THE HITCHERS
I love music, but sometimes I do wonder whether I love it as much as football. I guess the sweet spot is songs about football, a notoriously difficult art to master. I can think of about four songs about football I really like - at a push, I suppose - and yet only one I really love; ‘Strachan’ by Irish indie punks The Hitchers. It’s a song that implicitly understands all that’s special and important about football. A classic. A song immortal.
Formed in their native Limerick in the late eighties and led by ever constant singer, drummer and principal songwriter Niall Quinn, even putting tales of tiny wee Scotsmen with copper coloured hair aside, The Hitchers own story is one worth telling. It runs from childhood to adulthood, with a whole load of life in-between.
Here’s Niall to walk ‘Indie Heaven’ through it…
Hey Niall. Can you tell me a bit about how The Hitchers came together? I heard growing up you owned two records - a Madness one and a Boomtown Rats one, which explains a lot...
“Ah, we had a few more than that, but they’re the ones I used listen to the most. We had a 7” of ‘Rat Trap’ and me and my siblings used to put it on and play rockstars with pots and pans. The band came together in the late eighties initially. We were kids. 15 and 16 year olds and just a drummer, bassist and vocalist. We struggled to interest guitarists as they’d try out and I’d maybe show them one of our songs and say, “this one goes A-E-D-E, four counts of each” to which they’d say, “okay, then what happens?” and I’d have to say, “nothing. It ends”. So guitarists didn’t really feel there was a lot to get their teeth into with us. But we struggled through a few gigs with friends helping us out before the line-up settled for a while. Thereafter there’s essentially three eras - the five piece, the three piece and finally the four piece which is the one that eventually got a deal of sorts and released a couple of albums.”
You were the principal songwriter - from behind the drums. That's unusual. Did that present any problems, or am I overthinking it?
“No you’re not, and yes it did. Especially in the earlier line up it created some friction and contributed to an implosion of sorts. The friction was understandable as I was bringing in pretty much completed songs and I’m sure it’s tough for any singer to try to run with someone else’s worldview. I was reading over some things recently that took me through those early days. I can sometimes think of that time as an aeon ago when it all really played out over weeks and months. There’s stuff that happened I’m not proud of at all and the main thing that jumped out at me from it all was that the easiest solution, if we’d the time over, would’ve been to kick me out. It would’ve sorted several issues - and I’d have been fine. I’d have dusted myself off and kept going in some way or other. But, later, by the time we were making records and getting interest it’d sort of calcified that I was the main source of songs - which is a pity in many ways, as by then, while my ideas were still very scattergun and of uneven quality I think, Hoss [Carnage, bass] had emerged as a songwriter who could consistently produce absolute tunes and his talents were the lantern under the bushell as it were.”
Speaking of absolute tunes. You wrote ‘Strachan’, an ode to the then-Leeds United playmaker Gordon Strachan and probably the best football-themed pop song ever. Can you think of anyone else who is in contention?
“Of the ‘official’ songs, ‘Three Lions…’ has long been my favourite. Tremendously structured pop song, beautifully rendered. Apparently it finished behind ‘World In Motion’ in some poll of ‘Best England football songs’ thingie which is nonsense. With a non-football lyric on it ‘World In Motion’ wouldn’t have made track four on a New Order EP. Doesn’t lay a glove on ‘Three Lions’. I’ve always been a big fan of Thousand Yard Stares ‘0-0 AET’ and Billy Bragg has some beauts including ‘Upfield’, ‘God’s Footballer’ and of course ‘The Few’. We’ll be here all day if I get into Half Man Half Biscuit, of whom I’m a huge fan and have done tribute shows here in Ireland as they don’t travel far. Aside from the ones that are directly ‘set’ in a football context, their songs are littered with football references.”
More importantly, how does a band from Limerick come to support Leeds United?
“Many if not most Irish people support a UK team, which probably goes back to Match of the Day being beamed into the country back in the sixties and seventies. Popular sides include Man U, Liverpool, Celtic, Arsenal… In truth I’m the only Leeds supporter in the band, there’s a couple of Arsenal as well. When I was small I actually ‘supported’ - if I could find out much about them - QPR, as I got a school bag with their name on it when I was seven. But by the time I was a teenager I was Leeds United because my brothers supported them. I support my hometown team Limerick as well, though they’re effectively non-league at the moment which is some achievement in a country with a ten team Prem where the standard on the field is comparable to England’s League One and where the setup off the field is often several rungs lower. Even without current circumstances most of the clubs exist under permanent threat of extinction in a league that stumbles from one crisis to another. Then of course there’s the FAI who now feature prominently in a business studies module on corporate malpractice and ‘board capture’. Not sure if it’s a ‘How to Avoid’ or a ‘How to Do’.”
