, a year ago, Cullen decided he had had enough of London. His mother moved the bunk beds out of his bedroom, Cullen and his wife moved in and hostilities commenced. He describes the situation as “hell”. Its only fringe benefit, it seems, is that he recorded his new album speedily. “I had to get it done quickly,” he says, “because my wife was losing the plot with my ma.” The album’s title? Family Business.
Like Home Truths, Pony Club’s first album, it is replete with barbed references to Cullen’s loved ones. “I had been living away for years and I moved back into a family environment,” he says. “You start recognising people for all their faults. It’s hard to talk to them about things like that so I’m better at writing songs about it. You always get these people going ‘Ahhh, he wrote a song about me.’ Well, if I wrote a song about you it wouldn’t be something to cherish.”
He does not, he concedes, have much interest in writing songs about sunshine and fun. Even the seemingly innocuous name Pony Club is a reference not just to Finglas but also to the comparatively rarefied middle life in the home counties to which he was exposed while living in London.
“There’s a pony club where I grew up,” he says, “and there’s one in Ballymun and one in Ballyfermot. The kids loved the horses, but they weren’t able to afford to keep them. So they’d be looked after in the pony clubs.” In London a friend invited him to go riding in Kent. “It was totally different. The horses were all groomed. The phrase ‘pony club’ has a different meaning for those people.”
While he is not shy about bemoaning the life of the impoverished wage slave — “Now I’m stuck in a job that I hate, an industrial estate, not the place to waste 12 hours of my day,” he sings on From Bed to Work on the album — it doesn’t mean he wears Finglas or his working-class background on his sleeve as a writer.
“I’m not,” he says, “one of those people who goes ‘I was born on the wrong side of the tracks. I’m owed a living; I’m owed this. There’s nothing as bad as people who are like that. It’s not anybody’s fault where they are born and what they are born into.”
Indeed, Cullen is a remarkably uncomplaining sort. He doesn’t blame the record companies for the failure of Bawl and Fixed Stars. He doesn’t blame the producers and engineers with whom he squandered recording budgets. He doesn’t blame his acquaintances in London for turning into, as he puts it, “embittered coke heads”. Eventually, though, their example helped to make up his mind about returning to Dublin.
“I got to like London and the rest of the band didn’t,” he says. “I had always said that the only way I’d come back to Ireland was in a box. But with London, after a certain number of years, you’re either going to stay forever or you just fall out of love with it and I just got sick of it. All the people — even friends — were just shallow and f***** up. Everybody was looking out for themselves and I just got sick of that.
“I started getting homesick. We are a travelling race and I had to get that out of my system. But then you reach a point where you’re not ashamed of Ireland and you start remembering all the good things about it.
“I reached a point where I was in so much debt we literally left overnight. I knew, with getting married and having a child and whatever, I didn’t want to bring them up in London. You can only do that over there if you’re loaded.”
Having signed to Setanta, the small label established by fellow Dubliner Keith Cullen — no relation — he has little desire for any further dealings with big labels.
“Most of the people in record companies are only there for a short time,” he says. “You’ll get a few people who are genuine, but most of them are just complete flakes. It’s all very well at the start, but after a while it just wears you down.
“I spent most of my time just waiting around — waiting to record, waiting to gig. It was a bit of a weight off my shoulders when it ended.”
But if recording in a small bedroom has its liberating qualities — Cullen no longer has to watch time ticking expensively by as engineers and producers waft through recording sessions in high-profile London studios — the low-budget approach also has its limitations. In the absence of any studio pressure and without other band members to bounce ideas off, Cullen runs the risk of disappearing up his own ideas.
Family Business occasionally crosses this line between artist freedom and artist indulgence. There are some fantastic melodies, not to mention arrangements that owe a debt to Brian Wilson without being shamed by the comparison. Lyrically, too, it is laced with its fair share of morose inspiration, but there is a sense that some good ideas didn’t quite reach their full potential, while lesser ones were allowed to linger longer than they should have.
A ruthless producer, for example, might have done something about the album’s occasional sense of being trapped in the mid-1990s. Several of its most recognisable reference points — Pulp, Suede, Divine Comedy and elements of Blur’s Parklife — date from the period when Cullen first started making music seriously, and he would possibly have benefited from external input to help bring his sound up to date. Nonetheless, this is a fine follow-up to the promising Home Truths — although it probably won’t fulfil its author’s mocking ambition to shift “a couple of million records and sell out completely”.
Either way he’s unlikely, even though he returned to Dublin relatively recently, to remain in the city for long.
“I hate it,” he says. “I really do. You spend most days staring at bus lanes thinking: ‘What is the f****** point?’ And the house prices . . . Most people I know are waiting for parents or relations to die so they get their house. It’s like ‘You’re only 30 — your parents are going to have another 20 years.’ ‘Yeah, I know, but I’ll have the house.’
“It’s an awfully sad way to be.”
Rock: Keep it in the family
Mark Cullen is back home with new band Pony Club, but not everyone is happy, says Hugh Ormond
There’s a certain romance to recording an album alone in a bedroom and on a computer. There’s the appealing image of rising young guerrilla musicians crafting dizzyingly experimental work free from mercenary temptations and the constraints of the music industry.
The situation, however, is somewhat drained of its romance when the bedroom measures just 10ft x 8ft; when it’s the bedroom in which you slept as a child with two brothers; when you return to it, newly married, with your wife, after several years of self-imposed exile; and when your wife and mother are engaged in open warfare. Welcome to the world of Mark Cullen, aka Pony Club.
