"Livin' The Vida Loko"	Local Ireland
Daniel Hegarty

From the break-up of A House comes a collective called Lokomotiv, at the helm are Fergal Bunbury and Dave Couse. There are those bands that manage to remain unscathed through the sometimes-tortuous times that come with being involved in the music rat race. Looking back on Irish music in the 80s and 90s, there are few that survived without accumulating more than a few blemishes to their names. The Stars of Heaven and The Blades are two of the bands that history tends to look kindly upon, but for the countless others, things don't seem quite as pleasant. Many of these names come up in conversation, none of whom have managed to leave much of a legacy as they either burnt out or vanished. Another band that you could add to the above is A House. While success came in various shapes and quantities, the way in which they managed to hold things together in the latter stages of their career was admirable. "At the time that A House broke up we'd decided that this was what we wanted to do, and we'd taken it as far as it could go" Bunbury explains. "Rather than fizzle out, we wanted to break up when we felt that we'd just made our best album, and at the top of our game." These days the term collective is often used out of context, but that's exactly what Fergal and Dave have constructed in Lokomotiv. While there are those links to the old A House sound, their current guise offers them more options towards where they can go in the future. "After A House broke up, everyone was doing their own thing. I was writing songs and so was Dave, so we just decided to get together and do this album. It was nice to do this and get away from the four or six-piece rock band. There was no huge master plan; we just wanted to use different sounds, different instruments and a new approach. "Me and Dave are the core people, but we draft in other people to play or sing here and there. Dave doesn't sing on all the tracks, so there's quite a different mood off some of the songs than on 'Next Time Around'. I think that is one of the closer ones to the way A House sounded, in a loose way." Lokomotiv released their debut single 'Next Time Around' last September as a limited edition on the UK-based Shifty Disco label. Although most people weren't aware who was behind Lokomotiv (Dave and Fergal called themselves Tony and Frankie Furnhill initially!), the single sold out within weeks. "It was a limited edition single, so it wasn't like a full release, which suited us. Shifty Disco just rang us up and asked us did we want to do this and we said 'why not?' "What we kind of wanted was it to be judged on its own terms. We knew it would come out eventually who we were, or people who knew A House would recognise us in pictures. We just didn't want any of the baggage, and let the single stand on its own two feet." If there's a mid-point between a rebirth and a metamorphoses, then this would be the best way to view what Couse and Bunbury have created with Lokomotiv. There isn't too much to go on just yet, but what has been unveiled sounds like something that deserves a great deal of attention. "We're 95% finished recording an album the way we wanted to. There was complete freedom making the whole record, so we decided to stick with what we felt about the songs and not change them for any stupid reasons. "These days it's much easier to make and release a record, and get it played on independent radio. You can just go home and make a record on a PC, so you can do stuff that was never possible before."