Do you follow the Gaelic sports?
“Well, Hoss is a huge hurling fan. I know in large parts of Britain and Ireland that rugby has ‘classist’ connotations, but not so in Limerick at all. It’s Ireland’s rugby capital and it’s always been said that doctors and dustmen play for, support and socialise around the same teams. On the subject of Leeds, I’ve not been over to Elland Road for a game in years but I hope to get back and see them in the Premier League some day. I was over just before lockdown as my teenager had an academy trial but they were away at Forest that weekend. It’s a great town too and I’ve been over to see gigs - Half Man Half Biscuit - in or near there as well.”
There’s a line in that song that goes,"Strachan is stricken…" I think it’s a work of genius. Did you knock off early the day you came up with that one?
“No, that line was in the original draft which I wrote the day after Leeds won the title in 1992. I'd been knocking a concept around for a while of a song about football that wasn't actually about football at all. But I'd made no progress really. At the time The Hitchers were in a real state of flux. We'd lost a couple of founder members and were trying to find our feet. One of the things that early Hitchers lineup - the 5-piece - was really known for was really long song titles like ‘Which Leg of a Chicken is More Tender?’ and ‘There's a Bomb in That Basket of Fruit’, so I wanted to go the other way with one. Being a big Wedding Present fan I knew they’d had a song called ‘Shatner’ and an LP called George Best, so I was appropriating those kind of concepts and iconography…”
I mean, it’s very much your song. It’s your signature song, really…
“So my favourite songwriter [Half Man Half Biscuit’s] Nigel Blackwell has always said, ‘write what you know’ and at at that point Leeds United were playing a substantial part of my life. So I liked the way the surname ‘Strachan’ sounded and as a player he had a presence and influence on things. You could make him the feature in a story. Then, of course, in April 1992, Leeds became champions of England and the next day with a blinding hangover the song spilled out onto the page. It was awful. I mean dreadful. It had a mono-pace and intensity the whole way through, and was modelled a bit on the Teenage Fanclub song ‘Star Sign’. The lads didn't even laugh it off. It was like, “Niall you're drunk, go home” and I totally got that. My thinking was that balladeers and ‘Country & Irish’ acts sing about the prowess of sporting heroes. I was trying to tap into that, but for a supposedly indie-punk band it was massively uncool.”
The song didn’t actually come out until 1997. What took so long?
“It withered on the vine for near to three-years. Much of that time I was in college in Cork and all I had with me in the flat was an acoustic guitar. Then one day it came on the news. Gordon was leaving and going to Coventry City as their new Assistant Manager. It’s not that it was a shock. It wasn't, he'd had back troubles for ages. I was amazed he played for them at all. But I was genuinely moved. It was end of an era stuff. I found myself sitting on the bed with the acoustic guitar, slowly going through the chords looking at three-year-old crap lyrics and asking myself, ‘Is this song really about Gordon Strachan or is he playing the game of his life in the background of a different tale altogether? And if so, ‘What are you trying to actually say?’”
This is really great Niall. It’s like VH1’s ‘Behind The Music’!
“So the line came, “She waited for the match to start to start a fight..." and it spilled out onto the page again. It was a completely different perspective to the boy-talking-to-girl-narrative. Kitchen sink opera, really. I honestly can’t remember playing it for the lads again. I might’ve just done it at a party and one of them heard it. What’s also possible is that within the month we had a couple of shows with a stand in bass player as Hoss had final exams, and as a way to fill out the set I was allowed do this party piece. I recently found a picture of myself playing ‘Strachan’ on my own during a set at a festival in Germany. It made its way into the set that quickly, the May of 1995. Then the lads approved. I think the Germans were a bit bemused.”
Well, that was amazing. Bands from Ireland didn't really feature all that predominantly in England at the time The Hitchers were in your first flourish. What challenges did coming from Ireland present?
“It was tough enough. If we’d been UK based we could probably have gigged non stop and maybe pushed things harder. We weren’t short of offers, but that’s a double edged sword. We’ve friends and colleagues who were in bands that moved over to London and it ultimately caused their demise. If you’re in London you need to be able to support yourself somehow. We were on a tiny label so there was no tour support or advances to live off. As it was we were broke all the time living in Limerick and hiding from welfare on FAS schemes, which enabled us to give rock ‘n’ roll the attention it needed and be available when opportunities came up. So we’d get the ferry over every now and again, do a few shows, sleep on floors of friends’ flats and then get back home to try and earn the bucks on the circuit here to get back over.”
What was your experience of the music press at the time?
