“It’s always a shock when you see yourself in a mirror,” says Shane O’Neill, who aeons ago was the lead singer of the highly regarded Dublin rock bands Blue in Heaven and The Blue Angels, “because in your head you don’t really consider your age.”
“I was saying to Dave recently that when we started out, as teenagers, we were very arrogant. I wouldn’t have listened to anybody when I was a member of Blue in Heaven – that was one of the problems I had back then,” O’Neill says.
“We never learned anyone else’s songs, and that approach continued until I thought it wasn’t a good thing. You can learn from doing other people’s songs, but we didn’t see that.”
“I don’t have any problem with being called old,” says Dave Long, who aeons ago was the lead singer of the highly regarded Dublin rock band Into Paradise. “We are of a certain age, and what can you do about it? That said, in our imaginations, in our creative world, I think we’re wilder than a lot of young musicians.
Róisín Ingle: My profound, challenging, surprisingly joyful, life-changing year
The Big Irish Times Quiz of 2024
Megan Nolan: A conversation with a man in his late 30s made clear the realities of this new era in my dating life
Winter walks: 10 family-friendly trails around Ireland, from easy to challenging
“We are, obviously, a lot more experienced and we know now how to get to the essence of a song, how to make it more emotional, and so once it means something to us, then…”
Long’s words trail off. O’Neill nods in agreement. There’s a sense of something unspoken between the two men, who are now in their 60s: that years pass without warning, without a care, and far too quickly.
What isn’t unsaid is how a pair of musicians who have known each other since they were teenagers, and who were once lead singers in rock bands that could have and should have but for various reasons didn’t, carry on through the thick and thin of living, of career interruptions, of good intentions and occasional bad luck.
Blue in Heaven, who signed to Island Records, released two albums – All the Gods’ Men, produced by Martin Hannett in 1985, and Explicit Material, co-produced by Chris Blackwell, Island Records’ owner, in 1986 – and then split up in 1989; they re-formed the following year as The Blue Angels.
Into Paradise, who formed in 1986 as Backwards into Paradise, released four albums: Under the Water, in 1990; Churchtown, in 1991; Down All the Days, in 1992; and For No One, in 1993. The albums earned them highly positive press in both Ireland and Britain, from music publications such as Select, Melody Maker and NME, but commercial success continued to bypass them. They split up in the mid-1990s.
Over the past few years Long and O’Neill have released two albums: Moll & Zeis, in 2021, and Age of Finding Stars, in 2022. The pair’s third album arrives next week.
Continuing to make music in an environment that craves the new and the young, each has been through what you might call the music-industry wars; each has retreated for reasons best known to themselves; and each has returned in the guise of a duo to make music that means something to them, that excites them, that is making a marked impression on anyone that listens to it.
“When you start out you don’t really know anything,” says O’Neill, whose onstage performances with Blue in Heaven put him in the Iggy Pop stable of provocative lead singers.
“At the end of The Blue Angels I was aware of certain things about songwriting, and it became boring. Now it’s, well, mad. Dave comes up with the maddest things, sends them to me, and then I add to them.
“I lock in immediately to his voice … It took a little while to move back, to get my guitar playing up to scratch. We would make songs back and forth via MP3, email, and, yes, you lose the intimacy of being in the room together, but I like this working method – we push each other rather than going around in circles.”
The album’s themes of the reveries and misgivings of youth indicate how older people look back to what formed them. The music framing these ruminations is sublime, intuitive, simultaneously alternative yet powered by melody.
Ultimately, you are either born with a creative mind or you’re not, and if you have one then the best you can hope for is to keep on doing it for yourself
— David Long
“You can’t help what comes out of the collaboration,” Long says. “It’s all about the memories…”
O’Neill reckons the songs reflect on “never losing awareness of that time in your life when you first got into music. I love loads of new music, but I also love listening to Magazine, The Cure and other stuff that still resonates with me”.
So much is easier to do now they’re the age they are, with no record-label involvement, managers or producers, and no one breathing down their necks.
“We can do whatever we want. We have a completely blank canvas,” Long says, perhaps aware of the envy many younger musicians will feel.
“If the albums are bought on Bandcamp we go, ‘Wa-hooo, someone actually bought something!’ and if someone plays a song on the radio, that’s massive...
“I think younger people expect huge things,” he adds. “Ultimately, you are either born with a creative mind or you’re not, and if you have one then the best you can hope for is to keep on doing it for yourself.”
David Long and Shane O’Neill release And You Can’t Dream That on Monday, July 24th, via Bandcamp
