GALWAY, CLARE, DONEGAL

1987 - 1994

OVERVIEW It was 1986. I was unemployed and sharing a flat off the South Circular Rd. in Dublin. The city was bursting with musicians and The Underground, a tiny music venue on Dame St. was a regular hangout. Here, bands such as Something Happens, Real Wild West, A House, The Subterraneans, The Golden Horde, The Swinging Swine, Blue in Heaven and countless others played to a packed house of biker jackets, donkey jackets, pierced ears, quiffs and outsized suits. I decided I had to start my own band. You didn't have to do an interview or fill in an application form. You just decided and you told everyone. I placed an ad in Hot Press and auditions were held in Aidan Walsh's Temple Bar rehearsal studios - but the band sort of fell into place weeks later in Galway where I had previously been a student for three years. Cormac Dunne of Ballybofey, Co. Donegal had great taste in music, a degree in Archaeology and he punned non-stop (hence the nickname Corny). We had both been members of a band called New Testament and he was the best drummer I knew. Derek Murray, another Donegal native, had a music shop in Galway where he sold secondhand instruments and records while putting himself through college. I bought my first electric guitar there. He used to sit behind the counter and solo along to Johnny Guitar Watson records while I pretended to be a customer avidly reading record sleeves. His playing was amazing and one day I asked him to join the new band. He said he'd give it a wee go. My brother Joe had taken a year out of Art College to see Europe. I really wanted him in the band, as we had the same taste in music and unlike other musical siblings, we got on well. He was somewhere in Switzerland when I wrote to him asking would he come home and learn how to play the bass guitar. He was home within a month, fit, healthy and ready to rock. I had this notion of the band being really big, with a huge sound, a sort of nouveau showband. An ad was placed in a local paper and the first three brass musicians that answered it were all hired on the spot. Jim Higgins on trumpet, Donal Duggan on sax and Paddy Schutte on trombone. We called them the Brass Monkeys, as they were just three precocious kids just about to do their final school exams. As if seven wasn't enough we then decided we needed keyboards to fully complement our sound! Ronan Kavanagh, a medical student with a huge sense of melody and a tiny synthesizer was offered the job. It was sometime in 1987 and The Stunning were born. We all shared a big old farmhouse with friends where we rehearsed and partied and took turns to cook. Most times it was spaghetti bolognese. We even had a pony in the garden, Trigger and in the back yard we devised a new game SocFu, a cross between Kung Fu and soccer. Casualties were often high. The house was full of everyone's records. Derek had become a renowned DJ and ran a successful club called the Soul Solution. He had a vast collection of soul and blues and reggae records and we started learning songs by the likes of Archie Bell and the Drells, Koko Taylor and Lee Dorsey. Then there were mine and Joe's albums (some borrowed from our mother): Dionne Warwick, Martha and the Vandellas, Elvis Presley, John Lee Hooker, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, The Smiths, The Doors, Joy Division, Johnny Cash, The Goons. From Cormac's room you could hear the thumping of Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Eddie Cochrane and the feedback of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Jimmy was into The Police and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. But his real love was for old traditional recordings; the more crackle and hiss the better. He was now studying music in Cork University and playing the bodhran was to become his speciality. I could go on but you get the idea. We were all music mad and it was all we cared about. Early Stunning gigs were like a potted history in the development of popular music. We never thought much about what direction the band should take. We just played whatever we thought was good, as long as it wasn't too well known. We skipped from blues to country, from soul to guitar tunes, from jazzy to funky. Songs like "Sockin' 1234" and "Tighten Up" were rare soul cuts that we adapted for ourselves. Ben E.Kingšs "Supernatural Thing" was a certified floor-filler. Only the real music heads recognised Captain Beefheartšs "Zig Zag Wanderer". Our first gig in the Hilltop Hotel in Galway attracted about 50 people, the second one a week later was sold out. I remember it was almost midnight and Paddy the trombonist hadnšt shown up. We were due onstage in minutes so I decided to call his house. His mother got out of bed to answer the phone and reluctantly went to wake him. He was still at school and was under lock and key. I heard her running back down the hall to the phone screaming "Hešs not in bed and the windowšs open, where is he?!!" I hung up pronto. Minutes later he turned up backstage, completely out of breath. I waited until after the gig to tell him Išd blown his cover. Gradually we started to replace the cover versions with original songs. "Got to Get Away" our first single; "Half Past Two" our second; "Romeošs on Fire" our third; "Brewing up a Storm" our fourth. Every single was different to the one before. We just made the music and didnšt think about what it should be filed under. We played all over the country, in tiny bars, in old dancehalls and on the back of trucks. At one town festival we were playing on the back of a truck when the driver was asked to move it as it was blocking a pub. Nobody told the band, with disastrous consequences. We thought nothing about sitting on our equipment in the back of a small van and driving from Galway to London to do a gig. We brought the music straight to the people wherever they were, live, steaming and sweaty. We sometimes played seven nights in a row and someone once referred to us as the hardest working band in Ireland. In the summer of 1990 we were doing a soundcheck at a venue in Waterford and a message arrived saying that, our debut album "Paradise in the Picturehouse" had reached number one. It stayed at number one for five weeks and was the first time a debut album by an Irish band had done so. This very album was paid for out of our own hard-earned cash and now all the hard work had paid off. There was no major record company hype, no friends in the music press, no gimmicks and very little money. All those awful journeys back from gigs at five in the morning now seemed worth it. We were the proudest band in Ireland that summer. It went multi-platinum and was to be heard everywhere that year. I meet people now that say they met their wives or husbands at Stunning gigs and that our music was a soundtrack to that time in their lives. A band can receive no better compliment than that. We were together for seven years and released another number one album as well as a live album. Then we broke up. "Paradise in the Picturehouse" hasn't been available since around 1993 and I donšt think we ever quite realised what it really meant to a lot of people. Since Joe and I started our current band "The Walls" our website has been inundated with e-mails from Irish people all over the world looking for it. So we decided to re-release it on our own label Earshot and get the band back together for one final swansong. We hope you enjoy it whether it's your first time round or whether you're just re-visiting. This story ends here. Steve Wall, Dublin, August 2003 Taken from the sleeve notes of the remastered "Paradise In The Picturehouse"