Big Boy Foolish: Debut album from 'an up-and-coming band in our sixties’!

If you’re reading this, there’s every chance you’re aware of the power of myth-making in rock ’n’ roll; the allure of bands, artists and personalities who become, with time, part of a scene or city’s local folklore or inherited musical wisdom. Indeed, part of your writer’s post-pandemic preoccupation on these pages has been exploring and recontextualising Cork’s multifarious sonic legacies and their ripple effects on the city’s communities.

But as with any other journalistic or features-writing endeavour, this is ultimately a ‘people’ business, centred around communicating or amplifying perspective, experience and, hopefully, from time to time, inspiration. Ricky Dineen and Liam Heffernan join me over Zoom on a Tuesday morning, during a window they can both manage: the former living and working in Churchfield; the latter doing so in Dingle, Co Kerry.

Their reputations precede them, from their days in Cork’s formative post-punk era in the early 1980s in bands such as Nun Attax, Five Go Down to the Sea? and Mean Features, to Heffernan’s excursions into acting for screen and stage. But this morning, they have the butterflies. Stall the Ball, the debut album of their current-day musical outlet, post-punk duo Big Boy Foolish, is finally unleashed this week after a number of years, via digital platforms and Bandcamp.

“It’s a relief, more than anything else,” says Dineen. “It’s been a long time coming, and the nature of the way it was created means it’s been a long-distance relationship, and a slow process, to be honest with you. The old ways of recording, the old ways of writing, where people are in the same room, we’re jamming, we come up with ideas, we bounce off each other... that wasn’t here on this occasion, basically we were bouncing ideas long-distance.

“I’d throw an idea on to Liam, he’d throw one on to me, we’d add bits, songs would kind-of come together, and they’d be changed so many times before we’d finally agree on a settled or a finished product. It was just a different way of putting things together.

“But I think relief is the main emotion this week, that it’s finally out there. Hopefully ‘d’vinyl’ won’t take long, and we can finally put it to bed and really start working on the next one.”

Heffernan is anticipating the arrival of a test pressing of the upcoming physical release version of the album.

“I think I’m not there yet, ’til I have it in my hands. The digital release is one thing, but just to have the record in my hand, because I like records, y’know, and so hopefully the postman should be up here about 12 o’clock and hopefully he’ll have the test pressing, which I’m very excited about — and nervous about, as well. It is very different. We’re all so isolated, look at us now, we’re all in a little box, y’know, like, just looking at the screen, and here we are, that’s how we communicate. So it’s a very different process.”

The long-player is the sum total of the past few years of writing and recording as a duo, featuring a brace of new music, as well as overhauled versions of previous singles that have had their own lives in the online ether. Self-produced, and mastered by Eoin Hayes of Rebel Recordings, Stall the Ball is the end-game of an iterative process that results from working remotely and having had the time to live with the tunes, as it were.

“Going back to the process, the songs are never finished,” opines Dineen. “If we sat down with all the same songs again, like singles that we put out two or three years ago, we changed them a little bit. There’s bits that were annoying me, and that would be changed, and the songs would keep developing, and we could actually probably put the same songs out forever and just keep changing them as we’re going along, it was that kind of a process.

“You’re never quite happy with what’s finished, and now, like, to be honest with you, I do listen to the album that’s coming out, and there’s loads of bits already that I’d change ... I think it’s time to stop, and just leave it there, maybe play them live, and see what they sound like. It’s kind-of a terrible process. It just keeps on going, ’til you shout ‘stop’ [chuckles].”

“It’s kind-of like clothes,” adds Heffernan. “I think you know, if you look at the clothes you wore 20 years ago, ‘oh my god, what was I thinking?’ The haircut, you might have had, y’know, that’s just the way of getting older, moving on. You just have to park it, as well, at some stage, you just have to let go, and ... ‘g’way now, and earn us some money [laughs]’. Some chance of that.”

With that in mind, the question arises of assembling these tunes into an LP, and creating a coherent start-to-finish listen, how their perspectives, experiences, and process are a factor, and how artwork and design from local scene archivists Siobhán Bardsley and Fiona O’Mahony helps the overall ‘statement’, if any is expressly intended.

“I think if somebody was writing a paper on the album, they would find stuff that’s running through it, y’know, because our observations are our observations, or whatever we’re singing about. Stall the Ball, I think, is so succinct to what it’s about overall, and if you trawl through lyrics or whatever. I’m not somebody to tell you what the definition of the lyrics are, to be honest. even though I wrote them.

“I remember being in school, and people coming in and giving us different definitions about King Lear, saying this, that and the other about one of the characters, and like that, the English teacher just went ‘no, no, no, that’s not it at all! You can’t have it like that. That’s not how they are’. But when you look at it, you could go, ‘actually it is

if you want it to be’. Everybody has their own take on the world, the same words mean different things to different people.

“‘Stall the ball’ is what it’s about. We’re an up-and-coming band in our sixties, like, what else are you gonna do? It’s about, like, ‘look at the fucking stage that we’ve got ourselves into lads, hang on a second’.”

Big Boy Foolish’s debut album, Stall the Ball, is released now on digital platforms, and for download via https://bigboyfoolish.bandcamp.com/. A 12” release is set for later this year, with details of a launch gig to follow.