Archive News
Delorentos dare to be different with new album
Date Published: {J}
As the song once said “breaking up is so very hard to do”. This proved to the case for Delorentos, when the Dublin based quartet announced their split in 2009. A few months later they decided against this and returned with You Can Make Sound, their second album.
Three years on and the band are still together. They recently released Little Sparks, their finest set of songs yet and will showcase these in the Róisín Dubh on Friday, March 9. Lead singer Rónán Yourell explains what re-united the band – and has kept them together.
“We said right, if we’re going to continue the band on, firstly the music should be what everyone wants it to be,” he says. “The four of us all contribute to the song writing and sometimes you can hamper each other a bit. So we were focused on facilitating each other and exploring ideas no matter how crazy they were.”
The other members of Delorentos are Kieran McGuinness (vocals/guitar), Níal Conlon(bass/vocals) and Ross McCormick (drums/vocals). For Little Sparks, the band wanted to find new ways of promoting their music.
Last year, they released a 4 track EP, which came with a 40 page magazine that featured interviews with people like graffiti artist Will St Ledger, and other creative talents who inspire the band. At the end of January, Delorentos set up ‘pop-up’ shops in Galway and Cork to mark the release of their new record.
“When the music was done – and we were absolutely thrilled with the album, we think it’s the best work we’ve done – we wanted that creative element to not stop with the music,” says Rónán. “With this release we’ve used our imaginations.
“The pop-up shop was another idea – I’m not going to take credit for it!” he laughs. “It was probably Kieran. Why not have our own shop for a day? When you’re looking at releasing an album, and going around the country to promote it, they’re just aren’t the record shops there were a few years ago. As well as it being something creative, there was a practical element in terms of the in-stores that we would normally do.”
Delorentos set up their day-long pop-up shop in Galway City, just off Dominick Street. How did it go for them?
“It was great!” says Rónán. “We were just around the corner from Monroe’s. It was a hairdresser’s, so there are still a load of the basins in there. We brought some stuff up to Shop Street, played a short set and chatted to people, told them what we were doing, then bringing them back down.
“Playing gigs is what we’re all about and I love it to bits,” he adds. “But it’s really nice to do different things and we’ll never forget this experience. It’s lovely to push ourselves a bit. If you don’t have other things going on in your life that are inspiring you, it’s hard to write.”
Delorentos showed in their 2007 debut, In Love with Detail that the band could pen a catchy tune, but Little Sparks is a noticeable step-up. Gems like Care For, Bullet in a Gun and Did We Ever Really Try? immediately impress. At times, they sound like a different outfit. Were they looking for a new direction?
“It’s not that we set about to deliberately change anything but we wanted to make sure that this was the best thing that we could do,” says Rónán. “We started out as a guitar band. I’m a huge Springsteen fan, and The Strokes, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand – early noughties stuff that I was obsessed with when we started the band. But over time, I felt that maybe it would be nice to open that up and not have any constraints.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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