Colm O'Callaghan shouts from the rooftops about the Trash Can Sinatras.
Ten years later and The Trash Can Sinatras are still crawling at their own pace. Nine years since their first record and, through the gin and the rain and almost in spite of the whole world, they're shaking through. Three perfect elpees into a career that on your ledger reads bleak and blank. But only if you're talking numbers.
Like a host of angels before them and no doubt long after them too, they inspire an absolute and blanket devotion within their own fun-sized legion of support. A bit like The Fall I guess, only with better songs and with more audible words. Which is how popular music at its most enticing and anointing should be. My own rented townhouse is, by way of an example, adorned with more of their badly hung promo-matter than with anything else. Up there, pride of place between Keane and McGrath and for no other reason than that mine is a house that's proud to have known them. Prouder still to have shaken itself silly to their songs.
The Trash Can Sinatras are currently without a record label, without a bob and without a hope. At least on paper. In the last while, they've also undergone serious re-constructive surgery, something which may or may not be connected to all or some of the above. For those of you who know them merely from their erratic pop videos, seen sometimes on quality music television, or from all of those very similar early evening radio shows, the band is gasping and ailing and yet somehow still alive. Surviving on scraps and on someone else's good-will, still around kicking on doors and stealing your booze. What's really great to report though is that they're still resolute, still clever, still articulate, still funny and still write tunes that, for the most part, stick like good glue. Even if, given the appalling state of the domestic music industry's health, this is an irrelevance.
Popular music is currently bracing itself. It is an industry increasingly more conscious of its own need to survive, sensing all manner of paranoia the more multi-media infiltrates every new housing estate. And as more and more music is forced onto an ever more selective and declining market, song quality has become increasingly more obsolete, stuck well down the pecking order behind marketing budgets and legal fees. It's not so much the quality of the single, basically, as the size of the in-store poster display. Or the scale of the strike-forcing on your first three singles.
God, how Noel Gallagher must be ticked pink right now. Four years ago, Oasis were the vehicle onto which the industry tied its best horses, doing what it had always done best and seizing the moment. Not defining it, merely exploiting an unexpected good fortune. Opportunity meets culture statement with the blessing of the beautiful people and we're off. Sadly, bands like Pulp and Blur (who at the time rode the slipstream most prominently and who also, last time around, made their best records in ages even if none of you bought them) cannot hope to repeat their previous market penetrations or revisit their former chart positions. It is a downward slide from here. The industry drove them onwards to the point of overload while it could and, after radio re-coiled and marketing paranoia set in, it drove them back when it no longer required them. Even if the songs were far better.
What the industry is facing and what it is in some cases coming to terms with already, is an increased sense of polarity. The space and the distance between the haves and the have-nots has rarely been as pronounced. Not since the middle of the last decade, if the truth were told. So for all of EMI's very public investment in, say, THE DIVINE COMEDY, Neil Hannon's immediate future is not in the hands of the man who signed him but rather in the hands of his marketing and product managers. Because even if he does deliver EMI the finest record of his generation (and it's not that they'd notice, either way), he is dependent ultimately on the size and the force of the marketing budget behind it. Hate to break it to the MERCURY REV fans and all but that's pop.
Popular music has always been driven onwards by recurring fads and fashion and, with every passing fifteen years, familiar themes become re-apparent. The British popular music industry has become so top-heavy over the last five years with a slew of 'almost-theres' (like The Supernaturals, Travis, Cast and, even though it kills me, The Trash Can Sinatras) that it cannot sustain its own weight. So what has emerged over the last six months, and what will become increasingly more obvious the closer we get to the millennium and beyond, is a move away from the politics of accounting. A return to fanzine politics. To branding and loyalty. To C86's no-fi, no nonsense sense of purpose. To when quality songs and word-of-mouth propaganda were more than enough to overcome poor recording standards, second-hand sleeves and botched production. It is necessity breeding invention by another name.
Now I don't wish to sound like another flatulent old anorak, but the more I see and the more records I hear, then the less I'm surprised by popular music. So The Trash Can Sinatras are currently in Japan where they're working up another mini-storm to an audience of probably about twelve. How they possibly keep on keeping on, and why, astonishes me, given that the marketers and the speculators under-wrote them ages since. But there's far more to life than cash-books and balances and more than one way to skin your grandmother's cat. So at what price their second coming at the year's end, wrapped and bound with BELLE AND SEBASTIAN and SNOWPONY on a gift-pack cassette labelled with love and with the inscription C-00? Stranger things have happened. Ask ROBBIE WILLIAMS.
The Trash Can Sinatras play Dublin's Mean Fiddler on Friday March 5th. I'll be the one up front with the Brylcreemed hair and funny dancing.
Colm O'Callaghan is the producer of RTE-TV's Kenny Live
(Note: Colm O'Callaghan was also the producer of Ireland's "No Disco" television show, which was hosted by Irish DJ Donal Dineen. Clips of TCS' interview and videos from "No Disco" are included on the TCS Videos Lost and Found collection, courtesy of Mr. O'Callaghan - JFD)
If you have any questions, comments, etc, e-mail me at jdimaria@gis.net