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No ‘Kerbing’ their enthusiasm
by Daniel Carey, Athlone Voice
DANIEL CAREY met Sean and Kimberly Lightholder, the duo who make up Kerbside, who release their first album this week
FOR SEAN and Kimberly Lightholder, the waiting is almost over. The Athlone-based duo’s debut album anything strange? will be launched in The Shack next Friday evening. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work.
“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” confirmed Sean. “We’ve always wanted to do this, so to actually have it done is fantastic.”
The husband-and-wife team make up Kerbside, a band which has made its mark in Athlone since first arriving three years ago from San Francisco. The Lightholders regularly play Sean’s Bar, The Castle Inn, The Tack Room, Nut’s Corner and other local spots. The album will be available direct from the band’s website www.kerbside.ie as well as www.amazon.com and local record shops.
Remarkably, the Lightholders recorded the entire album in their living room, with the help of their friend Helge Wehder at the computer, a host of other musicians, and some understanding neighbours.
“We actually set up the drum kit in the living room, put the couches on the walls, and gave them as much warning as possible,” laughs Sean, whose dad hails from Dublin. “But we actually got no complaints. Thank God, we live in an age where somebody can go out, buy a computer and do things in their living room that you could never do before without paying thousands to go into a studio.”
The band name Kerbside was a variation of Kerbside Romance, the name of a group which Sean played with as a teenager in coffee shops. Before the duo arrived in Ireland, they went under the name Next April, chosen because it was when they were due to get married. However, that caused confusion among people who saw posters which read ‘Appearing this Wednesday – Next April’ and went away wondering whether the gig was days or months away! They met someone from a band called Last Tuesday and decided it was time for a name change.
The album is now finally in the bag and Kerbside hope to tour “the length and breadth of Ireland”. They are also due to play in Cambridge in November, having have just returned from a stint at the local folk festival. Although she admits with a chuckle that criticising Bono and Co means she’s “going to get massacred”, Kim says she admires independent folk artists more than “big, successful pop artists” like U2.
“I feel they have pressure put on them, especially from their record labels, to produce something that people are going to buy and spend money on,” she says of pop singers. “At the Cambridge Folk Festival we met so many wonderful musicians who have huge followings. These independent folk artists are putting out music because they have something that they want to share with the people who have shown interest in them for years. There’s no pressure on them whatsoever. They’re just able to express what they want to express, and I’d rather be there than be this big, successful, famous musician.”
Sean echoes those sentiments, saying that his ideal musical scenario would be to able to “spend time putting songs together and going out and performing them for an appreciative audience, and recording as often as possible”.
Kim always believed that she did not come from a musical family, although she discovered recently that both her father and grandfather played guitar – “I always thought it was just dropped into my lap out of the sky,” she laughs. Her mother told her that she was singing before she could talk, and she took up flute, piano and “any instrument I could find” when she went to school.
Sean took piano lessons as a child but “got kicked out” after a couple of years. He modestly says that he was drawn to songwriting after concluding that “if I wrote my own stuff, there was nobody who could tell me it was wrong!”
The band’s writing method generally involves Sean disappearing for a few hours to sketch out a song, at which point Kim joins the process and makes suggestions.
“He doesn’t necessarily go into a room and say ‘I’m going to write a song now’ and shut away from the world,” Kim says of her husband. “But out of nowhere he’ll get inspired, and if he gets inspired and he gives into it, the world does not exist until the song is done. Now, it doesn’t necessarily take him that long. Usually it’ll take him a couple of hours to work up the skeleton of it, and then he’s willing to talk to the world again!”
Seeing the album come to fruition, it’s all a long way from their first night gigging in Ireland. Just after boarding a bus from Dublin Airport, Sean received a ‘phone call. At the other end of the line was his friend (and temporary host) Mark Henshaw, who asked the pair to cover for him at a show that evening.
“We went down like a lead balloon!” Sean recalls of that opening night in “a pub that shall remain nameless”. “It was a disaster. The pub was mostly populated by people over 60. We were either too quiet or too unknown in our selection of tunes.”
The duo had been used to performing in San Francisco, where musicians are expected to play their own original material. This particular Irish establishment, accustomed to having people belt out cover versions, wasn’t quite ready for the Lightholders. Their decision to play their own songs “very quietly in a corner as far away from the microphones as possible” was, in retrospect, the wrong call.
“In a pub, you want something that’s loud,” reflects Kim, who briefly quit the band after the experience! “A girl we met that night told us: ‘If we can’t hear ourselves talk, then you’re doing all right’.”
So on day two, Sean went to perform on his own. An hour before the show, he was informed that if you didn’t play with a drum machine in Ireland, “you’d be quickly thrown out of the place by some large rugby lads!”
Given an ancient drum machine he couldn’t work, he tried to find songs to fit the beats. Sean admits that he “can’t remember much of the show,” although Kim’s decision to sing a couple of songs redeemed him somewhat. At the end of the night, he found himself in a headlock with a “very large” rugby player” who muttered to him: “You can really sing the blues”.
It may be no coincidence after their forgettable opening night that the band’s sound has changed during their time in Ireland. Having arrived as an acoustic, melodic, folk-sounding duet, they’re now much more rhythmical. As Sean puts it, “when you play in a loud pub, you learn what punches through!”
So the beginning may have been inauspicious. But undaunted, Sean printed business cards in the local internet store and did the rounds, asking local pubs for a chance to play. They were asked back at each of the venues they performed in and things took off from there. And while they were mostly playing cover versions, they were still working on their own material.
“In the middle of a set, if the audience is going really well, we’ll whip out one of our own and sneak it in when no one was noticing!” laughs Kim. “We actually got a few people who started recognising two of our songs. Indian Dance and Ten-Minute Anniversary started getting requested.”
Now the other nine tracks on the album will be winning their own fans. The album title was Sean’s idea, as he was struck by how common a greeting “anything strange?” is in this country. “It was a turn of phrase that we kept hearing here,” he says. In fact, when asked the question “anything strange?” his initial instinct is to reply: “Well, there’s us.”
Sure enough, Athlone isn’t awash with singer-songwriters from the west coast of the United States. But the Lightholders stress that there are numerous talented musicians in the town, many of whom make guest appearances on the album: Ru Powell (drums), guitarists Ross McDonald, Fergie Milton, Willie Kiernan, Willie Dunne (keyboards), Eamonn Hatten (harmonica), David Curley (djembe), Mark Henshaw (mandolin). Alongside The Beatles, Morphine and The Indigo Girls, Sean and Kim list local musicians Fergal Cox and Eddie Keenan as major influences on their work. They hope that both will be available to play at the launch.
“There’s some amazing songwriters in this town that are unheard of,” explains Kim.
The latent talent they found in the locality prompted the Lightholders to organise a songwriters’ night in 2004. They repeated the dose earlier this year in a jam-packed Palace Loft. A live CD of that evening’s show is also on the way over the next few months.
“This town is rife with talent,” agrees Sean. “There are so many people here who are doing incredible stuff. It’s hard to know these people and be around them and not feel inspired to do it yourself.”