Tasty rock sound of Ham Sandwich at Monroe’s Live

Date Published: {J}

The impressive indie rock quartet Ham Sandwich will play Monroe’s Live this Friday and as she prepares for the gig, lead singer Niamh Farrell reflects on a fruitful 2011.

“We were really busy; we were over in Reading and Leeds, we were in Popkomm in Berlin as well, and the Electric Picnic,” she says of the Meath band. “We’ve had the best year.”

Reading and Leeds are two of the UK’s biggest festivals, and take place over the same August weekend. Did the shows go well for the band?

“They were amazing,” Niamh says. “We were playing at the BBC Introducing Stage. Reading was fantastic; Leeds was brilliant, but the weather was horrible. At Reading, the weather was incredible and loads of people showed up to see us. A lot of people said they showed up off the back of us having a strange name!”

In 2010, Ham Sandwich released White Fox, their second CD which included the superb single Ants. But in July of that year, as they were making the album, their manager Derek Nally died of a heart attack. Not only did the band lose a friend and an ally, but on the day of Derek’s funeral the quarter had studio time booked.

“We had it all planned and booked that we would go in to the studio on a certain date,” Niamh explains. “When Derek passed away, we went to his funeral and we were in the recording studio that day. We were talking about it – ‘will we do it? Will we put it back?’ We just sat down, had a chat about it and thought Derek would’ve told us just to get on with it.”

“At times like that, you do feel like giving up, you really do,” she adds. “But you have to remember what Derek was about, and how much faith he had in us. He would’ve told us to cop on and keep going with it.”

Over a year after his death, Derek Nally’s absence is still felt.

“At different points, at different gigs, you’d miss being able to ring him,” Niamh says. “Like Reading and Leeds, and Popkomm, you’d miss ringing him and going ‘guess what we’re doing!’. Or maybe he would’ve even come with us.”

It may have been made in trying circumstances, but White Fox is an album that strikes an uplifting tone. The combination of guitar, bass, keys and drums is a tried and tested one, but Ham Sandwich still manage to make it fresh and interesting. The Naturist is a toe-tapping gem, the sound of a band having fun – particularly when Niamh repeats the line ‘I liked you better with your homemade haircut/And then she goes and cuts your favourite t-shirt’.

“The Naturist was written pretty much along with the music,” she says. “The music came first, and then myself and Podge (guitar/vocals) in rehearsal were just throwing lines at each other. Then the end of the song, we had the t-shirt line and the haircut line, and that was just repeated in the demo.

“Then when we went in to the studio to record it we were like ‘we need something more, to lift it up.’ Ollie came up with a line, then D’Arcy came up with a line, and I came up with another line – it was great ‘cos we all pitched in.”

Niamh and Podge share vocal duties in the band, and the combination of their voices means you’ll always know a Ham Sandwich song when you hear one. Has it always been part of their sound?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.