Having just released their new single Specialist, and with ‘Joylist’, their second album, due to be released at the end of April, Dublin-based rock ‘n’ rollers The Spikes have an exciting year ahead. Specialist is a deft and funky rock song that should satisfy anyone starved for the kind of music the genre was once known for, the kind that gets people moving.
The origins of The Spikes lie in a chance encounter in New Zealand between lead singer Tom Dunne and guitarist Gaz Lewis at a song-writing contest (that Gaz ended up winning). After returning respectively to Ireland and Wales, the two decided to form the band. Shortly after they added Pete Redmond on bass, who by coincidence had been in New Zealand around the same time as the others, though they never met up. “He’d never played bass,” Tom explains, “but he was classical guitar trained, played tuba, concert flute, so the guy was a musical genius if you ask me.”
Lead guitarist Paul Hogan joined the band after a meeting at a venue in Balbriggan. “I remember we were down the back and maybe we had gone outside for a smoke and we could hear this guy playing the guitar like really ripping the shreds out of it…we just walked inside and I had a look up on the stage…he was down on his knees and he was playing behind the back of his head, and I said ‘fuck, what a showman’. So after the gig we just went up to him and asked did he want to be in The Spikes and he was like ‘fuck yeah’ so he quit his band and joined The Spikes.”
The search for a permanent drummer proved more difficult and they went through a few, who for one reason or another could not commit full-time, including yet another New Zealand connection; a native who was deported after losing his job in the recession. Eventually session-musician Dave Lawless was sent their way. “We got a gig doing Castlepalooza and we needed a drummer. We sent Dave the tracks and we had no rehearsal, y’know, but he learned ‘em, man, and I swear it was magic. He came off the stage or whatever and he goes ‘I wanna be in the band’ and we were like ‘yeah, well, we’re gonna need you again’ and he goes ‘no, no, fuck that, I don’t wanna work, I wanna be in the band and I wanna be the drummer.’” ‘Joylist’ was produced by Dave’s brother Keith who officially joined the band during the recording process and The Spikes became a six-piece.
Off the back of their first album ‘Urges & Purges,’ The Spikes were given the opportunity to tour in Russia around St Patrick’s Day in 2010. “It was a whole week. I remember trying to get onstage for the last show and the guy wanted to make this presentation and I was up in the room and I was fucked, man, like serious…I couldn’t even go down and do the sound-check, cos I was so busted…it was like fuck it, man, two shots of tequila and then got onstage and did the show…I would say it was amazing but really solid lesson learned that in the business and being professional, you can’t abuse yourself, like your body over seven days of booze because you just can’t do your job. It was very rock ‘n’ roll, the whole thing. It was complete and utter…excess.”
Since then, having added the new members, the band has certainly matured. This is self-evident in the quality and sense of direction of songs such as Specialist and Bed Down from the upcoming album. “It took us eighteen months to make the first album. We did ‘Joylist’ in nine and we knew exactly what was going on the album, we knew exactly what we were gonna do…and then it was just a matter of coming up with different parts during the recording…it was structured because we had fallen over ourselves and spent crazy money on the first one, and that wasn’t gonna happen again.”
They are a rock band, but the album touches on a wide variety of genres at the same time, owing to the different tastes of the six band members. Tom explains his own influences by recounting his time growing up in Clare in the ‘80s. “I remember my brother going to secondary school and he was two years older than me and some guy gave him a tape…what we used to do was, we had a sitting room that wasn’t really furnished yet…so there were six kids and there’s a year between us all, we would go into the sitting room, turn off the light, lie on the floor and just listen to the records…cos there was no TV then so what else do you do? So…and music for me, you just lie there and you just get transported into your imagination and it was great y’know as a kid. But anyway that day then Mick came back with this tape he put it in the tape deck and it was ‘The Best of the Doors’ and I had never heard anything like this, I was fucking ten and it blew me away and like we did that religiously for like two years, nearly every evening, just go in and listen to the Doors.”
Tom’s belief in the current line-up is palpable. “There’s six of us in the band now, we all come from such different musical roots as well, and all of them have their place in The Spikes, they all work. Nobody refuses to do a certain type or a certain genre of song…everyone would be driving their own train on a different track, but you wanna be a carriage of a train on the same track, with the same journey and the same goal at the end. So you don’t have that, you quit, you find the right people to work with.”
‘Joylist,’ produced by Keith Lawless is due for release in April and Tom promises something special for the launch. Specialist is available for download on iTunes.