Festive fun on menu with dance outfit Le Galaxie

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

We’re gonna have a party tonight,” sings Shakin’ Stevens on his Christmas hit, and one band who can guarantee a good time over the festive period are Le Galaxie.

The Dublin dance act return to the Róisín Dubh on Wednesday, December 30, having played one of the gigs of the year there in May. This year has been a good year for the band, but they aren’t being complacent.

“We signed to Universal and we signed a big publishing deal, but at the same time we’ve always been realistic about the band, in terms of the amount of work it takes to get you in that situation,” says bassist and keyboard player David McLoughlin. “Once you get there, it’s actually like getting to the starting line. We feel like things are just beginning for us, there’s still a long, long way to go.”

The band recently returned from France, where they played the Transmusicales festival in Rennes. That event, which took in several venues, was attended by 20,000 punters. Did the attacks in Paris have any effect on the atmosphere or security around the event?

“Absolutely not,” David says. “There were maybe a few more armed guards in the airport, but on any given day you might see armed police in any airport. At the festival, I wouldn’t have noticed anything in particular and it certainly didn’t affect the atmosphere.”

Le Galaxie were also a major part of another urban festival in their hometown, playing the Metropolis weekend in the RDS. The band played the same stage as Chic, Mark Ronson and The Roots and enjoyed the experience thoroughly, despite not knowing what to expect.

“It was fantastic. We had no idea what to expect as it’s a brand new festival,” David says. “When we went on it was 6pm. We went down about 15-20 minutes before the show and there weren’t a lot of people in the hall. We thought it was going to be terrible, but we came out and there were about 6,000 people there. And the response was incredible, to look down the back of the hall and see all the hands in the air. It was one of the highlights of our career.”

Playing to thousands at festivals is a different proposition to doing shows in more intimate rooms like the Róisín, so how do Le Galaxie go about putting a show together?

“We would tend to adjust, depending on what kind of slot we have,” David says. “There are some songs that go down better late at night; there are some songs that go better at an earlier show. Ultimately, the ideal platform for us would be late at night with an hour and fifteen minutes to play. We can build around that, and have different moods in the set.”

Le Club was one of the most impressive Irish releases of 2015, and Le Galaxie are scheming on its follow up.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.