JJ72

We should get the easy stuff out of the way first. Yes, JJ72 are all just out of their teens. No, no-one apart from singer Mark Greaney knows what their name means and he’s getting a little annoyed about all the silly theories that journalists keep putting to him (Janis Joplin’s weight in stones at the time of her demise? a German plane?). And yes, they’re already creating a sound of such verve and intensity that it makes their peers sound like rank amateurs.

“I’m a firm believer that the whole reason we’re doing this is that there’s not enough music for me that has that special thing,” says Mark. “I believe that really simple guitar music can have the same effect as classical music or listening to someone like Maria Callas. Listening to ‘Closer’ from start to finish, that to me is classical music.”

Oops, Joy Division, a band that’s haunted the JJ’s ever since Mark told an interviewer that they were one of the few bands he’d give house-room to (incidentally, he’s also a big fan of Norwegian pop-heroes A-Ha, especially the glacial, mournful tones of ‘Take On Me’). But listening to the bewitching, elegiac ‘Oxygen’, the staccato splendour of ‘October Swimmer’ or the oblique rage of ‘Snow’ from their astonishing debut album, it’s not that they sound like the Divs – rather it’s a shared sense of wide-eyed grandeur, a belief that there’s more to music than schmoozing Dr Fox on The Pepsi Chart.

Having said all that, the band started in the least portentous way possible.. “I just walked up to Mark, I didn’t know him at all,” says drummer Fergal Matthews, who only had one drum lesson before realising that he was this generation’s Keith Moon. “I knew he played guitar and he had a jacket that I thought was really nice, so I thought I’d give him a shot!”

After playing with a variety of bass-players, they decided to ask Hillary Woods, partly inspired by her bravado performance in a school production of ‘Sweeney Todd’. And the rest was (relatively) simple – sending copies of ‘Oxygen’ out to journalists and radio stations (accompanied by a sweet hand-written letter), suddenly the JJ’s became the most talked about Irish rock band since you-know-who. Airplay on fabulous One FM and articles in Melody Maker, NME and Select have all helped to establish them as one of this year’s ‘greatest hopes’, but it was their incendiary live show that really astounded punters and the press alike. One particularly memorable gig was playing to a bunch of music biz bods at the Camden Falcon. “I know it was mostly industry people at the gig, but we saw a queue around the corner and we were like ‘Ooooohhh!’,” giggles Mark. “People were putting their hands on the stage looking at you, and you’re like ‘All right, how’s it going there?’ Actually, with all the touring we’ve realised that playing in a band can be a bit of a job – but it’s still the best job in the world.”

While their gigs have been likened to early Suede in terms of ‘had to be there’ moments and they’re now being asked to sign autographs back in their native Dublin, it’s not always been plain sailing for the band. After one triumphant London date, Fergal developed a hideous blood clot in his arm. “My hand looked like a Gladiators big hand”, laughs Fergal, who’s sometimes scared that he resembles the drummer from Travis. “Fergal’s medical complaints are a fairly constant worry,” says Mark. “He’s the kind of person who could be walking along the road and just fall off the kerb.”

But near-death experiences and boring journalist questions apart, JJ72’s ascendancy now seems beautifully inevitable. Their album moves between sweetly melancholic love songs (‘Not Like You’) to savage, red-raw sonic assaults (‘Surrender’) to sheer visceral open-heart-surgery (‘Improv’). But what links it all together is a seriousness of purpose, a realisation that the world can change in the space of a three minute pop song. Not that you’ll ever hear such hyperbole from Mark – “When you strip away everything, all the interviews, all the obnoxious thing or the money thing, what it comes down to is you just want to make a great, great song.”

JOHN MULLEN
2001has seen JJ72 go from strength to strength. In January the band were selected to headline the The NME Carling Awards Tour which travelled throughout Britain and finished with a triumphal gig at London’s Astoria. This was the best attended NME Tour in years mainly due to the popularity of JJ72 .Fergal’s luck remained true to form when he did some very serious damage to his ankle after a gig and so had to learn to play bass drum with his other foot very, very quickly. It was around this period that JJ72’s album went ‘Gold’ in the UK(100,000 sales).

January also seen JJ72 release the single ‘Snow’ which went into the top 30 and saw the band perform on Top Of The Pops for amazingly the third time in such a short career so far.

February seen the band heading off on their first headline tour of Europe. This tour served not only to bring the bands music to a wider audience but to confirm their across boarder appeal. This European tour ended at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin where the full extent of the of the band’s popularity became apparent and surprised many in their hometown.

Japan was the next port of call for JJ72 in their hectic timetable. This was the first time the band played outside Europe, despite that fact ,the band have achieved quite substantial album sales in Japan. The first thing which struck the band was the amount of fan’s waiting outside their hotel in Osaka when they arrived and which continued when they travelled to Tokyo for two more sold out gigs. During JJ72’s stay in Japan there was a large amount of press and television interest in the band and they should be going back later on this year.

On returning to Dublin after Japan the band received news that they had won Best New Band at The Irish Music Awards. This was the first award that JJ72 have won outright. They were presented with the award at a ceremony at The Point Depot. in Dublin and in Mark’s acceptance speech he thanked all the ‘real music fan’s’ and targeted manufactured bands and Ireland’s association with them ,for some critical remark’s.