'Stop The Lights' as Walls play gig to launch new album

The Walls, led by brothers Steve and Joe Wall (formerly of The Stunning), will play Monroe’s Live on Saturday, March 31.

The gig is part of a series to celebrate the launch of their third album, Stop The Lights. Their previous released was 2006’s New Dawn Breaking – what took them so long?

“We’ve been asking ourselves that question!” laughs Steve. “I suppose a lot of things happened in between – kids arrived, DIY, putting up shelves, building an extension, building a studio. A few Stunning reunions. And we spent a lot of time working on songs for this new Walls album,” says Steve.

He and Joe are the chief songwriters in The Walls and normally bring finished songs to the studio, but they went for a different approach this time around. They spent over a year recording jams with fellow band members, which the brothers would then sift through to try and find pieces that they could shape into songs.

While it was far from a fruitless process, the brothers eventually realised that ‘maybe we’re the kind of songwriters that write in a certain way’.

“Of all the stuff we did, we managed to get maybe two or three things,” Steve says. “Then we kind of went back to the drawing board a bit, and myself and Joe started writing apart, and together. What we felt about a lot of the stuff that we jammed was that it didn’t have that emotional attachment.”

Some recent reunion show with The Stunning re-affirmed the power of their songs to Steve, and made him think about how he writes.

“We were amazed every time we went out and did Stunning gigs at how many people still found those songs relevant to them,” he says. “Songs like Everything That Rises, Heads Are Gonna Roll, Brewing Up A Storm, Romeo’s On Fire. The one thing you thought was ‘why try and fix it if it’s not broken?’.”

Steve and Joe may have returned to their roots as songwriters, but those of hours of jams that The Walls made have not been abandoned just yet. In fact, Steve is thinking of turning to one of Ireland’s funkiest bands for assistance.

“Now that the album’s out we might revisit some of that to see if there’s anything in it, now that the pressure’s off a bit,” he says. “Some of it was very good. There was one track – what did we call it again? We used to put whatever name came into your head, king of working titles-so there was a song called Broccoli!

“There was one piece we were trying to turn into a song. It was something you could imagine the Republic of Loose doing, it had that kind of vibe to it. So I might give [ROL’s frontman] Mick Pyro a shout and ask him to help us finish it.”

When Steve was writing songs for the previous Walls album, Ireland was in the grips of the economic boom. Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone was inspired by the Yeats’ poem, September 1913, a weary look at those in thrall to money.

“The song would have been written around 2004, right in the middle of all that greed and buying and borrowing,” says Steve. “The Celtic Tiger didn’t affect a lot of artists really. Maybe the gig money was better, but at the same time we were watching all of this going ‘this can’t last’.

“Since then – because we’ve been so slow in getting our bloody albums out! – there have been so many changes,” he adds. “It’s like a different country. There’s a song on the new album called It Goes Without Saying. We’re getting great feedback on it, even though the subject matter is. . . I hate using the word depressing. And it’s not even a comment, because I don’t like commenting on things. I hate songs that are political in any kind of preachy way.”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.