POWER, CORRUPTION AND NOISE
By Olaf Tyaransen
THE
RACKETEERS INTERVIEW
IN HOT PRESS MAGAZINE:
15 November 2006
Much to his chagrin, frustration and occasional amusement, a lot of people have been coming up and congratulating DIY rocker Eamonn Dowd recently. After almost a decade of relative obscurity, his outfit The Racketeers are finally having hit records in Europe, Asia and America, selling-out big tours, and getting celebrity endorsements and name checks in all the right places.
Except,
of course, they’re not. The
Racketeers are as worthy but obscure as ever.
It’s just a little mix-up with the name.
“With
The Raconteurs playing here, there and everywhere else, it certainly doesn’t
fucking help,” Dowd sighs. “It
started a few months ago – people saying, ‘Ah Eamonn, I heard your crowd on
Tom Dunne the other night’. And
I’m going, ‘I don’t think so. I
haven’t released a record in two years, and I can’t see Tom digging me out
from the bottom of the pile!’ So
there’s been a lot of confusion.”
Just
to add a touch more, his band’s fourth independently released album, Silver
and Dust, sees them trading under the newly expanded moniker ‘Eamonn Dowd
& The Racketeers’. Why the
name change?
“Well,
I’m the only surviving member from the original crew, and it’s kinda been my
baby for a long time,” he explains. “But
the name thing really came about
because I’ve been doing a lot of solo acoustic gigs around Europe over the
last couple of years. And I’ve
been billed as ‘Eamonn Racketeer’.
“But
a lot of the promoters I’ve been dealing with would be from these small towns
in Germany or wherever, and they’d print up their own fliers and put me into
the local paper as ‘Eamonn Dowd from The Racketeers’. So it kinda made sense.”
There’s
been quite a few Racketeers over the last 10 years, including at various stages
Engine Alley’s Emmaline Duffy-Fallon, the Big Geranium’s Neil McCartney,
Keltic Dub Posse’s Alan Madigan, and the ubiquitous Dave Clarke.
Currently, Brian O’Toole is on bass and Chris Teusner is on drums, but
it’s essentially always been Dowd fronting an ever changing line-up.
“They
come and they go,” he chuckles. “I
was thinking of sitting down and trying to make up a list. I’d say it’s up
to 15 or 20 at this stage.”
Musically,
Silver and Dust is a solid, balls out,
three chords and the bitter truth, rock & roll album – country rock tinged
with whiskey and experience. Dowd
has a harsh, raspy voice, but somehow it works.
He sounds like an Irish Steve Earle.
Lyrically,
there are shades of everybody from Bukowski, Burroughs and Behan to Cash, Cave
and Crowley (‘Don’t Let Me Fall’ features the brilliant lines “I
dreamed last night/ That you were uptight/ with the succubus/ under my bed”). However, while previous albums have always been quite
personal, Dowd insists that he’s mostly storytelling this time out.
“I
consciously decided to write songs that weren’t autobiographical in any way
because I’m sick of that shit. There’s
only so many songs you can write about drinking and falling over and bad women.
Ha, ha! What I decided to do
was to write songs about characters – whether they’re either historical
characters or fictional characters. And
that was fun because then I felt I could write about anything.”
The
Racketeers will be busy over the coming months, with shows in the US, Canada,
Germany, Sweden, Holland, France and the UK already pencilled in.
Whether playing solo or with the band, Dowd estimates that he usually
plays 80 – 100 gigs a year. While not a mega rock star, he’s certainly a busy one.
“The
solo acoustic gigs kind of keep me going,” he explains. “We’ve always had pockets of fans scattered all over the
place. I’ll often just pack my
guitar, grab a cheap flight and go play some gigs.”
Although
they’ve now got a record company in Germany, Dowd handles most of the
Racketeers’ affairs himself. Fiercely
independent-minded, he has no manager, booking agent or A&R man. All of this
adds to the madness and stress of
an already precarious on the road existence (he writes a hilarious tour diary on
theracketeers.com). No longer
a spring chicken, though, he says he’s starting to slow down.
“Touring’s
always a bit fucking crazy, but I’m starting to take it easier these days,”
he admits. “I’m getting close
to that danger spot around the forties when people start dropping off.”
He
knows quite a few people who’ve died or burnt out from living the life, but
was particularly shocked by the recent death of former Swell Maps’ frontman
Nikki Sudden in New York. “I’ve
been intrigued by him for a long time. Probably
since the late 70’s. He was very
indie and very DIY. He influenced
people like Sonic Youth and Mercury Rev.
“I
got to know him a little last year. We
had a correspondence going on for over a year.
He was supposed to be coming to Ireland and I was going to go to the
States, but nothing ever connected. But
eventually he came over and I set up a tour for him. He did a few dates around the country, we had a great time,
and we recorded a song together. And then he went back to the States in great
form. And the night before he was due to leave New York and swing by here again,
he just fucking died. He died
sitting at a table, reading a book. Heart attack.
