King Kong Company - Tara Thomas

The Irish summer has come on a Tuesday this year. The sun is splitting the stones in a quieter part of Waterford city, and Mark Graham, Mark White , and Tom Stapleton, who between them comprise half of local veterans King Kong Company, are sat in a deserted pub. “We usually sit over there in December”, says Graham, pointing to a currently sun-flooded window at the front of the premises. “That’s what we’ve done for the last couple of years, and we say ‘what do we want to do this year?’”.

When they ask the same question about six months from now, with another summer campaign of speaker-bursting electro-rock anarchy behind them, things will have changed. A music video precedes the release of the first single, Scarity Dan, from their self-titled debut album on June 17th. Either side of that release date, “I don’t think there’s a field in the country we won’t have covered” according to Tom, as the by-now established festival favourites gear up for another round of summer insanity.

With everything they do, as Graham says, King Kong Company have taken the “scenic route”. As recently as last November, Goldenplec spoke to the group, who were then supposedly on the verge of releasing that album. Needless to point out, it got delayed. They had been working with producer Tim Holmes and had only the one track left to polish off. Holmes hadn’t the time to do it, and Neil McLellan, producer of every Prodigy album in the last 20 years, agreed to take it. Graham recalls that Alan Aylward, the band’s guitarist, predicted that “if he does a good job on this, we’re fucked”. He did, and the track ended up standing out so much in comparison that the band felt that they had to get McLellan to produce the lot of it. “It sounded a lot more like being what we imagined,” says Graham; not necessarily better, but that bit closer to how the songs went in their heads.

The album is the culmination of about two decades’ worth of very sporadic activity for the band. “We gave it a rattle then alright”, says Graham in reference to the four years in the 90s when the band first came on the scene. They released an EP of sorts, and played on the main stage of the now-defunct Homelands festival. “We did ok, we played some nice gigs, but it wasn’t like anything on this level, to be honest”, says Stapleton. ‘This level’ has indeed been something of a step-up.

When another Waterford band, The Madrigal, reunited in about 2010, White says that one of the band asked him afterwards if King Kong Company would consider something similar. He didn’t think much of it, but “within a year we were playing around with the idea”. The world had changed a lot, however, in the time it took the Black Eyed Peas to replace Oasis on the top of the charts. Aspects of the digital universe were instrumental in facilitating the band’s return. They put out YouTube videos to begin building buzz for a comeback. “Instead of just going out and doing the gig and hoping people would turn up”, Graham says, “we decided we’d spend a year promoting that gig through making videos for YouTube”. This period produced the manic, unsettling video to Acetate, and the frenetic oddity which is Dr. Whom. The strategy worked. The internet and social media allowed them to build buzz, “and we got probably about four times how many people we would have gotten otherwise”.

There were other changes in the period they’d been away, at least some of them definitively for the better. The rise of social media and associated accoutrements allowed not only bands like them, but any number of the current generation of smaller music festivals to get the word out. On the other hand, better and cheaper equipment now exists to let them approximate the sound they were trying to achieve in the first run. “Back then we were trying to do what we’re doing now”, says White, “but technology-wise we just didn’t have the gear to do it. This digital 8-track had only just come out, a Roland 8-track, and it was very limited, but now we’re able to do all those things that we need to do”. The sonic and technological wizardry which is stamped all over the new album is testament to these new possibilities.

If not part of an endangered species exactly, King Kong Company are at least a relative rarity in basing themselves in Waterford City. The city itself has had its problems in recent decades, with the employers like Waterford Crystal shutting down and a general sense of economic stagnation. “Live-wise, it’s not that great anymore”, says Graham of the local music scene. “The venue where we would have played most of our gigs, The Forum, shut its doors two and a half or three years ago”. That said, Stapleton and Graham agree that Waterford music is actually in reasonably good shape. “The scene might not be obvious to other people, but I would think that it’s pretty good and very creative as well”. Acts like In The Willows, O Emperor, and Cut Once are all either based in or actually from Waterford, and there’s been a steady stream of quality bands emerging from the city over the years. Unusual and eccentric venues are being used as gig spaces, with cheaper tickets and a policy of BYOB. Central Arts and pubs around the city are hosting shows. “There’s a hairdresser up on Michael Street, they do gigs on Friday nights, maybe 10 or 20 people in there”, says Stapleton.

King Kong Company - The Button Factory - Dublin - Tara Thomas

Among the guest features on recent material is Colm Williamson of Waterford Whispers News, the hugely successful satirical news site, delivering a madcap pseudo-political rant on the Spacehopper video. Other tracks and videos, like the anti-corporate revenge fantasy played out in Scarity Dan, or the gnawing sense of paranoid isolation in Acetate, similarly seem to be saying something that goes beyond a mere mindless hedonism. Graham says it’s a recent development. “I suppose for the first time,[in the last couple of years] we were saying things, and that’s a recent occurrence, but there are things being said alright”. It’s far more subtle than a protest rock polemicism, but even still, “you deal with what’s around you, even musically, it doesn’t have to be what you’re saying as much as a feeling musically, reflective of the situations you’re finding yourself in”.

The recession, on some level, may have been an influence. The world portrayed in much of the band’s work is not one of Celtic Tiger rosiness. “You go back and people have always being saying these things”, says Graham, “songs are always reflective of the situation people find themselves in”. As such, White says that the onset of the recession meant his own freelance work dried up somewhat, while Graham found it hard to get a mortgage from a bank. On a whole other level, the recession had the effect of leaving a lot of people with much more time on their hands, who had something to express.

Regardless of the thematic backbone to their work, King Kong Company admit to being excited for the summer festival circuit, where they seem to come into their own. The current crop of small festivals welcoming independent Irish acts is a huge bonus to an act like themselves. They particularly admire the likes of Body & Soul, where they have been invited back for a second year running (a rarity), and Vantastival, where they play next Friday night. Graham enjoys the community vibe which goes with the weekend in Louth. Unlike other festivals at home and abroad where “the only reason they bring the people into the field is to take as much money from you as possible”, Vantastival seems motivated by something other than money.

It would appear to dovetail nicely with the aims of the band themselves. White says that the original iteration of the group was in part a reaction to the standard way of doing things in the music industry, with the frustrations of record labels and the community of middle men between band and audience. This ethos still pervades the group’s intentions, to an extent. “We’re doing this for ourselves, and if other people want to join in on that thing we’re doing, then happy days”, says Graham. Happy days indeed.

King Kong Company play the closing slot on the main stage at this year's Vantastival.