WILDING BUNCH

Rip It Up, Issue 179, 1 June 1992, Page 10

WILDING BUNCH

The way Michael O'Neill tells it, you could be forgiven for < thinking the Pope got the wrong man when he canonised the bloke from Opus Dei a few weeks ago. If John Paul had had his wits about him he would've given the metaphysical gong to Mark Tierney, producer-at-large. Laurie Mains probably missed his chance to get the greatest All Black captain of modem times .. .

Yes, O'Neill can't say enough about Tierney—and with good reason. Not only did the media assassin give up the traditional Christmas-New Year break to help These Wilding Ways push through their debut album Paul in a mere three weeks, but he managed to bring a focus to a band which had really only been able to count on the fact that O'Neill seemed to write good songs on a consistent basis. The songwriting thing, which O'Neill doesn't seem to fully understand himself, came late in life, in rock 'n' roll terms. He had his first bash straight out of school with the Screaming Mee Mees, a band which never seemed to turn a huge amount of energy and a lot of potential talent into the results everyone expected. They were widely perceived as four arrogant , brats:

"Oh, we were!" O'Neill grins. "I think it was partly because we never made a conscious decision to be in a band — I was only in when it started at school because my brother had built me a left-handed guitar and bought me an amp. What we were doing seemed to work and we saw no need to work on it and improve it. "With These Wilding Ways there's no aspect of trying to please people or do the right thing, which is a contrast to the Mee Mees. We were very influenced and I was probably

the most to blame. I'd hear something I loved and then couldn't wait to get my hands on a guitar so I could write something like it. Then I'd get pissed off when someone picked the influence!" The brother who made that first left-handed guitar, Paul O'Neill, died in 1983. Michael took it hard at the time and Paul's name became the title of the album partly because Michael saw it as the album Paul had always wanted his younger sibling to make. "He was very disappointed with the Mee Mees' album at the time, but now we've got an album where we got what we wanted, so it was just basically saying 'cheers' to him. "The Mee Mees album was full of great songs, but it just didn't work. I don't own a copy now, I didn't like recording it and the first time I heard it played back I was really disappointed. We'd just been part of something that just didn't represent us." After Propeller Records and its roster of acts made a quite impressive job of falling over in unison, O'Neill retired to twiddling and writing tunes on his guitar, which he'd always done, but also singing • and writing lyrics for his own benefit. He also got out there in the world, travelled and worked (although, if the truth be known, he wasn't , exactly the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic). It gave him

something to write about. - "I'm glad that I finished then and had nothing to do with music for seven years. That whole period gave me the input to write. The difference is that I'm writing about things I feel strongly about, rather • than things I feel energetically about." He kept it to himself until a couple of buddies, Jason Dempsey and Glen Robson, after listening to an O'Neill sermon on the state of music in 1989, suggested he do something about it. "They said, 'why not form a band?' Jason wanted to learn the bass and Glen could play 'Stairway To Heaven', so I thought well, that'll do." A few months later they were opening for U2 and Western Springs, in front of 80,000 people. O'Neill had sent a demo tape "as a joke — we didn't expect anything" to U2's tour promoters in Australia. They got the gig. That hasn't been the only unexpected break. The band's debut single, 'Can't Control Her', did the unbelievable and made mainstream radio playlists and• another demo tape dropped in the mail won O'Neill a publishing deal with Mushroom Music. Drummer Wayne Bell and teenage jazz guitar prodigy Joel Haines joined up and These Wilding Ways went on to be.. . somewhat unfashionable. The low profile suited O'Neill and it was probably a goodthing for the band which has only recently found its feet. The hints of dance production introduced by Tierney have opened up songs like Take My Hand' and the re-recorded 'Can't Control Her'. "Manchester" isn't just something you buy at Smith & Caughe/s. It's a

rhythm section thing and, logically enough, largely the result of close collaboration between Tierney and Bell.

"Mark's first job was to mix Take My Hand'," says O'Neill. "Wayne had already done the funky

drummer thing and Mark came in with all his gear and put a drum pattern behind Wayne's and said what do you think of this? He sold me from that point on, because I'd always been a bit scared of technology.

"Mark would sometimes look straight past me to discuss something with Wayne, which was a smart thing *- to do. He sussed out very quickly that if it was up to me I'd just load everything onto the track extra harmonies and guitar parts — I'm terrible like that. He chose the songs from the ones we presented him with too. I would have just picked all the fast, grunty ones, but he went for a variety of different keys and -. tempos, which is what's really made the album work. It's varied but cohesive." One thing it's not hard to pick up . from Paulis the fact that O'Neill's still less than comfortable with singing. It's not necessarily a bad thing. "I don't think I'll ever be comfortable singing. I can sing the songs I write, but I can't sing covers — and we've tried! I just seem to have to believe in what I'm singing about to be able to do it. People have said I should take lessons and I've always meant to, but I can write a song and sing it. I don't know if I want to be comfortable with singing — the day I was and didn't believe in what I was singing, I'd lose the passion. If I didn't have that, I couldn't be a frontman anyway." The songs on Paul don't sound like the sort of work of a rock frontman — more like a bunch of tunes someone's gone away and written in a bedroom then presented to the band and the producer— which is pretty much the case. O'Neill, as chirpy and full of chat as his songs are intense and personal, decided after he got the publishing deal that yes, okay, he was a musician and he'd have a crack. ; "It's taken us a long time to get any sort of profile and I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but I can't wait to go down the line soon on tour, because I know that some of the people we play to are going to go out and buy that album. I just want to play those songs to as many people as went to listen to them."

RUSSELL BROWN