It is clearly a case of once bitten, twice shy. Tierney can well recall the happiness she felt four years ago when she heard the finished tapes of what was supposed to be her first album, as a member of Chicks, the teen girl punk group signed by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks label. As she listened to the album she rolled around the floor, crying with joy.
The meteoric rise of Chicks had been followed by arduous recording sessions. There had been tense times in the studio with the album’s producers, American duo Royal Trux, but back then it all seemed worthwhile. All Tierney had to do was wait for the album to be released. So she waited. And waited. A year on she began to realise the album would not see the light of day.
“We felt like exploding,” Tierney says. “We were just sitting around Dublin. We had money, but nothing to do. At that age you think the world is happening all around and you’re missing out on something if you’re not constantly moving.
“We took a gamble with annoying the label. We knew what might happen and we did it anyway. They (DreamWorks) didn’t want us to make an album with Royal Trux producing. But we had the sort of deal that, if they dropped us, they would owe us loads. So they dragged it out a long time.
“Eventually we got the money and the record, but by that stage we decided we had had enough.”
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Tierney has spent the intervening years studying theology at Trinity College Dublin, but her return is all the more welcome for the surprising twist it has taken. The bubblegum punk of Chicks has been swapped for the floating, almost elegiac vocals that adorn the Radio’s mix of expansive alternative rock and sweeping electro pop.
The album is an unexpected pleasure, at once bouncy and epic. Its uplifting opening track, Remember Me Remember You, is already a favourite on Creation founder Alan McGee’s BBC radio show. But while their album has been released in Ireland, the trio — Tierney, Murray and Mark Dennehy — remain cautious about taking it further afield.
If the Radio’s songs often have an aching quality, it may be because Tierney is not the only one with painful memories. Before she had even started in the business, Murray was on the brink of leaving the music scene after his experiences with Rollerskate Skinny, who split in 1997.
“I began to hate music,” he says. “I stopped listening to it because I associated it with everything bad that was happening. It was only a couple of years after the band ended that I rediscovered it. This is a much happier environment. We try to be mates. The first thing I said to Mark (Dennehy) was, I didn’t want to get into a band situation where I was just going to be arguing about everything. I wasn’t going down that road again.”
If Tierney represents one face of the music industry trajectory — the sensational rise followed by the descent into oblivion — Murray exemplifies the more familiar face of Irish rock: the attritional plod through misfiring albums and souring record deals before the inevitable split amid a welter of bitter recriminations.
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When Rollerskate Skinny landed their first deal in the early 1990s, their dense sound and expansive songs marked them out from the U2 wannabes who had dominated Irish rock for the previous decade. Formed by Murray and lead singer Ken Griffin in the late- 1980s, they attempted to fuse Sonic Youth’s dirge with Phil Spector’s epic pop. Their albums, Shoulder Voices and Horsedrawn Wishes, were ambitious and often enthralling, but also expensive, uneven and commercially unsuccessful.
The band was also draining for its members, with constant friction. “There were a couple of pricks in the band,” says Murray. He won’t be drawn further, but the faultlines were visible. Guitarist Jimmy Shields, brother of My Bloody Valentine frontman Kevin, was fired after they signed an ill-judged deal with Warner in the US. Later, after they were dropped in 1996, the group imploded amid acrimonious relations between Griffin and Murray.
“It was a very low, very hard, very disturbing, very detrimental period of time, which lasted seven or eight years, when we were stuck in each other’s pockets,” Murray says. “We weren’t getting on. There were a few fights, so I never liked that. We were all songwriters, but there were a lot of people pulling rank, which caused the arguments. I probably instigated the end of the band because I didn’t pull it all together and I was usually the one who did that. We weren’t a happy band, but we had a good time in a strange sort of way.”
In contrast to his time with Rollerskate Skinny, Murray paints the Radio as a liberating experience. Certainly his songwriting is fresher and more immediate than his old band’s often forbidding output. While Murray is very much the creative force behind the Radio — he had started recording the album before Dennehy drafted in Tierney on vocals — he is keen to paint the project as a collective effort.
If the thirtysomething Murray is the nearest thing to the band’s optimistic dreamer, talking excitedly, if modestly about the album’s virtues, then Tierney has a streak of sang-froid that belies her youth. “You can’t trust anyone in this business, but I knew that when I started,” she says. “But there’s not many options if you want to put a record out. You can’t sit in your bedroom, you have to dance with them a bit.”
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Unlike Murray, Tierney was not driven by teenage dreams of rock glory. She formed Chicks only at the behest of her brother Mick, now singer with Republic of Loose, who taught her to play guitar while schooling her fellow schoolmates Isabel Reyes and Lucy Clarke on bass and drums.
But Tierney took to the hype-driven music world easily. Despite Chicks’ rudimentary ability, Tierney exhibited such self belief that she helped convince a small Dublin label of the merits of their first demo. “The bullshit factor was there,” she says. “When you’re young you don’t care much.”
In the bidding war that followed the release of their first EP, Criminales, Coches, Pistolas y Chicas, the Chicks signed to DreamWorks, took on Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis as their manager and went to Los Angeles to record their ill-fated album. There, Tierney showed she had more mettle than the band’s cartoonish image suggested.
“It was slightly intense sometimes,” Tierney says. “We were trying to get a record made, we were all away from home and when someone else is producing you have to stand up to them. Particularly with us because we were ropey musicians. It was a battle sometimes to say no, you can’t bring anyone else in.”
Tierney’s lack of illusion about the pitfalls of her career probably made it easier to split up Chicks, as it became obvious there were yet more obstacles to releasing their album after their release from DreamWorks. When Reyes announced she was moving to her Spanish homeland the group split amicably, though not, Tierney says, before time.
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“We were all a weird crowd, like three little witches,” she says. “It was very intense and kind of creepy. We were basically the same person, but we couldn’t carry on like that, we needed some space. But we’re all still insanely tight. And while I would like to have got the album out in some form, other than that I don’t have any regrets.”
Tierney’s realism may mean she is better equipped for the music industry than Murray, the weary idealist. Though she enjoys playing — she also sings in a country act with brother Mick — she says she sees any future in music at the business end of things.
For the moment, however, she is a welcome counterpoint to Murray, and not just in terms of personality. The bruised romanticism and big choruses of his songs are complemented by Tierney’s vocals, by turns longing and joyous. She is not getting excited about the Radio: that, she realises, may be the key to the band’s success.
“There were loads of times with Chicks where I would have legged it if I could,” she says. “To be honest, having bands that are so easy to be in makes playing easier. This band is a piece of cake: Steve does all the work. It’s easy for me to go in, it’s no hassle. That got me back into music. It doesn’t have to be full speed ahead.”
Kindness is on Reekus Records