"Whipping Boy Interview"	The Sunday Times
Mick Heaney	23 April 2000

After failing the first time around Whipping Boy have returned unbowed, reports Mick Heaney Ferghal McKee talks about having “the Bono disease”, of wanting to save the world form a terrible fate. But for the past five years the lead singer with the Dublin band Whipping Boy has had little opportunity to preach on globalisation or campaign for Third World debt relief; he has instead become yet another stalled Irish rock artist adjusting to life after a failed big-label deal, working a day job an raising a child. As his group independently release their self-titled third album, their first since 1995, it can seem the only trait McKee shares with the U2 singer is a propensity for self-consciously portentous statements. “We’ve all had to do things that we didn’t have to do before,” he says about making the new disc under his own steam. “Where we used to live on the shreds of a fantasy, intoxicating substances and the whole dream of rock’n’roll, now it’s just real life. But I think it’s freer now than it ever has been.” Confident speeches about new-found freedom after a barren big-label experience are the Irish rock world’s catechism of cliché. But as McKee talks sweepingly about rock’n’roll and rebellion, he and Colm Hassett, Whipping Boy’s low-key drummer, seem untroubled by their independent status since departing Sony Music, which released the band’s previous album, Heartworm. There was much expectation about that release but little success. “We came back from touring with Lou Reed in 1996-97 and we just knew it wasn’t happening, because the management had changed. So we just said, let’s get out of here boys. It was pretty amiable parting. They paid us off and we said thank you very much. It was a valuable experience for the fact that you found out how they destroy music and how they destroy bands.” McKee admits that the quartet – also comprising guitarist Paul Page and bassist Myles McDonnell – didn’t really play the big-label game. “There was the whole corporate thing of needing to impress,” he says, “but the idea of impressing people wasn’t Whipping Boy.” It didn’t help that the band played relatively few tours in support of the album. But McKee feels Sony misunderstood Whipping Boy, with the marketing men trying to fit them into areas they weren’t suited to. “There was this constant thing about having to write a Top 10 hit and that wasn’t what we were about,” he says. They may be level-headed about it now, but after the Sony experience the band became disillusioned and disenchanted, and drifted apart. Hassett stopped listening to music. McKee, who had previously been infamous for shock tactics such as stripping on stage, made an unlikely but cathartic retreat in to family life. “I looked after my kid, got a mortgage and got a job as a chef, but was still writing in the kitchen. I suppose having a daughter got rid of a lot of debris in my life. That was the most important thing for me. “I was someone who had said on record that I didn’t want children, then suddenly I had one and I recognised I was a mass of contradictions.” The combination of family responsibility, self-examination and rediscovery of a passion for music has resulted in the new album sounding less bombastic and struttingly self-important than its predecessor. Hassett stresses that it is a crafted piece of work, but the more polished numbers, such as the string-laden One To Call My Own, lumber under their own weight, and it is the ragged guitar-driven numbers, such as Pat the Almighty and That Was Then, This Is Now that make an impact. But where Heartworm’s big-rock angst fitted in with 1995’s post-grunge fallout, the new album sounds out of time. Neither McKee nor Hassett are bothered by any apparent lack of amass appeal. Following their Faustian flirtation with top labels, the band are taking the opposite approach, the grass-roots, DIY route of cult bands such as Canada’s Godspeed You Black Emporer!, who recently played to packed Irish houses. “It doesn’t matter whether you like them or not, the whole idea is that you don’t need the old media, that it can be done through word of mouth or the internet,” says McKee excitedly. “People can record an album on a minidisc and sell 30,000 copies. You’re making your money and you’re being an artist.” If McKee appears content aiming lower in terms of numbers, he is still driven by the injustices and processed homogenisation of the Celtic tiger. “Nobody supports people on the margins in this country, people who want to discover their own dreams or make good music,” he says. But if this motivates his music, the former wild child has calmed down in other ways. “You have to mellow with a child, but the mellowness is rechannelled in to another more studied thinking process as to why you want to carry on. You could just flitter away, but I couldn’t do that. I want to enhance life for myself and other people in another way.” We’ll soon see whether he can.