“It was similarly double edged. Most media in Ireland ignored us until people started taking an interest in us in the UK. Reviews were probably more important back then too but the magazines took little interest in us until John Peel and a few others like Steve Lamacq started to play us. Then the reviews were as mixed as I’d expected and I’m fine with that. I’d rather a terrible review over no review any day. No review means or meant you don’t exist. Also while they had a lot of clout, it’s not like their word was law. Some of the poor reviews we got came from people who were tipping Kula Shaker as the future of rock ‘n’ roll, so there was a pinch of salt required. We didn’t do too bad - we just needed more of it, but again if you weren’t in their faces and you weren’t hanging round the Camden Falcon then it could be hard to get in on things.”
Can you tell me a little bit about the connection between The Hitchers and The Cranberries? It was awfully sad when Dolores passed...
“Yes it was. Too sad entirely. My eldest is the same age as her youngest I think. I can’t begin to imagine.
Early on in The Hitchers, I was writing a lot, so I joined a second band with Noel [Hogan], Mike [Hogan] and Fergal [Lawler] so I could have another songwriting outlet, and have a go at being a frontman. I’ve always been a bit of a frustrated frontman I think, but in truth it’s just not me. But I gave it a go for a few months and we did a handful of gigs. I then left and said I’d keep an eye and an ear out for prospective replacements and I got a tip-off about a girl who turned out to be Dolores [O’Riordan]. She was a nice kid. I only got to know her a little before our paths diverged, but they made some great records and reached dizzying heights. I wasn’t as impressed with her solo stuff at all in truth and I thought her involvement with stuff like The Voice was regrettable to be honest. I think it’s a bit sad when people of that stature lend credibility to that nonsense. But then she’s back with The Cranberries and it’s like someones sprinkled fairy dust. There’s just that bit of magic there again. It was tremendously sad when that ended as it did. But I dunno if you’ve heard In The End, the last Cranberries record? They gave her some send-off. That is a very fine epitaph indeed.”
This is an extremely nerdy fan question. Who made the puppets for the 'Liver' video? I love those puppets. I’m a puppet guy, y’know?
“That was me putting my art college education to use. I have them about here somewhere, actually. Must find them and take a photo. I made them from a handful of knock-off Action Men. That video is awful! We’d a huge falling out with the guy who recorded it and I eventually got him to give me the raw footage and a friend of mine who knows what he’s doing edited it down with what little usable footage there was. Most of it was garbage but he rescued enough to make a usable video.”
The Hitchers split in 2001. Can you tell me more about that?
“The thing was, by the time we did the second album [1999’s For The Want of Some Better TV] our record company - which was centered around a recording studio - was in trouble. It just wasn’t profitable. So we got the album done and a few weeks later the studio was closed. They released the second album in 1999 but there was little they could do to promote it so it didn’t get the push it needed. By the following spring, Hoss told me he was done. We’d been pulling this thing around, the idea of being in a band, since we were 14, so it was weird but I totally got it. I wanted to draw a line under it then. But Hoss didn’t mean to break the band up. He just wanted to go back to college. So I was talked into keeping going without him. Frank [Ryan, bass] replaced Hoss and we kept going for nearly another year and we had some great times - as we did throughout, by the way, just in case I’m painting all of this as a story of disappointment and failure. We had some really great times, but we were out of steam and rudderless, which new kid Frank noted most keenly.”
What do you mean?
“Well, he’d be trying to organise rehearsals and recording and someone always had something else on. We were just done. We were all in our late twenties, now watching friends getting careers and mortgages. So we were gradually taking on more commitments outside the band. Eventually Andy [Gallagher, vocals and guitar] got a great job opportunity - in France. So we called time on it.”
And yet that’s nowhere near the end of the story…
“So we did a farewell gig organised in under 48 hours that we could’ve sold out twice over. I was a month off 28 having been in this band called The Hitchers since I was 15. It was weird. I’d been used to not going away for weekends, not booking holidays and not making any major life decisions - going to college at 19 aside - without checking in with three or four other people first. I’d turned down a permanent pensionable job with the local council five years earlier because I was signing a record contract that afternoon. That broke my mum’s heart. And now it was over and I was a bit like a dog whose master had died. I was noticed more than once hanging around the hallway or checking the curtains after Final Score on a Saturday evening. Checking for a van that wasn’t coming any more.”
But you went on to make more music, as The Pennywhores or Theme Tune Boy…
“I wasn’t done. I resolved I was going to keep going. I’d been helping Frank’s band Barberskum, playing whatever needed doing, and I even got a couple of offers of drumming jobs from other bands, which was very flattering. I decided to try singing again. Even took lessons. My teacher used make me bring my electric guitar and a mic stand, set them up as if I were onstage and do my la-la-las and sing [The Temptations’] ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ that way. With Eric [Fitzgerald, Hitchers guitarist] and a couple of friends we did a couple of EPs under the name The Pennywhores, but by then we were all crossing the 30 mark. There’s three and four weddings a year to go to and babies are coming. It’s hard to build momentum.”
