Kieran Hurley, lead singer of The Love Buzz on songwriting during COVID, developing atmosphere in a live performance and the next adventure.
by Cormac McCarthy (Music Editor)
Kieran phones me at 3 o’clock on a Tuesday, just as I’m exiting my lecture. We haven’t organized a meeting yet, but he asks whether I’m free to meet in The Roundy. I have other plans, but the University Express comes first, especially when I’m about to interview the lead singer of the hottest thing to come out of Cork since the plans to build an incinerator were unveiled.
We head upstairs, to the pub’s unassuming venue room where the curtains are drawn, the light trickling in through the cracks. I’m drinking a cup of tea; Kieran had already had his before I arrived. We settle into the interview and I crack into the biscuit that has come with the tea.
The band, a three-piece turned four-piece, have been going for a few years now, building up their reputation around Ireland and moving slowly into the UK. The Love Buzz are known for their full-on, somewhat bellicose, stage persona while balancing that with their captivating musical stylings. “The dynamic on stage is a lot different than to the rehearsal room. When we go on stage, we really do switch into something else. Where as in the rehearsal rooms, it’s a lot more chilled out.”
The writing process is also a more relaxed affair. “We don’t jam very well, and when we do jam we don’t really write anything. The best way is for one of us to write something at home and then come in. We sit on things for years. The new songs, we write them and then play them for a year and then record it. To record a song its better just to know it very well.”
Covid certainly had a benefit to Kieran’s writing ability, scheduling writing times for himself and churning out potential songs. “The first EP, “Candy Flip”, was very much a group effort, but when it came to [the second EP], it was during COVID, so I sat at home every day, writing every day. There’s some songs I would write and I don’t want to record them. The lads would egg me on because there’s some goofy songs that we’ve written over the while.”
While the music comes easily, Kieran has a different method for writing the lyrics. “I don’t like to write lyrics myself. The last lyrics session we did was us standing around in the gaff, just with a notepad for about three hours. Just spitballing. It’s basically like a writer’s room. I felt like I was in The Simpsons”
They’ve grown musically and commercially over the years but have they figured out who and what they are? “As you get older, you become more of an artist and define your sound better. There’s a lot of bands under 25 that are figuring it out and then there’s an older crew who have completely figured it out. I don’t really know if we have. We’re always trying to decide what people like about our music, but to figure out what people like and keep doing it is stupid. To keep progressing is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to mess things up a bit.”
While the band are known for being primarily a punk band, they are always venturing into different genres. They recently released what had previously been a vinyl-only single “Kaleidoscope” on all digital platforms. It incorporates a more electronic/trip-hop sound into proceedings. “All of us want different things, and what ends up happening, just happens. Oisín, the new guitarist, is so new, he’s trying to figure us out. Aidan [the bassist] is a really raw creative force, like very experimental. And then I just try to write a pop song.”
The band themselves have made quite an impact on the local Cork scene. They supported the legendary Sultans of Ping last Friday in the Opera House. Further than that, their influence on youth culture in Cork is quite something. “We went to see a band called Pebbledash in May. I was watching them and then had to go for a pee and a pint halfway through their set, which isn’t very nice but you know, duty calls. But then I came back, and someone was like ‘They just covered your song Harp’. I felt so bad. Even to think that a band would cover our song in Fred Zepplin’s is mad to me. But I don’t want to let it get to my head at all. I wish I caught it.”
Like any artist on the train of momentum, Kieran has big plans in sight for the band but is very careful with being mindful of himself. “We try to put it all in adventures. A good mentor that we had before, she said to pick your adventures and manifest them. Because that used to work for us before. Supporting the Sultans of Ping in the Opera House makes me feel that Cork is [motions ticking sign] for me now. So to play a load of festivals over the summer, in Europe, Ireland and the UK; that’s an adventure. And then after that, the next adventure would be to go back and record a whole load of music. We’re going to release an album next, all new stuff with stuff that we’ve been playing for a while. There’s a song on there that I wrote when I was 18.”
The Love Buzz’s 2023 is sure to be a wild one.
