Here at Her.ie, we’ve been keeping a close eye on the progression of The Riptide Movement, with the four-piece quickly moving from being Lucan’s best kept secret to sharing a stage with some of the biggest acts in the world.
After releasing debut album ‘What About The Tip Jars?’ to a muted reaction in 2009, the band took to busking on the streets of Dublin to build their fan base and hone their ‘swamp rock’ style. The result was Keep On Keepin’ On, a rollicking taste of old school rock and roll that had the desired effect and earned the band their rightful place as one of the country’s most exciting bands.
Since then, The Riptide Movement have toured across Ireland, the UK, Europe, the US, Russia and India, played The Late Late Show twice, supported The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park, and performed with a 70-piece orchestra for the BBC. Oh yeah, and they signed a worldwide record deal with Universal Music.
With their third album Getting Through out this Friday and set to be launched with a major gig at Vicar Street, we reckoned it was high time we caught up with the boys and popped down to Brooks Hotel on Monday night for a chat with a very dapper Mal Tuohy (vocals), Gar Byrne (drums, vocals), Ger McGarry (bass, harmonica, vocals) and JP Dalton (lead guitar, vocals).
It soon emerged that the band’s new look is a result of the Universal deal as while the record execs were delighted with the sound of the band’s new album, they dragged them to the nearest barbers once they had signed on the dotted line. Mal admits that they had previously thought that it was “all about the music” but the band are clearly enjoying their bit of pampering and got cleaned up just in time for their recent video shoot for single All Works Out.
Mal: “We were happy with that because we needed to shape ourselves up I suppose. We’ve just finished this new video with Amy Huberman and Paul Ronan and we saw the first cut of it last night. It was amazing, the story is great and it will be out on the April 7th. There were about 30 people working on it, whereas we’re used of going around with handheld recorders!
Gar: Or doing it on our phones!
Mal: There were directors and stunt men, wardrobe…it was amazing! Madness. We’re all really buzzing off it.
Ger: This is what we’ve been trying to do for years and now it’s all here so we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We’re enjoying it. It puts a new wind in your sails.
The video will mark the first release from Getting Through, which was produced by Ted Hutt with engineer Ryan Mall (The Gaslight Anthem, Old Crow Medicine) last year and the lads are evidently excited about the release, which Mal describes as “definitely a more mature album, structurally, musically, lyrically”. He tellingly adds that he thinks it’s made for “stadiums and big gigs”, which would tally with the steady expansion of the Riptide sound in recent years. From a four-piece with a raw finish, the band has grown into a more polished ensemble with a brass section and set of female backing singers, who you may have spotted on last week’s Late Late Show.
While some diehard fans may be skeptical about this new direction, the band are adamant that all of the new additions compliment their sound and will help them to make the break from the small pond of Irish music to the international ocean.
Ger: I looked back on The Late Late Show performance and I couldn’t believe it. All my friends never text me and they were getting in touch going ‘Gerry, what’s the story? Ye were deadly’ and I’m going ‘you’re only texting me cos there’s girls involved’! But it’s great to have them to compliment our sound. Anything that works, we’re always open to.
Gar: We’ve tried a lot of different things, we’ve tried playing with a didgeridoo…
Mal: Which was pretty cool, he was deadly. He dressed up and did all the Aborigini painting and stuff but he was actually Polish. We’ve played a bit outside of Ireland and we’ve seen our potential outside of Ireland. Ireland is where we started and our home and we want to do as well here as possible but we’ve got our eyes set on abroad too and just feel that, with this album, we’ve got the songs to play the big gigs and get released in England and Europe.
The Riptide have been steadily working towards this goal throughout their career, with “seeds sown” across Europe and in America, as well as some less conventional adventures in Russia and India. While India might not be the most likely home for a bunch of hairy rockers from Dublin, Ger reveals that it turned out to be their biggest rock and roll moment so far.
Ger: It was an amazing reaction. That’s the best reaction that we’ve had from an audience from all our shows that we’ve ever played. It was a bit surreal. You see The Beatles and everyone going absolutely crazy, now I know that it was predominantly females, but they were absolutely roaring and screaming and I was kinda going ‘What?!’.
JP: Ger was very popular over there!
Mal: We had the gowns and everything as well. I said burkas in another interview but that’s a different thing altogether!
Ger: They absolutely loved the music though and that was amazing, music really is the universal language. People mightn’t understand what you’re singing but they really connected to what we were playing and the vibe in the room. He (JP) was crowd surfing with all these Indians!
One of the most defining elements of The Riptide Movement is that they put on a hell of a live show, with Mal proving himself a natural frontman and the anthemic choruses of Keep On Keepin On and Shake Shake ensuring that every audience leaves feeling sweaty, exhausted and thoroughly exhilarated. However, having self-produced their previous releases, they admit that they found it difficult to transfer this live atmosphere to their albums and brought Hutt and Mall on board for Getting Through in an effort to overcome this frustrating problem.
Previously, the four members laid down their instruments in a ‘live’ setting but on Getting Through, Hutt asked each to record their contribution seperately and they are now confident that this has created an album that successfully slayed any such demons.
Gar: It was our first time recording that way. Before, we would always play with the four of us in the room for a ‘live’ vibe but Ted was all about doing it isolated. First do the drums on a click track, then the bass and the guitars and everything, so it was our first time having the budget to do it that way and being able to do pre-production with Ted.
They’re with you every step of the way as well. When I was recording the drums, he’d be behind a big glass window and he’d be playing air drums! He’s a guitarist himself so he spent a lot of time working on that…the stick he gave J was unreal! He was grinding his gears.
JP: It was a learning curve. ‘The Butcher’ I call him! Ah no, he’s an amazing guy and I learned so much off him. The recording process was a huge step up. It was inspirational.
Mal: He didn’t have any attitude about the bands he had worked with either but if someone it didn’t work, he’d just say ‘that bit was good but that other bit was shit, you can do better than that’. It really pushed you to your limits because you’d feel like you let him down.
Mal: It was like going to a teacher with your homework, you know. You’d be going ‘please, please be alright’. He’d ask ‘what do you mean by this line?’ and you’d go into it and he’d tell you to work on it again. So you’d end up at 4am with a pen and paper at the window trying to get some clues or inspiration. There’s a little bird out on the branch… ‘tweet tweet’, ‘what’s that, little birdy?’.
Ger: That’s where Animal came from. ‘Bird..animal…that’s it…I’ve just named the song, thank you little bird, keep going…what’s the first line?’
Wherever the inspiration has come from, the band’s reaction (and early murmurings from the critics) suggest that Getting Through is going to be a defining moment for The Riptide Movement, with Ger promising that the release will “get your engine running”.
Mal: We’re really excited to hear what people think of the album because if they liked Keep On Keepin On, they’re going to f**king love this one.
We don’t doubt it.
The Riptide Movement’s Getting Through is out on Friday April 4th and the band will be performing live, meeting fans and signing copies of the album at HMV Henry Street at 4pm on Friday April 4th, HMV Liffey Valley at 1pm on Saturday April 5th and HMV Dundrum Town Centre at 2pm on Sunday April 6th.
The band play Vicar Street on Friday April 4th and tickets priced at €19.50 are available from ticketmaster.ie.