It’s hard to give up something so important as music…
“Later into the noughties I started recording and writing under the name Theme Tune Boy and have done so since. Sometimes Theme Tune Boy is a band and sometimes it’s just me and that gives it the versatility it needs at my time of life. We were building momentum before the COVID lockdown but over the course I had an accident where I picked up a nasty infection via a hand injury which has basically left me learning to play guitar all over again. But I’ll get there…”
Bloody hell.
”I’m still in touch with all The Hitchers guys. We never made any money so there was little to fall out over. They’re my best friends still and I feel lucky and honoured to say that because it might not have turned out that way at all. There was some crucial junctures down the years where I let them down terribly with either my own behaviour or the shabby way people exited the band and I have to own that. Sometimes when I look back at it all, it can seem like we were mad to think it could’ve worked out, and we were a million miles from anything happening. Then I remember other little bits and it seems we were possibly just a phone call or an introduction away from a bunch of pieces clicking into place. Its funny, but for a band it took seven years to get a deal I reckon we got to London a year too early. The fact is - we had a shot and I drank it.”
Can you talk a bit about that?
“By the time we made our first trip to London in the spring of 1997 I’d been burning the candle at both ends for nearly two years. We’d been picking up interest on the back of airplay from Peel and the album was out in Ireland. Some shows were booked and we went over to play in a couple of buzzy circuit venues in Islington and Camden. I actually don’t remember a lot of the trip. I remember being in what appeared to be a kegroom that served as our ‘dressing room’ with our manager begging me to stop drinking and eat some pizza. But I couldn’t stand up, much less play the drums. It’s a pity I was in such a destructive mindset. I reckon if you’re going to jump off a building the decent thing to do is check you’re not going to land on anyone. I landed on people. Good people who only wanted the best for me and had worked far harder than I had to bring the whole thing to the place it had gotten to.”
I mean, I wouldn’t beat yourself up. It happens to young people.
“But I didn’t even learn a lesson. At least I wasn’t allowed sing live anymore but I kept going like that for the rest of the year. We did our last show of 1997 on New Year’s Eve in Ennis. The following morning, in the flush of New Year’s resolutions, I said I was done drinking at gigs. I started looking after myself a bit better. Had a dry January and, doing scarcely any more than I had been before, lost 19lbs in 31 days. The Hitchers’ best live performances all came in 1998 and 1999. We were extremely tight and like a well oiled machine and some of the new songs were really good. I could still take a drink - and still do! - but not until the work was done. But it was all too late. Our chance was gone and that’s on me.”
Well, for what it’s worth, I think The Hitchers have got a decent legacy and created a load of things to be proud of…
“Not to make myself out to be a basketcase, but there probably just wasn’t a career there for me. I was just a bit of a messer and immature at that stage and I probably have the type of personality and inclinations that it’s no harm at all if there’s somewhere I need to be at 8.30 in the morning. If that’s a pity then it’d be worse if I didn’t acknowledge it. I do feel bad for the lads because there might’ve been a career there for them. I remember I used worry that Andy - who can play anything - would be seen by someone and get a transfer up a few divisions. He’d complement any band’s line-up. Similarly Eric had that too and a no nonsense pop-sensibility that was the final jigsaw piece for The Hitchers and that could’ve seen him go into production too. Hoss, as I’ve already mentioned, was the proper songwriter and deserved to have had a band focused on that. But, to wrap up on a happier note, nobody died and we all meet up and laugh about it from time to time. We get together every couple of years and do a gig or two. It’s great fun and we get to see everybody. We’ve talked about recording something again and I’d never say never but not this year and probably not next.”
Isn’t that what it’s all about? Can we end by you telling us what everyone is up to now?
“So, as to the guys who played on the albums, Andy still lives in France and plays music frequently. He’s working in the aviation business. Hoss lives in Dublin where he has a young family and works in IT. Eric lives in Limerick, works in media, is a sought after DJ and occasionally does club nights with me under the name Decks&DrumsLK where Eric spins the tunes and I whallop a drum kit and for some reason people seem to love it. It is tremendous fun. Diving deeper, Frank, who replaced Hoss, is a noted astronomer and astro-photographer. He lives just outside Limerick. Benny [McCormack, guitar] who played in the early line-up lives in County Galway and has a successful radio show. Eoin [O’Kelly, vocals], our original singer, produces documentaries for RTE’s classical station LyricFM in Limerick, and Donnacha [Twoomey, guitar] - who played at our earliest gigs and appears on our first recording - lives in Kerry and is still writing, recording and releasing new music…”