The clanking of tea cups and sandwich plates being scurried around to the patrons of Lucy in the Sky restaurant is somehow a comforting wall of sound as I wait for Liverpool singer songwriter Alan O’ Hare. Like the restaurant, Alan O’ Hare has been busy beyond belief. A new album to launch which was warmly received by all, various gigs to perform at with one of Liverpool’s finest bands, The Trestles and which Bido Lito magazine call “Purveyors of heart-on-your-sleeve pop rock” and now the upcoming launch of another new song in the form of the quirkily titled Oscar Wilde (Stole My Morning).
I don’t have to wait long, Alan is caught up in traffic but I don’t have time to even take a sip of my tea from the overworked waitress as Al bounds over to me, trademark grin upon his face and looking for all intense purposes as if he received the best news in the world ever but had been told to keep it too himself.
As with any album they you had invested time in listening to, I gave the band’s debut album, What Do You See? another listen too just to refresh my memory of some of the subject matter and to listen to the stunning playing that had grabbed my attention all those months ago. I’m struck by the brutal honesty of the lyrics and his outlook on life and as he orders a sandwich from the woman serving our table, I ask Alan about his thoughts on turning 30 and his emotions behind the songs.
“It’s very rare to have the words before the music. That was literally autobiographical. I was in Spain, I don’t do holidays but my girlfriend wanted to do it and a couple of friends of ours wanted to so I said O.K. They said take their own books! I hate the sun; I hate sitting down and doing nothing. I had something to occupy my mind. So, we were in Spain for my 30th birthday and that was something. All the friends who were with us, they’re not the materialistic type but they liked their foreign holidays, the best clothes. They said to me you must be bothered turning 30 but it didn’t bother me one iota”.
“I lost my mum a couple of years ago and that is when I decided to not be worried about things like that – life’s too short. I can’t control what happened then and it drove me potty, bananas, angry, sad – every emotion you can imagine. That’s why the song says it does not bother me too much. I don’t care about what I can’t control”.
I mention that it’s interesting and refreshing to hear him say that as whenever I have seen him and the Trestles play, he has that demeanour of all that matters at that moment is what he is saying to the crowd. I wonder where he gets this love of humanity from, something than seems so rare at times but comes across as perfectly natural when listening to Alan talk, especially of his musical and non musical heroes. He is as candid in his answer as he is happy to impart knowledge; I have compared Alan in style to Liverpool’s own Ian Prowse and Ian McNabb.
“I’ve just learnt off all sorts of people maybe the word heroes, all the performers I’ve seen and love and the one’s I haven’t seen. I can see why you say them two and I wouldn’t disagree with it. I mean, Prowse’s been my mate for years; he was quite an influence on it- not his fault. I mean, I was bored of music; I was so bored of music in Liverpool. They’re too cool on stage to talk to the audience and say things and they’ve got the right shoes but not the right chords. I wanted to get out of that. I went to see Amsterdam and this was the first gig I’d seen in this part of town. I was 17 or 18 when I saw Amsterdam and their singer looked as if he meant it and he looked like he was talking to me and everyone in the room. I didn’t know Ian McNabb musically before I met him. I’d heard of the Icicle Works but for whatever reason, they’d passed me by. I would say they were influences on me are as a writer but not when I was growing up. I like people who plough their own furrow, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Paul Weller, Bob Dylan, and Kate Bush. It sounds stupid but it reaffirms my faith in humanity to hear that Bruce Springsteen turned down $10m for ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ to advertise Chrysler, that’s how I feel”.
It’s hard not to disagree with Alan; he is as forthright and genuine as he is passionate about music and the business but he also enjoys seeing and capturing the festival side especially
if it means trying to capture new bands. Recently we had captured a chat over a drink at the acclaimed Chester Rocks festival and I asked him if he would ever consider playing there, a certain laughter lights up his eyes as he answers.
“We’ll play anywhere! We’re not really involved in the ‘cool set’ of Liverpool bands, never were and never will be. I didn’t see all the bands that were on the other stage but I recognised a few names that I quite like the music of. We don’t run with the pack, we would play on an album, stand on Bold Street if someone asked us because I just love playing music , so if anyone asked us we’d do it like a shot but I’m not going to run with the pack to get on these things. I started the Trestles off; it’s been four years now. It’s not been as long with this line-up but I’ve played the Mathew Street Festival, I’ve played Sound City, Liverpool Live – we’ve done all them and they’re all brilliant things. I’d be involved with them like a shot but they are not the be all and end all of this band. It’s not on our agenda or in our interests to look at the ‘cool set’, that’s why we weren’t there this year”.
It is true than Alan will play anywhere, for example The Trestles have a gig in Southport on Sunday the 14th August in all places, the bandstand and then following soon after as part of Above the Beaten Track afternoon at the Blue Coat Art Centre where they hope to be playing the new single Oscar Wilde (Stole my Morning) and it was thought of the new single than I asked him about the album in general and the forthcoming album. When I first heard What Do You See? I was struck by its immediacy and its genuine tangibility, so much so I described it as The best debut album by a Liverpool band in years. It is a view I hold on to and with any piece of music you attach a time to it, it stands out and I ask Alan if it’s the same for him.
“I attach records to various things in my life. I know what I was listening to when my mum died. I know what I was listening to when I was 21. I define my life by records. Making a record like that, it seems to be a dying art, you know with sleeve notes. I wanted to make a record that whether anyone thought or anyone didn’t that was actually a body of work where someone could come up to you and say what ’did you do in your life?’ and say to them I did that! It doesn’t matter if it makes money or doesn’t get anywhere it’s all very nice and of course you want to do well in life but to do something tangible at the end of the day, that’s what I do. It was a statement – points A, B and C. We structured it for a reason, the songs that were written and recorded. We approached the recording like a gig”.
