Nostalgia reigns with Stunning Seapoint show

Date Published: 19-Dec-2012

Twenty-five years ago, in a two-storey farmhouse in Tirellan, a group of musicians who would go on to be one of Ireland’s most seminal bands were at work. They called themselves The Stunning and were writing songs that would end up on Paradise in the Picturehouse.

Featuring tracks like Half Past Two and Brewing up a Storm, this classic album will be celebrated in the Seapoint Ballroom, Salthill on Saturday, December 29.

As he gears up for The Stunning’s national tour, with founding members Joe Wall, Jimmy Higgins, Derek Murray and Cormac Dunne, lead singer Steve Wall recalls life in that farmhouse.

“We’d get together in the sitting room in the house, we had all the gear set up,” he says. “It was pretty packed – there’d be eight of us in it! Brass section, keyboards, drums, bass, two guitars. We’d flake away; we started off learning covers.”

Guitarist Derek Murray was also living in the house and DJ-ing in Salthill. His collection formed part of the band’s early influences, especially obscure soul music records. Bands like The Waterboys, Pere Ubu and Echo & the Bunnymen were also releasing great albums.

“You found out about new music through word of mouth,” Steve says. “Or if you had a subscription to the NME. Nowadays people get that information immediately, a bit too much information actually. You get swamped with new stuff, and I think the lifespan of music is shorter as a result.”

Released in 1990, Paradise in the Picturehouse made The Stunning one of the most popular Irish bands of their era. Did Steve have any notion the album would have the impact it did?

“Not at all,” he says. “If anything, we thought it wouldn’t be that well received. We were treating it as a stop-gap album, because it was so short. There were only eight tracks, and half of those were our first four singles. They were all recorded in different studios.

“Got to Get Away was recorded in Sun Studios in Dublin, Romeo’s on Fire was recorded in a studio in Grand Canal Street in Dublin, Half Past Two was recorded in Limerick and Brewing up a Storm was recorded up in the North.”

Because Paradise was shorter than your average album, The Stunning didn’t want their fans paying over the odds for it. They took the unprecedented step of putting a label on the back that said ‘pay no more than £5’.

“There was uproar over it, because no one had ever done that before,” says Steve. “There’d be a wholesale price from the distributor, then the record shops would decide themselves how much profit to put on it.

They might double the distributor’s price, but what we did meant that they couldn’t.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.