Info: Ahead of their headline performance at The Workman's Club this Friday for the Dublin Quays Festival, REMY caught up with the fresh lo-fi rockers PowPig to talk current happenings, that's happening on the music trail in their home city of Limerick and current plans.
REMY: I’m very curious about the music scene in your home city of Limerick, as we don’t often hear about it. There are some great local bands and artists such as whenyoung, Zombie Picnic, Proper Micro NV (Rory Hall), Slow Riot to name but a few, and also the iconic Dolan’s venue. What insights can you give us on the health of the local scene and have you any tips for upcoming Limerick acts we should be keeping tabs on?
PowPig: The Limerick music scene is very much alive and well with really talented bands and artists; we’re extremely lucky to be part of it.
The support we have received from everyone within the scene over the past year has been huge and we’re very grateful for everyone who has helped us, from everyone to DIY LK to Music Generation.
DIY LK are a Limerick based music collective that has breathed new life into the scene organising and promoting gigs with local bands as well as acts from around the country. The support and encouragement from everyone in DIY LK has been really great. One of our first ~proper~ gigs was with Thomond Sessions, which is run by Marty from Anna’s Anchor from DIY LK. They’ve helped us and so many other local bands reach a local audience, which is so important!!
There are loads of bands from limerick to keep a tabs on, but some of our favourites are Cruiser, King Palace, Inner City Radio, Anna’s Anchor, and an amazing ~ "rap group" ~ called Same D who formed through Music Generation like us.
REMY: PowPig are together for just over a year now and you already have two EP’s under your belts, Denture Adventure which was released last August and Buzz Buzz which just came out in May. Tell us how the four of you got together and what are your shared interests in terms of musical styles which influence you?
PowPig: For us, Music Generation was our starting point. Music Gen. is a programme that gets young musicians to meet and write music. Three of us had been doing our own things for a while until we started collaborating to make some MAJOR CHUNEzzzz. Ok not really. Up until then we’d been quite indie-acoustic-y sounding, which is an element I think we still have on some songs, but after a while we began to experiment a little with different sounds.
But really we were just messing around, and never thought that anything would come from it. Nearing summer we somehow convinced our drummer to join despite the fact that she was the only one who could actually play her instrument properly. From then on our songs got a little louder, obviously, with 'Birds of Paradise' being written a few weeks into playing as a four piece. The drums are now such a vital part of our songs it’s hard to remember what it was like without it!
In regards to our ~ musical influences ~ we just kind of take in everything we listen to, no matter the genre. Our music tastes do blend at times but we have our own separate artists we listen to. Artists like Mitski, Slaves, Weezer, PJ Harvey, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, the Nova Twins, Warpaint, Mac DeMarco, Pavement, Tyler the Creater, windings and Pillow Queens are some of our frequents listens.
PowPig - 'Birds of Paradise'
REMY: Listening to both EP’s I was really struck by the very broad spectrum of sounds. From the debut for example, ‘Blue Man Child’ has a tongue-in-cheek grunge feel, and then ‘Rosalee’ is a beautifully dreamy old world folk tune. Whereas on Buzz Buzz ‘Weed’ is quite post-punk, and ‘I for an Eye’ has strong elements of psych-garage. That’s quite a melting pot! Would I be right in saying that all four of you contribute directly to the song-writing process?
Powpig: You’re right, we pretty much all contribute to our songs and what sounds we create. We don’t really have a “song writing process” as it generally just flows naturally. Sometimes someone brings in a fully written song and we add ourselves into it; other times someone will just bring a small idea and we build the song around that.
We all have our own styles I guess, and you can see that within the two EP’s because our songs don’t all fit into one genre. Whenever we really try and buckle down to write a song it doesn’t usually go well because we spend half the time just talking about nothing, and then the other half we’re so focused on making it ‘good’ that we just kind of forget that the whole idea of writing music is about making what we want, and not what is ‘good’ by other people’s standards or expectations.
REMY: For a band who are together a relatively short amount of time you’ve gained some really good traction so far, most recently being name Artist of the Week in the Irish times last month and also playing Body & Soul festival, next up, this Friday night you headline the #IrishMusicParty stage in The Workman’s Club for the Dublin Quays Festival. What has been the highlight for the four of you as a band since starting out?
PowPig: Everything has been such a positive experience so far, and everyone we’ve played with or for have been so kind. Getting artist of the week was a huge honour and very surreal. When we started we didn’t expect anything to come from this. We thought our first gig with Thomond Sessions would happen a few years after we’d been together, but it happened only a couple of weeks after we decided on our name. Everything after that has been even more amazing and crazy. One of the nicest unexpected things was the opportunities we’ve had to meet other artists like Pillow Queens and Paddy Hanna and whenyoung, musicians who we are all huge fans of.
