Archive News
Size2Shoes on a mission to create inspirational pop
Date Published: 06-Nov-2009
Size2Shoes play Kelly’s Bar, Bridge Street this Saturday as part of the Spirit Of Voice Festival. The Limerick band is made up of brothers Eoin and Moley Ó Súilleabháin, sons of esteemed musicians Dr Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Dr Nóirín Ní Riain.
Eoin and Moley’s impressive vocal harmonies have been charming audiences nationwide, but they’re not the product of a musical hothouse.
“You think we would’ve been singing together, like thrown together, from an early age but it was kind of the opposite,” says Moley. “Both our parents are musicians but they never really put much pressure on us. We sailed through our early teens because we were too cool for each other, and we didn’t play together.”
Around eight years ago Moley and Eoin began playing together regularly and they have worked on their sound since, as well as changing their name.
“We were called Súilí and The Mole Man, which is kind of like Hooty and The Blowfish but we changed it because that was too long,” Moley explains.
“We changed to Size2Shoes because I met this bird in college. She was my own age 21, 22 and she had size two shoes.“Basically, I wrote a song about it. It’s a love song I suppose. We like to write love songs without mentioning he or she, to try and keep it open.”
Moley and Eoin have invented a specific term to describe their type of music.“We try to write ‘inspirational pop’,” says Moley. “When you listen to a lot of acoustic music it’s quite slow and it’s not very happy. With the Irish singer/songwriter scene, I’d find anyway, there’s a kind of downtrodden-ness.”
Moley has a very clear mission when it comes to writing and performing, and he’s determined to shake up his chosen genre.
“I wanted to get into acoustic music just to be upbeat and happy,” he states.
“I suppose I must be a happy person because I don’t want to write songs that aren’t there to make you feel good, to make you feel an emotion other than stillness or sadness. Something that’ll make you smile, basically.”
A Size2Shoes live show is an entertaining trip through many different styles, held together by the Ó Súilleabháin brothers’ precise harmonies.
“We genre hop a lot,” says Moley. “We kind of do a rock tune and we kind of do a jazz tune and I do some beat box and rap. The inspirational thing would spill over in that we’re there to entertain, we’ll play anything really.
“We try to make it as funny as possible,” he continues. “We did one or two stand-up gigs which did make us better. We do some kids’ gigs as well, we find them very good; comedy and kids, gigs – if you don’t keep people entertained they’ll get up and walk out.”
In concert Moley frequently shows his skill at ‘beatboxing’ – where a performer recreates the sound of a turntable with his voice.
“We’ve got a song called Temper, Temper; in the middle of that, when we do it live we drop in R. Kelly’s Remix to Ignition,” he says. “The first song on our current album, Take it Easy, that really drops in well with Sadé’s Smooth Operator. Our approach to writing would be tongue-in-cheek, trying to keep it fairly happy.”
Moley is also a huge fan of rap music and will also use his own MC skills at a gig.“I got into gangster rap at boarding school,” he recalls. “Which is kind of unusual, because I never thought I’d get into electronic music; I was into acoustic music. But no, now I’m just a big hip-hop and techno head.”
Acoustic music spliced with R&B and hip-hop by two guys from Limerick is as unusual as it sounds, but Moley is happy with the reception Size2Shoes are getting.
“The reaction we’ve had has been pretty ridiculous!” he laughs.“People aren’t expecting what they hear when they see us get up there with two guitars. What people have seen [before] is just a different style. A lot of singer/songwriters or groups, they seem to not know what they want to achieve. All we want to do is put a smile on people’s faces and keep a smile on ours. A lot of other groups, smiling wouldn’t even come into it. Ours is good old fashioned entertainment.”Size2Shoes have found a celebrity admirer in the shape of Russell Crowe who has called the Eoin and Moley ‘unaffected and awesome’. How did the lads get the attention of the A-list actor?
“That story’s got legs man, it’s crazy!” says Moley. “[Limerick actor] Richard Harris was in Gladiator with Russell. Apparently, Richard Harris was pretty fond of the booze and Russell would be pretty much the same. They used to get on like a house on fire.
“There was a statue being unveiled in Kilkee in 2006. I don’t know who made the hook up to get Russell over but he arrived with his personal assistant and a friend who played guitar. Someone had it set up that Russell would sing a song he had called Mr Harris. It’s on his album. We got the call from the Kilkee Town Council to come down and be the band with Russell, to sing the song on the back of a truck.”
Rather than playing the song and leaving, Crowe hung on and ended up hitting the town with Eoin and Moley. The unlikely hook-up has presented the lads with a unique recording opportunity.“I think he took a shine to us,” says Moley. “He’s filming Robin Hood in London and we’ve been over to visit him. He’s a really cool guy; he invited us to record our second album in Australia, on his ranch.
“We’re really excited about that. It’s pretty epic; it’s just as random as it sounds!”Hollywood hobnobbing aside, Size2Shoes are focused on putting on the best show possible for punters.
“We both talk about this quite a bit,” Moley says. “We want people to leave feeling happy, uplifted – uplifted by the music, and also by the virtuosity of it. But it’s not a gimmicks show. A Size2Shoes show is pretty wacky; it does stretch a lot of things.”
Size2Shoes support Linton Kwesi Johnson in Kelly’s Bar this Saturday, November 7. Tickets €15/10 in advance.
They also headline the Róisín Dubh on Friday, November 20.
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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