Earning their Strypes

The Strypes are a four piece rock and roll band from County Cavan in Ireland. Formed and signed while still in school, the band’s rise to fame has seemed relentless but as Evan Walsh, the band’s drummer, explained to Sam Steen ahead of their gig at den Atelier on October 15, it has been quite a natural and measured progression. 

In this fascinating interview Evan recounts the astonishing story of a band of school friends who go from playing covers in their bedroom to supporting Arctic Monkeys on tour and selling out shows the world over.

The band’s first hit was a cover of Bo Diddley’s song You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover, how is that a group of kids, as you were at the time, came to be playing these classic blues and rock and roll tunes?

We all come from musical families, with instruments around the house and music was very prominent when we were growing up. My Dad had been in a band when he was younger and all the lads’ parents had been involved in music some way or another be it roadie-ing or as stage managers or whatever, it was just in us from a very young age. I wasn’t pushed on us or anything like that but our parents were all very supportive… whatever we’d been interested in I think they would have been supportive of it, and it just so happened to be music.

What was it about that genre of music that attracted you to it? Most young bands would have been playing punk or grunge or pop songs.

From the word go we wanted to be a bit different and a lot of young bands, when they start out, they play the same set list, it’s all that pub band set list whatever that is of its era and we were aware of that from a young enough age and we wanted to be different and have an unusual angle on it. And you know, we were just interested in a mix of rhythm and blues, old stuff like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddly and stuff like that and a lot of 70’s punk and new wave bands as well like Dr. Feelgood and The undertones and the Clash and bands like that so we were influenced by bands like that and early Boomtown Rats.

You mentioned how your families are really in to music were those the bands that they were playing in the house as you grew up?

I think so, a huge amount of music was played all the time and we just kind of chose from that. My parents would have been teenagers in the kind of ’76, ’77 punk times and so they would have played a lot of bands like Elvis Costello and Squeeze when I was small and a lot of blues and rockabilly and ska and we just sort of cherry picked from that. Eventually we had this idea of doing Dr. Feelgood and a couple of blues standards as our set and as time went on then Josh, the guitarist, started writing songs and they gradually got replaced until it was a mix of a couple of covers but mainly originals and that’s just how it ended up.

And of course your debut EP, Young Gifted & Blue was a collection of covers right?

Yeah it was just four tracks that we were doing in the set at the time which was just done for fun really, there was absolutely no ambition behind it. It was just an exercise of, you know, we’re in a band, we’re playing in the bedroom, doing a couple of local gigs, what else can we do to amuse ourselves outside of school? So we recorded the EP in a friend’s house, who had a recording set up and we did it all in two or three days and designed the cover ourselves and did a limited rum locally because friends and family and a few people who would have followed the band at that stage would have bought it and that was our thinking behind it. It was just a wee advert for gigs and just a nice thing to do and then to our surprise it ended up as number one on the iTunes blues chart! Which was a bit of a strange one.

Things started to move quite quickly for you after that…

From that we got more gigs and Universal in Ireland expressed an interest in signing us but we held off for about a year or so because we didn’t want to be rushed in to anything and we wanted to just keep gigging and to see what else happened not to just rush in to something and then regret it. So eventually, we kept plugging away for a couple of months and were offered a couple of gigs in London. That would have been around September/October 2012 and we went over and did a couple of gigs and after that time we got a lot of interest from UK labels until we signed with Mercury who are now Virgin/EMI at the end of the year.

So what happened then?

You’re kind of put on the treadmill then, we started doing more gigs and signed with Rocket management and got an agent and they started getting us more gigs in the UK and we just started playing gigs for a couple of months and tried to build up a bit of a following. At the same time we recorded the first album, over in England as well, with Chris Thomas who produced Never Mind The Bollox and engineered on the White Album as well which was a great thing for us. So we were doing that and I can’t I really remember to be honest how it built up but by the end of that year which was 2013 we were touring with the Arctic Monkeys and the album was out and we were selling out reasonably large venues.

Your second album Little Victories is out now, how has it been going and how are the songs being received at your shows?

The album has been really surprisingly well received and we’ve been delighted with how that’s gone. It went to number one in Ireland and top 20 in the UK which we were delighted about. We’ve done a lot of gigs with those songs now. We started doing them just before Christmas last year so people at the gigs got very used to them so with the album out now, when we do the UK it’ll be very interesting to see if people know the words or are in to certain songs or how they will react. We’ve been very lucky in that we’ve had people moshing and going crazy to songs that they don’t really know so when they do know them it’ll be interesting.

And your European tour starts soon too, in fact, it kicks off here in Luxembourg!

Absolutely and we’re looking forward to that, we haven’t done a European tour since April of last year and we did a full month then but we didn’t go to Luxembourg at that time so it’ll be our first time there. It’ll be interesting to play in a new place.

I saw that you have a pretty extensive tour coming up in Japan too. That sounds really interesting.

Yeah in November we’re doing a tour where we literally go from the top of the island right down to the bottom in two weeks and apparently that not something that a lot of non-Japanese bands do so again it’ll be an experience. It’ll be our fifth time going over to Japan since we got signed. We’ve gone over a few times just to do short spurts of gigs and they’ve always been really good. The crowds have been vert receptive. Once they get in to something they really commit to it in Japan so you get people giving you presents and stuff after the gigs. It’s just how they treat foreign bands I guess they see it as welcoming you to their country.

What kind of presents?

Socks and stuff like that, trinkets and knick knacks. We’ve done interviews about the realities of touring and how it’s not all the wild rock n roll thrill ride it’s often about, “oh we have to go wash our socks and do this and that and when are we going to get time to those things”

So if any of your fans here want to bring you gifts what should they bring?

Umm, probably yeah, just black and red business socks would be the order of the day.

Listen to the full interview broadcast on ARA City Radio, below:

Find out more about the band at www.thestrypes.com

Tickets for the concert at den Atelier, available at www.atelier.lu

Sam's Scene!

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Sam Steen on ARA City Radio

You can catch Sam in his "Freshly Squeezed Breakfast Show" on ARA City Radio every weekday morning from 6-9:30am. For more info visit the website: www.aracityradio.com_________________________________________________________

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