And then we got to support them!
But, that being said, the highlight has definitely got to be our EP launch. DIY LK were kind enough to organise it for us. We were so worried it would be our parents and 5 other people as it was our very first headline. But it actually all went fantastically, and we were seriously very shocked and very thankful to everyone who came that night, as we really weren’t expecting that many people!! It just proves how crazy supportive the Limerick music scene is.
PowPig - Buzz Buzz EP (2018)
REMY: What have been your experiences so far in dealing with traditional and non-traditional media outlets?
PowPig: So far we have not had too many encounters with ~the media~ but any time we do it’s always been a really good experience. It’s a really cool thing for us to see what we do being mentioned anywhere, and are genuinely surprised that people are nice enough to take the time to talk or write about what we do. People who write or talk about us in blogs, newspapers, podcasts, radios and magazines have so far been incredibly encouraging and really kind. We are all really grateful for that. Our encounters with media also, in a way, reassure us that what we are doing is worth the time and effort that we put in. Obviously, it’s great just to be making the music in the first place, and we do it primarily because we want to, but it’s nice to know that people other than our close relatives and friends might actually like our music, y'know??
REMY: Your live performances have also received a very positive reaction for being a little wild and full of high-energy, which one stands out most in your minds to date, and describe what PowPig’s dream gig would look like!
PowPig: Body and Soul was a huge deal for us, it being our first festival; we were nervous that not many people would come to our tent as there were so many other amazing acts on, and we had just watched KneeCap play a stellar set in a full tent. But we were shocked when people showed up specifically and that passer bys walked in to hear us. The energy was amazing and it proved to be one of our best gigs yet!
There, we’d also been asked to play at The Irish Times Women’s Podcast post-referendum talk, which, apart from being interesting, was where we met Leo Varadkar. It was very odd and cool and weird. He is very tall?!
But then again, every gig we’ve done has been so much fun. All the people we’ve come in contact with, whether they were just doing sound or organising the venue or just watching, have been so kind and lovely and helpful, and has made every gig special.
Our first gig outside of Limerick was in Whelans for the Strypes’ Christmas matinee show. Up until then the biggest stage we’d played was the Kasbah club, which is tiny in comparison, and it was very stressful trying to prepare. We practised for two or three weeks in advance and had to really think about our sound in terms of pedals, as in we had to buy pedals, as before we just used the pre set sounds on our amps. We didn’t even have tuners, and I remember we had to rehearse using them in our practise because stepping on them was so foreign to us.
The reason that stands out is because while I wouldn’t say it was our best gig ever it definitely taught us a lot about playing live. We’d never really thought about how we play, it was just us being thrown up onto the stage, but in worrying about that gig and then watching The Strypes, we realised how far we had to come (and still have to go). It really improved our live performances.
Additional upcoming dates:
2nd August: Róisín Dubh, Galway.
11th August: Seoda Shows Summer Party, Dolans, Limerick.
25th August: Dott album launch, Whelans.
23rd September: Clonakility Guitar Festival, Co. Cork.
REMY: Finally, it’s only been 2 months since Buzz Buzz was released, but once festival season dies down, have you any early plans to record new material?
PowPig: We’re always writing new stuff, and seeing that we’re on our summer holidays from school at the moment we have plans to record some stuff ourselves soon. The only song we’ve released that we fully recorded ourselves is “Sticky Teeth” which was intended to be very lo-fi, so we’ll see how the other songs turn out.
We have a few gigs coming up over the summer so between that and recording we’ll be fairly busy in the next month or two. These next few gigs will likely be our last for a while as this September, three of us are heading into our sixth year of secondary school.
That will unfortunately be our main focus. However we do plan on playing gigs on any day we can sacrifice from study, and once the leaving cert is over we’ll be playing as much as possible before our fourth member then heads in for her own final year.
After that who knows? We’re not trying to cement our lives in stone yet. We’re still very young. All that we know going forward is that we want music to be a part of our lives, and we want to stay friends, whether we’re touring Europe or texting from college.
PowPig play at The Workman's Club on Friday, 20th July as part of Dublin Quays Festival. ALL events are free. Check www.facebook.com/dublinquaysfestival for full lineup.
2nd August: Róisín Dubh, Galway.
11th August: Seoda Shows Summer Party, Dolans, Limerick.
25th August: Dott album launch, Whelans.
23rd September: Clonakility Guitar Festival, Co. Cork.
