"Skin Up!"	Hot Press
Stephen Robinson	28 February 2001

Gerry Owens is the songwriter, producer and sometime vocalist with Irish music's best kept secret, Skindive. Gerry Owens looks the part. I arrive in the hotel bar for our meeting and it's clear that there's only one person in the room who looks like a rock star. Pencil-thin, scarlet-haired and possessed of a static nervous energy that makes the air around him almost crackle. It's immediately clear where the energy that drives 'tranquillizer', skindive's first single from their forthcoming album comes from. A tour de force of cinematic, epic trip-hop combined with industrial-strength guitars and featuring the needle-sharp vocals of Danielle Harrison, it attained Single of the Fortnight status at Hotpress, when it enjoyed a limited release last year. -[solid state pacifier] The band's eponomously-titled debut album is set for release in April on Chris Blackwell's Palm Pictures label. Two years in the making and recorded in pert in Carlow, Dublin, New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver, productions credits include Adrian Sherwood, Alan Branch, Skip McDonald, Gerry Owens and orchestration of a 42 piece ensemble by Nick Ingman. So far, so impressive. So how come we've never heard of skindive? "I get asked this a lot," smiles the softly-spoken Owens. " Skindive have existed for about three years and for a while we did the local gig thing, but it wasn't really going anywhere, in the sense that we didn't receive a lot of interest from home based record companies. Eventually we got together enough money to do a couple of gigs in New York, and Eric Silver of Palm saw us at Arlene's Grocery. That led to a gig at LA's Viper Rooms, by which time Chris Blackwell had decided to sign us, so it took us about four years to become an overnight success!" That was in 1998, so why have we had to wait nearly three years for skindive's debut? "Initially I retired to a studio in a cottage in Carlow for six months, writing and laying down tracks during the week and recording them with the band on Thursdays, and sending them to Plam on Fridays. At this stage I was basically working on the premise that these sessions were for demo purposes and we would re-cord the tracks at a later date, but typically it turned out that these tracks captured what I wanted so it was just a question of production. That involved months of travelling to London and the US meeting various producers, which was a little strange having basically lived like a hermit for six months. It was quite a surreal experience: imagine everything you've ever dreamed about rock'n'roll excess and multiply it by ten!" Okay, I'm imagining, but how about some details? "Well I was trying to produce an album remember, which is difficult when you're in a recording studio in LA where there's a jacuzzi filled with naked women and people are using coffee grinders but they're not grinding coffee! I've a girlfriend for Christ's sake! If you could take the weather and put it somewhere else.... "But while it was great fun and I met some really talented people, I didn't find anybody who I could work with until I hooked up with Adrian Sherwood, Alan Branch and Skip McDonald. Then it was a question of working from 10am till 3am for a year and a half. We spent two months in Windmill Lane using both studios to record a 42 piece orchestra conducted by Nick Ingham, who has worked with Portishead and on the music for Shakespeare In Love. After stints in London and Vancouver we finally finished the album in January 2000. It was a pretty heavy schedule, but after LA, everything's okay!" A Mammoth undertaking, then, and it shows. Songs like 'swallow', 'skindive' and 'no more good guys' have all of the energy of 'tranquillizer' and in addition boast a subtlety and style that literally took the breath away from that listener. What sort of musical background has inspired Owens' work? "I've played music since I was a kid and before skindive I was into industrial metal acts like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. I'm also influenced by film music, and by people like Burt Bacharach and Henry Mancini, so I guess it's a concoction of all of that. "To be honest, if Skindive is a dictatorship then yes, I'm Stalin, but the band bring they're own energies too." While the epic sound the produce can be traced to Owens' cited influences, the lyrics are harder to fathom. Where does Owens find inspiration for his lyrics? "From everyday life I suppose....I'm slightly dyslexic so I don't read a lot of books, but I love film. I particularly like older films which assume a degree of intelligence in the viewer; a lot of what's being done nowadays is categorised and sanitised so it can be slotted in to a particular genre. We don't have an angle, in fact the music is the angle. Also, I don't like to be simplistic since an element of obscurity enables the listener to identify with the lyric in a more personal way. I find writing lyrics to be the most difficult part of the songwriting process actually, but it's also the most fulfilling." Is it true that you've sung with Bono in the studio? "Oh. I don't want to get into this, I hate people who drop names...." (I push him on the question and he relents.) "What happened was that I was working in a studio in the US, and Bono and Wim Wenders arrived to record a song for the soundtrack of Million Dollar Hotel. Bono was wandering around the room singing away and towards the end of the take he beckoned me over and nodded that I should follow his vocal, so what was I gonna do? Bono thrusts a mic under your nose and, ah, you sing, y'know." Skindive play the PoD on Thursday, Feb 15th. The Forum, Waterford on Friday, Feb 16th and Cuba in Galway on Wednesday, Feb 21st. 'Tranquillizer' is out now while the album Skindive is released in April on Palm Pictures.