“Whenever I buy any record by an artist the first thing I look for is to go and hear it played live. It’s like an O.C.D. routine for me – I’ll hear a song or someone recommends me a song or a record so I’ll go and buy that song or whatever album and then go to the gig and if the gig’s not good enough – it can be the end of the relationship! I’ve got lots of C.D.s in my collection and records that I’m sure contain great songs but I haven’t touched them for years because I went to see the artist live”.
As Alan talks I’m reminded of one of the first gigs I saw in Liverpool after moving here, it was one of the most horrendous nights as the artist in question didn’t seem to care about the audience, Alan agrees with me about the night and it only proves to confirm what he espouses.
“There’s nothing worse – you can turn a bad record off but there’s nothing worse than being stood in a room full of people and watching someone kind of unravel. That’s what I’m talking about playing live – that’s what’s at stake. You either go and though no fault of your own you deliver or you sink or swim. We did a gig on Monday at a club Ian Prowse launched at The Cavern – it was all open mic, songwriters, just come down, play a song and with us being mates we were the first band to play so we said no problem. We turned up with no equipment as there was equipment there and you didn’t have time to mess about, got onstage and plugged in and played 3 or 4 songs and we went down a storm. It just reaffirmed my faith in the band and we did 20 minutes”.
The new single back that up and as ever Alan beams with joy as we bring the conversation round to it.
“Someone asked me the other day what the lyrics were about. It’s about nothing, it’s about everything. What I mean by that is that the album or C.D. has been out 3 months now; it has a very definite message. The lyrics are not very heavy-handed but they are very strong. I wanted to show the other side of the band quickly. The band is very broadminded as a political animal. We just wanted to show that we could have fun as well. Now, there are a lot of politics in the lyrics but it’s a proper pop song writing, it’s a form of words. How it came about was that I had that phrase. I was reading a book about Oscar Wilde, not a book about his works. I was reading about Oscar Wilde – woke up early one day, which is very rare for me and I put the lamp on and got a cup of coffee and it was about 8.50am and the next minute it was 12.45pm! I had the lyrics and I sort of got myself out of bed and scolded myself – the man stole my morning! He’s an artist who draws you along with him that’s what I wanted to do”.
“Tom the guitarist is one of the best young musicians in the city to me; he just gets better all the time. He had most of the ‘Oscar Wilde’ song written in his flat. We put our own spin on it, he played me this rift and I said I’ve got the perfect lyric for that and it just worked, which is why we went and recorded it so quickly for the album as it was so fresh and live and that’s what music should be. John Lennon had ‘Instant Karma written, recorded, produced and in the shops within two and a half weeks. What’s wrong with that? The record companies aren’t involved with us, we’re doing it for ourselves and why not? Why not these days? There’s a lot of tooing and froing in the music industry now and I want to make some money out of it. It worries me, I’m skint but it’s not why I do it. So it shouldn’t stop you doing it. If you worry about it think about how to keep going”.
“I’m talking about the throwaway nature of the song – it is a 3 minute pop song with lyrics that fit well with the melody. It’s about pure pop song writing because that’s the greatest art form in the world to me – the 3 minute pop single. Talking guitars like Blondie, ‘Oliver’s Army’, ‘There She Goes’, talking guitar pop songs that now and again take over our lives. They are the great pop songs; ‘Common People’ is a fantastic example. All those pop songs where you think you’ve heard them – if it comes on the BBC’s Glastonbury highlights or it gets heard at the Academy. I remember I’d been to countless gigs – Van Morrison is my hero and my favourite songwriter and performer for that reason, without slipping into being a hippy! Time stands still watching him. I’ve been sat in the Philharmonic Hall on my own – that’s about enjoying the moment. If music makes you feel better – I used to live in a flat in town and Sundays when you were skint you’d feel melancholic and you can hear Sunday going on outside your window. I used to go to Mathew Street where you could it hear it all going on – it was hard. I’d always put on Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen and Geno – all the early Dexy’s stuff. It just instantly made you feel better”.
Like all Liverpool people, Alan is proud of the heritage he has inherited and whilst I am by no means Liverpool born so I would not change the Liverpool scene, I grew up outside of it but loving it from afar. Sometimes though it can come across that the city will always grip to the ideals of past glories and not embrace the 80’s and nineties that was a renaissance for the city and if that’s the case what hope is there for bands that come along now.
“There’s no bigger Beatles fan than me in Liverpool. I don’t think we’ve got one song that sounds like them. There are many bands in this city that are derivative for the wrong reasons. I don’t make modern music. I make music that makes me sound like my heroes. I’m not Jean-Michel Jarre, I’m not pushing things forward but again it’s not completely devoid of original thought! There are a lot of bands that are out there who do not have an original thought in their heads, they just try and sound like The Beatles or The Las and as a Scouser I feel that Liverpool does eat itself in that way. I totally agree, the people who love Liverpool know there’s a lot more to this city”.
“A lot of people outside it know there’s a lot more to it. It’s just the music scene every now and then – I think we’re going through a patch now as well if I’m honest. It tends to focus on the skiffle, the 60’s, The Beatles, The Las, the whole West Coast vibe – Love, The Byrds – it’s all brilliant music. I say this as the owner of a Love album, you can tell my guitarist who’s a West Coast fan – Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Byrds, all the Scouse reference points – Tom loves too. You have to put original thought in. You don’t want to hear in 40 years’ time, Liverpool neglecting Amsterdam, Icicle Works, Pete Wylie, Wild Swans and Teardrop Explodes”.
Ian D. Hall