In the mid-1990s, Cullen and his two brothers left home in Dublin’s working-class suburb of Finglas. Their band, Bawl, was one of the more promising ones to emerge in the bleak landscape that was 1990s’ Irish rock. They left for London giddy at the prospect of a career on a top label — A&M — yet realistic enough to keep their ambitions trimmed, having watched a succession of Irish bands crash and burn after signing with majors.
Although Bawl quickly became darlings of the music press, the praise failed to translate into sales. After a couple of albums on A&M, Bawl moved to Mercury, then reinvented themselves as Fixed Stars. Nothing worked. Eventually, a year ago, Cullen decided he had had enough of London. His mother moved the bunk beds out of his bedroom, Cullen and his wife moved in and hostilities commenced. He describes the situation as “hell”. Its only fringe benefit, it seems, is that he recorded his new album speedily. “I had to get it done quickly,” he says, “because my wife was losing the plot with my ma.” The album’s title? Family Business.
Like Home Truths, Pony Club’s first album, it is replete with barbed references to Cullen’s loved ones. “I had been living away for years and I moved back into a family environment,” he says. “You start recognising people for all their faults. It’s hard to talk to them about things like that so I’m better at writing songs about it. You always get these people going ‘Ahhh, he wrote a song about me.’ Well, if I wrote a song about you it wouldn’t be something to cherish.”
He does not, he concedes, have much interest in writing songs about sunshine and fun. Even the seemingly innocuous name Pony Club is a reference not just to Finglas but also to the comparatively rarefied middle life in the home counties to which he was exposed while living in London.
“There’s a pony club where I grew up,” he says, “and there’s one in Ballymun and one in Ballyfermot. The kids loved the horses, but they weren’t able to afford to keep them. So they’d be looked after in the pony clubs.” In London a friend invited him to go riding in Kent. “It was totally different. The horses were all groomed. The phrase ‘pony club’ has a different meaning for those people.”
While he is not shy about bemoaning the life of the impoverished wage slave — “Now I’m stuck in a job that I hate, an industrial estate, not the place to waste 12 hours of my day,” he sings on From Bed to Work on the album — it doesn’t mean he wears Finglas or his working-class background on his sleeve as a writer.
“I’m not,” he says, “one of those people who goes ‘I was born on the wrong side of the tracks. I’m owed a living; I’m owed this. There’s nothing as bad as people who are like that. It’s not anybody’s fault where they are born and what they are born into.”
Indeed, Cullen is a remarkably uncomplaining sort. He doesn’t blame the record companies for the failure of Bawl and Fixed Stars. He doesn’t blame the producers and engineers with whom he squandered recording budgets. He doesn’t blame his acquaintances in London for turning into, as he puts it, “embittered coke heads”. Eventually, though, their example helped to make up his mind about returning to Dublin.
“I got to like London and the rest of the band didn’t,” he says. “I had always said that the only way I’d come back to Ireland was in a box. But with London, after a certain number of years, you’re either going to stay forever or you just fall out of love with it and I just got sick of it. All the people — even friends — were just shallow and f***** up. Everybody was looking out for themselves and I just got sick of that.
“I started getting homesick. We are a travelling race and I had to get that out of my system. But then you reach a point where you’re not ashamed of Ireland and you start remembering all the good things about it.
“I reached a point where I was in so much debt we literally left overnight. I knew, with getting married and having a child and whatever, I didn’t want to bring them up in London. You can only do that over there if you’re loaded.”
Having signed to Setanta, the small label established by fellow Dubliner Keith Cullen — no relation — he has little desire for any further dealings with big labels.
“Most of the people in record companies are only there for a short time,” he says. “You’ll get a few people who are genuine, but most of them are just complete flakes. It’s all very well at the start, but after a while it just wears you down.
“I spent most of my time just waiting around — waiting to record, waiting to gig. It was a bit of a weight off my shoulders when it ended.”
But if recording in a small bedroom has its liberating qualities — Cullen no longer has to watch time ticking expensively by as engineers and producers waft through recording sessions in high-profile London studios — the low-budget approach also has its limitations. In the absence of any studio pressure and without other band members to bounce ideas off, Cullen runs the risk of disappearing up his own ideas.
Family Business occasionally crosses this line between artist freedom and artist indulgence. There are some fantastic melodies, not to mention arrangements that owe a debt to Brian Wilson without being shamed by the comparison. Lyrically, too, it is laced with its fair share of morose inspiration, but there is a sense that some good ideas didn’t quite reach their full potential, while lesser ones were allowed to linger longer than they should have.
A ruthless producer, for example, might have done something about the album’s occasional sense of being trapped in the mid-1990s. Several of its most recognisable reference points — Pulp, Suede, Divine Comedy and elements of Blur’s Parklife — date from the period when Cullen first started making music seriously, and he would possibly have benefited from external input to help bring his sound up to date. Nonetheless, this is a fine follow-up to the promising Home Truths — although it probably won’t fulfil its author’s mocking ambition to shift “a couple of million records and sell out completely”.
Either way he’s unlikely, even though he returned to Dublin relatively recently, to remain in the city for long.
“I hate it,” he says. “I really do. You spend most days staring at bus lanes thinking: ‘What is the f****** point?’ And the house prices . . . Most people I know are waiting for parents or relations to die so they get their house. It’s like ‘You’re only 30 — your parents are going to have another 20 years.’ ‘Yeah, I know, but I’ll have the house.’
“It’s an awfully sad way to be.”
