Photo: Press
Walking On Cars frontman Patrick Sheehy talks a lot about territories. He describes the band's latest album Everything This Way as doing well "in more territories" than just their native Ireland.
And he talks about the band's impending tour of the UK, culminating in their biggest date here at The Roundhouse in Camden on 13 December, as simply taking on another territory. It doesn't feel like a conscious decision, and it may be something about the dialect in the small Irish town of Dingle from which the band hail, but I can't help but think of the language as striking.
He doesn't speak about markets to be broken or audiences to be seduced, but territories: and territories are something you conquer. As we speak the band are about to go on stage at Dublin's Three Arena; the biggest arena in Ireland. And so, from their formation in 2010 to 2016, they have effectively conquered their home territory. The young and frenetic crowd treat them like bona fide national heroes tonight. Their brand of driving guitar and piano-based indie pop lapped up with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved either for American pop starlets or rockers with many more miles on the musical clock.
Now, as they look outwards, thoughts move to the next conquests. The band are in a confident mood; and who can blame them?
"We're a lot more ready than when we started in Ireland," Sheehy explains. "Back then we were really just finding our song and we didn't really have a clear picture of what we want to achieve. Now we're a lot more sure of what we want our live shows to be when we enter these territories and what we want to happen when we go there."
Keyboard player Sorcha Durham agrees that, although they have yet to hit the heights abroad that they have at home, branching out doesn't exactly "feel like starting again".
"We've been able to do a lot of the ground work at home, so when we go out to somewhere like Germany for example, where it's going really well, we're already playing to about 1,500 people. It took us about two or three years to do that at home, so it's all relative."
The band's rise in Ireland, although it has been over a six-year period, has felt meteoric in its trajectory. In 2010 they all retreated to a house in the country to write songs and form the basis of the initial work that has rocketed them to stardom. Looking back, would they have any words of advice for those five naive kids taking their first steps into the sometimes brutal music industry?
"I don't know if there's much I could say, but we've made huge mistakes along the way," says bassist Paul Flannery. "We used to have the band motto 'chalk it down to experience'. We'd make the biggest fuck ups and we wouldn't get too angry about it, we'd just say 'chalk it down to experience'."
One of these moments came when Sheehy was on the dole and accidentally threw the cash they'd earned for a gig into the bin.
"It was €200, which was a huge amount of money for us back then," he recalls. "I went to sign on and threw the envelope with my forms in it in the bin - not realising the money from the gig was in it too. I had nothing then, I was devastated."
So the road to success hasn't always been as smooth as it may have looked from the outside. But they have had a helping hand from some of the other bands who have successfully crossed the Irish Sea in the past, including The Script, who are big fans of their fellow countrymen (and woman).
"There's definitely a close-knit community of Irish bands and we've always been conscious that we want to hit them up for help," Flannery explains. "And now we're going out doing festivals all over Europe it's great because we end up meeting a lot of them. We met The Waterboys recently and they were really supportive and helpful."
As well as bottom-down support, the band has always had a groundswell of loyal fans from Dingle, the small town in Kerry where they grew up, and as Durham explains, that was a double-edged sword in the early days.
"We started out in this place in Dingle called McCarthy's that could only hold about 60 people. And it was mostly just our friends and family at first. But then off the back of that we got to play a few club nights in Dublin and, even though nobody knew us really, it was all part of the learning experience.
"It was good I think to toughen ourselves up a bit in that environment where you don't really have time to soundcheck, you're straight in and out and you don't even know if anyone's even coming. But then we started getting played on the radio and it really changed everything."
"The town used to come up and support us," adds Sheehy. "You'd look out and you'd see your boss or someone in the crowd. So it's been brilliant always to have that kind of support."
That support has taken Walking On Cars a hell of a long way. And, of course, they've earned everything they have through hard work and not a little musical talent. As they branch out in earnest for the first time, you feel they still carry the torch for the tiny town of Dingle with them. They are a band who seem to soak up adoration and good-will and are able to use it as energy to propel them ever onwards. Now, with the wind at their backs and a steely determination in their soul, there seems to be no limit to exactly how far they can go.
