Billy Mahonie haven't had it easy. Highly praised a couple of years for the debut album 'The Big Dig, they were bizarrely dropped by their label and written off by a lot of people. They returned with the double album - "What Becomes Before' - a record which consolidated and built on the strengths of the debut. I caught up with them at their first gig to support that album, a fairly intimate affair at Camden's Dublin Castle. Gavin (guitar), Hywell (one of the bass players) and Howard (drums) answer the questions.

Icebreaker question first - why did you choose the name Billy Mahonie?
G: "It's from a film - 'Flatliners' with Keifer Sutherland, medical students experimenting with life-after-death experiences. Billy Mahonie is the little kid who comes back to haunt Keifer Sutherland. I think the only thing that it means to me, is that a very small entity can be very powerful, cos although he's a little kid he can still beat up Keifer Sutherland. It's not a very good movie though!"
Hywell: "That's what I like - the fact he beat up Keifer Sutherland. It's quite worrying cos people who think they're in the know are going to imagine we like 'Flatliners' then aren't they?

The current Billy Mahonie line-up has been around since the tail end of 1997, though there was an earlier version - Billy Mahonie Mk I if you like. Tell us about that.
G: "Myself and Howard the drummer were in that, along with Crawford who now plays in Rothko and Geiger Counter. That was in 1994 and we were trying to be like Pearl Jam and we were auditioning singers and stuff, but it never really worked out and we only got about five tunes together and then it all fell apart, although one of the tunes did survive to be included on 'The Big Dig' ('Drega')"

So how did you end up coming back as Billy Mahonie mk II?
G: "I had been doing 4-track stuff with Howard at home, just messing about really, and in the end he booked a gig and we had two months to find two other members. We knew Kev (bass) from university and then we put a very unspecific ad in a record shop."
Hywell: "In my life I've rung two ads out of record shops - the first one of which was a complete disaster, and I would never have rung another except this lot didn't say what they wanted you to play - it said something like 'guitarist and drummer seek musicians'. I turned up with my guitar but now I only play bass really.

Did you feel any affinity towards other bands that emerged around the same time - Mogwai, Rothko, and so on.
Hywell: "It was just a fluke that we appeared at the same. It's particularly odd that we got labelled as a 'Mogwai tribute band' sometimes when I was really unaware of their music. Gavin had heard Mogwai but we only heard Rothko play after I had joined the band, and then we asked Rothko to support cos there are some similarities there. It did work in our advantage when we wanted to do gigs cos there were other bands we could play with."
G: "It was encouraging that they were doing similar things cos we thought no-one was at the time. I was listening to the first Rachel's album and Aerial M, but I wasn't hearing much from Britain."
Hywell: "it was really Bundy K Brown's 'Directions in Music' that we all knew, and then Tortoise I suppose, so that was definitely common ground. I think outside of that I wasn't listening to guitar music, I was listening to hip hop and drum and bass. We did a split single with Rothko and when I used to DJ more often I played the Rothko version with beats behind it and then go into 'Little Feat' by Billy Mahonie, dropping some a Capella hip hop over the top of it."

So after an early single on the Fierce Panda offshoot Livid Meerkat, you signed to Too Pure and ended up releasing one album only - 'The Big Dig'. What happened?
G: "We were just young and foolish! The first gig we ever did we charged our mates to come in, hired some microphones, borrowed an 8-track and made a demo and just started sending that around.
Hywell; "I think Paul Cox (who runs Too Pure) had been to our second gig and nearly everything we'd played after that and then the rest of the Too Pure people started coming, and we were interested cos they were a label with a good track record."
G: "It seemed like a really good idea at the time but as it went on the relationship just fell apart. I think they were expecting us to sell a lot more copies of out first album, especially as they were promoting it as 'the new Mogwai' and they had sold 26,000 in Britain by that point. That label has kind of stuck with us, and it's quite good now because the new Mogwai record is not like the new Billy Mahonie record at all."

It must have been quite a blow though, what did you do next?
Howard: "Well, Southern were in pretty quickly. It was a bad time for us but a little piece of humanity came out of it in that Too Pure had booked a studio to record our second album and I was in there with Luke Sutherland (Bows) at the time we parted company with the label, and the studio let us record anyway, and let us pay them later. So we had half an album by then and then Southern stepped in, and now it's a double album!

How is the new album different from your debut?
G: "To me it sounds like we've got more focussed in terms of each individual piece of music, it's definitely varied.

Are you concerned about people pigeoholing you - for instance the 'post-rock' tag, the Mogwai comparisons...
G: "I don't mind, it's just easy and lazy to do that, but it doesn't bother me at all. In my own opinion I don't think that we're a post-rock band in the way the press defines post-rock. Post-rock seems to be minimal, a bit jazzier than us, and not as metally. I like to think of us more as a rock band that doesn't have a singer, or that we're in some breakaway genre of rock music."
Hywell: "I think so, because we're arranging things differently because the key element of most rock music - the singer- isn't there. The only thing that pisses me off is that most post-rock bands are crap so when we get lumped in with that and the Evening Standard or whoever says we're post-rock, you get all the post-rock kids coming down and other people who say 'oh, I don't like post-rock' will stay away. That bugs me."

One of you said Billy Mahonie are as "obsessed with being as rock as possible without actually playing rock music". Explain.
G: "I'm sure I said that! It depends on what you mean by rock music though. To me it means Aerosmith and fat bald Americans playing stuff which isn't very interesting. If you look at someone like the Black Crowes they're great at what they do, but that sort of music had it's day years ago.
Hywell: "We just like playing tunes, and we like playing heavy stuff too."
G: "If you listen to jazz you become vary of how instrumental pieces should work and different things you want to do, places you take basic riffs or whatever and they gradually evolve, that's how we work. Or we all jam and work something out that way, and you're conscious of how things and going work, and how people are listen to it and get something out of it. It is unconscious so you don't fret about, but mostly I like to think we're having fun."

Interview by Jonathan Greer

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