So that was a bit sad.
“He
was somebody that I always admired, because he was always on the road, either
with a band or solo. He did his
thing. He did about 20 solo
albums.”
Dowd
says that the future of The Racketeers will simply be more of the same –
releasing albums and touring wherever and whenever as much as possible.
“This is what I do,” he shrugs.
“I’m a musician, a rock & roll singer.
I never really had a deal so I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Not too concerned about hitting Number One then?
“You know, it would almost be terrible to have a
hit after all these years,” he laughs, looking vaguely horrified at the
prospect. “I mean, what would I
fucking do? Nah, as long as I’m releasing records I’m happy with, and
getting out there gigging, I’m cool with that.”
HOT PRESS interview September 1999
Eamonn Dowd has more stories than you've had hot
dinners. No sooner have I finished our half-hour interview than he turns to me
and smiles, "So, you don't want to hear about how our drummer got stabbed
in Finland, and how he got arrested the next day?"
Hmmmm, my keen journalistic instincts and probing news sense have obviously
drawn these confessions from him. Or, more likely, Eamonn has a knack for
spinning a good yarn, as evidenced by his band, The Racketeers' two albums to
date, full of the kind of lovelorn balladry and beer sodden dreams that
make for compelling listening. And that's before the stabbing incident.
The Racketeers have been together for about three years now, and already have
two albums under their belt, 1997's "By Hook Or By Crook" and
"Long Time Gone" released earlier this year. They have traveled the
completely independent route, releasing both albums under their own steam, with
Eamonn admitting he went into debt to ensure the albums' release.
"Long Time Gone" was well received by the critics, including yours
truly, but due to a distribution problem, was unavailable in record stores for
some time after it's release, which obviously impacted badly on sales. However,
Eamonn is still rather upbeat and is planning a possible Christmas EP to build
up momentum. Ciaran Donnelly, who previously worked with Sinead O Connor, is
making a video for the song "Million Miles Away", and The Racketeers
are planning the first Irish tour in some time over the festive season.
"I don't know if you can really tour here anymore" he opines. "A
lot of the venues are just doing clubs now or else full-on show-bands like
Abbaesque or Smokey. It's a bit of a strange situation to be in, that we are
doing so many gigs abroad and yet we can't get on TV here."
The Racketeers grueling tour schedule has taken it's toll on the band whose
line-up has always been somewhat fluid,as Eamonn explains. " The first time
we went to Europe we did something like 35 dates in seven weeks and that was too
hectic. That claimed the first bass player" he chuckles.
Since then, there have been many coming's and goings (former Engine Alley
skin-thumper Emmaline Duffy-Fallon is another who has fallen by the wayside) but
the line-up now seems more solid than it has done in some time, including former
Big Geranium Neil McCartney on fiddle.
Eamonn's songs tend, to these ears, to be whiskey-soaked ballads, with a guitar
sound reminiscent of Neil Young's finer moments as Dowd takes on the role of the
universal barfly. I said as much in my review of their second album earlier this
year, and Eamonn chuckles as he recalls seeing it.
"We were sitting in this bar, reading it, and Alan was saying 'Jesus
Eamonn, if anyone wrote that in the fucking paper about me, I'd fucking kill
him. He's calling you an alcoholic.' I was trying not to look at that, I
was looking at the fact that we got 9 out of 12 on the dice," he laughs
Dowd admits, that yes, Neil Young is a reference point, but maintains that Dylan
is a bigger influence on his work. "The songs come from a folk end of
things, but I didn't want it to be twee and I didn't want it to be too acoustic
based. I like Neil Young and I like the old country stuff, people like Gram
Parsons and George Jones. But I was also quite conscious of having an Irish
element in there, and this was all pre-Corrs and all that."
The Irish element has worked well for The Racketeers in Europe, particularly in
Sweden, he maintains, where all things Irish are in vogue.
"In the past 10-15 years Sweden has changed. A lot of bars have opened up
and many of them are run by Irish people, and they seem to have gotten into the
whole Irish thing," he explains. "Then you have all this crap like
Riverdance that people latch onto and think that's part of the Irish thing. I
usually end up explaining when I've had a few too many pints on me that it's all
shit and they should buy a Luke Kelly record instead."
It's at this point we close the interview, before Dowd refers to Dave Clarke's
rather too intimate encounter with a naked blade. Explain yourself Eamonn. "Klarkey, our drummer, got stabbed in Helsinki in April," recalls
Eamonn. "He got stabbed in the back by a lady, literally. Then, the
following day a drug deal was going on in the apartment downstairs, and this guy
got two bullets in the back of the head. So Klarkey got questioned as to why he
had a stab-wound in his back. He was fine though, it wasn't a deep wound - he
could still play" No wonder they found it difficult to get a regular line-up to go on the road.
John Walshe