 |  | ReamonnReamonn have certainly played their dues, their dues have just been bigger than most bands could ever imagine. In July 2005, the group played Live8 in Berlin. Two years later, they performed at Live Earth in Hamburg. Last year, they appeared at The Siegessäule, the famous Victory Column in Berlin, entertaining a 200.000-strong crowd before Presidential Candidate Barack Obama made a speech that captured European hearts. Now Obama is in the White House and Reamonn are still going places and truly are the band for the big occasion. Their songs, full of big hooks, hope and the promise of better things to come, have already found favour in much of continental Europe, and the band are now looking forward to releasing their second album for Universal, simply called Reamonn, in the British Isles and beyond in June.
”We’re ambitious enough and believe in ourselves and believe in this album. I’m very proud of where we are, I wanted that mass appeal. And we’re there, we do play those arena shows. It’s an incredible feeling, really amazing,” says frontman Rea Garvey about the German, Austrian and Swiss audiences who have been singing along to stand-out tracks Million Miles and Through The Eyes Of A Child on their recent tour.
It’s all a far cry from twelve years ago when Garvey arrived in Stockach, a small town in the Freiburg region of South-West Germany, after borrowing the plane fare from friends in his native Dublin. The singer had been there before with his previous group, The Reckless Pedestrians, and, now alone, took an ad in the local paper. “Looking for band for touring and album, both of which didn’t exist at the time,” he recalls. “The only person who answered was Mike Gommeringer, the drummer. He knew Sebastian Padotzke, the keyboard-player, from school. He rang him up asking if he knew any good guitarists. Uwe Bossert was in a ska band with Philipp Rauenbusch, the bass-player, so it really had a bit of a domino effect.”
The five-piece spent six months rehearsing and writing, away from the big cities and the pressure to conform. “Dublin was very cliquey. I’m an eighties radio-kid, I listen to everything,” stresses Garvey who felt liberated and thrived in his new environment. “It felt like this was what I wanted to do. The music industry stops at Stuttgart so nobody could tell us what we were doing was right or wrong. By the time we got to meet record companies, we had our own sound. It was one of the best starts we could have envisaged,” explains the tall, charismatic frontman with the big voice. Rea’s name might have been on their first demo but Reamonn are very much a band, not his band. “Everyone has their moment, everyone has their strengths,” he insists.
After making their live debut on New Year’s Eve 1998, the group played a showcase in Hamburg and signed to Virgin Germany in 1999. The following year, they issued their first album, entitled Tuesday, and scored a Top Ten hit in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands with the moody single Supergirl. Reamonn have hardly stopped since, releasing a further four albums, including Raise Your Hands, a live CD and DVD in 2004, and Wish, their first for Universal, in 2006, and making friends and fans in Portugal and Ireland. Along the way, the band also broadened their appeal thanks to collaborations with Nelly Furtado and Lucie Silvas, while Garvey sang lead on Let Go, a huge trance hit for DJ Paul van Dyk last year. “It opened up my mind and my eyes to a whole scene I didn’t really know much about,” admits the vocalist. “We picked up three dance awards in Miami. We did Los Angeles, New York, Kiev, Moscow and London. For clubbers to get the vocals live was something new and it felt incredible being there.”
But, by the time they began recording their new album, Reamonn were going through a difficult patch. “We’d had quite a lot of success but we were spending too much time preoccupied with the peripheral stuff. Something had to happen to reinforce us again as a band,” says the singer. “Moments Like This probably reflects this. It’s about getting over the hard times and how they make you strong. In my lyrics, I need to see the positive side, the hope. We started to find mind music again. We did a lot of things that we’d never done before.”
This involved broadening their horizons and welcoming the input of noted producers and composers Julio Reyes Copello (Nelly Furtado), Brian Howes (Chris Cornell, Daughtry), and the Berman Brothers (Hanson, the Rhythms del Mundo project). “Working with great producers who really got into the music is what we needed. They helped us find that missing piece in the studio. It’s great to have somebody who inspires you even more,” expands Garvey. “Julio is an amazing composer, string arranger. He definitely has a certain magic. Brian is very talented, incredible with vocals. He was trying to kill me on Goodbyes. He pushed me to sing so high.”
However, the perfectionist Reamonn only pronounced themselves satisfied when Chris Lord-Alge (Green Day, Manic Street Preachers) sent in the final mixes. “He put the icing on the cake. He found the sound that we always wanted to hear,” enthuses the singer.
As a lyricist, Garvey often comes up with striking images and celestial metaphors to match his bandmates’ soaring melodies and uplifting choruses, especially on Aeroplane, Free Like A Bird or Open Skies, which featured in The Red Baron, the Nikolai Müllerschön film starring Matthias Schweighöfer and Joseph Fiennes. “Flying is probably the best form of escape you can imagine. Up there, everything is fine, nobody is going to tell you what to do. Up there is freedom, down here is fucking madness, and where are we going? We nearly called the album phoenix because it really felt like a rebirth,” he ventures. “I’m a bit of a sad bastard. As an Irish person, you’re naturally melancholic. But I love it, the Irish art of telling stories, playing the strings of your heart. There was a lot of letting go on the album, getting rid of shit that I’d been carrying around for years and never talked about. One of the songs, Goodbyes, is all about breaking up. Everyone around me seems to be getting divorced at the moment,” says the happily-married vocalist.
On a more positive note, Set Of Keys, the upbeat first single from the album, makes the most of its simple simile. “When I was living in Ireland, having a car was everything,” recalls Garvey. “Set Of Keys has this imagery of everything I have in the world is on this key-ring now. I give you my love and a set of keys, but there’s a certain amount of trust involved in it too. I really love the song, it’s a great rock track.”
Reamonn are undoubtedly a band with universal appeal, in the vein of Coldplay, Creed, Maroon 5 or U2. “We love the idea of maybe playing Wembley Arena or even Slane Castle, because I’ve been there and I know what it’s like to be one of the 70,000 people. I think if we ever got to play Slane, a dream would come true that I’ve been having since I was a kid. I tend to dream reality, things that could happen, so who knows?” |
