All tomorrow’s parties: Super Extra Bonus Party interview

With a sound that could only be described as a polyphonic orgasm, Super Extra Bonus Party are one of the most exciting acts to grace the Irish scene in recent years. Their debut self-titled album received critical acclaim across the board and scooped this year’s Choice Music Prize.

However the band has no illusions of having reached any dizzying heights. While humbled and gracious of the win, it hasn’t opened any magic doors. The monetary value of the prize (10,000 blips, not too shabby) is the only aspect which has made any real impact on the band’s progression. “It’s not like it’s been mind- blowing or thrown us into anything of epic proportions” Cormac, the bands multi- instrumentalist DJ, tells me, “financially we’re able to do more gigs abroad so its had a positive effect in that sense.”

The Boners, as they like to call themselves, will soon be leaving the comforts of their nest in Newbridge, Co. Kildare for a few gigs around Europe in the hope of gaining more international recognition. “We’re doing some gigs in London, Barcelona and Berlin. Some of them pay you and some don’t so we use the Choice money if they won’t pay us,” he says.

So while now financially able to promote themselves, the award hasn’t sparked a flurry of industry interest, or even mild industry interest. One might expect Super Extra Bonus Party to feel a little let down by this, but somehow I doubt they do. “It’s more about the expressive aspect, and having fun.

It’s about having a deadly time through the medium of music. That sounds fucking hippy-ish, but it’s true,” he says. For the immediate future the band will be concentrating on writing and recording their second album. The Everything Flows EP was released in February to whet our appetites and features remixes by Jape, Cadence Weapon and Nouveaunoise. They hope to release the album by the end of the year or in early 2009 and I’m told it will feature some very exciting, but top secret, collaborations. Aside from that the band hopes to have broken the ice in Europe in time for the record’s release.

Super Extra Bonus Party have never been shy about sharing their sound with other artists. Their debut album featured collaborations with Nina Hynes and Channel One and they have worked frequently with Kill City Defectors. Cormac discusses a camaraderie that is arising in the Irish scene: “You’re always excited by other artists and when you’re writing songs it’s great to be able to have artists you admire working with you. I think people are becoming more receptive to working with other artists.”

It is encouraging to see - it indicates that the scene is developing in a positive way. With so many bands in Dublin at the moment it often seems like there should be more quality music but as Cormac points out, we can’t have it both ways. “I’d much rather if everyone in the city was in a mediocre band than had a car and was a fucking boy racer.”

With Brazilian Mc Rodrigo bringing a splice of multi-culturism to an already eclectic line-up Super Extra Bonus Party create a fusion of the best elements of music this generation has had to offer. Indie, electro, hip-hop and dance combine in a bilingual assault on musical boundaries. With such an array of sounds working simultaneously it would be easy to assume that band must struggle to maintain an organic progression. For the Boners however this has always been the natural order.

“The very beginning was me, Stephen Fahy and Mike back in Newbridge. There was this open mic night in some pub and we thought why not? It sounded like loads of weird dodgy instruments, Casio drum kits and the like. We wrote three pretty strange songs but we got some good feedback, probably because we weren’t doing real singer-songwriter crap. And we ended up expanding with Gavin and Rodrigo shifting about and collaborating. We never made any conscious decision as to what the line-up would be we just went with what felt right, put no borders on the music. We thought ‘lets just do whatever the fuck we want.’”

Cormac acknowledges that making this kind of album wouldn’t have been possible ten or 15 years ago. The band owes much to the groundwork laid out in the past eight years by everyone from Kanye to the Strokes to Daft Punk.

“If we came out with this album in the early 90’s people would have been like, ‘what the fuck?’ You never have a clue how your music will be received - it’s always nice when people respond.”

The band adopted a “Fuck You” approach to making music from the very beginning writing songs they felt people would be surprised by and getting up to all sorts of tomfoolery on stage.

My first experience of the band was a support slot for Messiah J and the Expert in Crawdaddy a few months ago.

I begin to compliment Cormac on the incredible energy and impressive performance when he tells me that that was what they considered a bad gig (I’m dying to see them on a good night).

“That was messy; we opened with this new tune. We were coming straight from a practice studio and we had only jammed it like three times.”

Nonetheless it was a performance that stood out in my mind.

Not taking themselves too seriously, band members pranced around wielding tennis rackets and other sports equipment, should they not be playing in a particular song. “We always like to take the piss,” Cormac laughs. With their fun loving antics in mind I wonder what kind of shenanigans the band might have gotten up to on the road, but I receive a rather dubious anecdote about the shoddy quality of signposting down the country.

“We all managed to get lost in Longford; there are all sorts of deceptive road signs there. (Pause) You’re not from Longford are you? ‘Nope’. Its weird we were driving around for an hour and a half and the only people on the roads were kids so we couldn’t ask them for directions.” You probably had to be there. “You can probably come up with a better story than that…”

While I would love to weave you a tale of Super Extra Bonus Party’s epic battle with totalitarian Gardaí after breaking into a sweet shop because Ozzy Osbourne wanted a thousand brown M&Ms, it’s simply not ethical. Cormac agrees; “Just say we threw televisions out the window and set fi re to things.” They also got quite nasty carpet burn from doing knee slides on stage.

Rock and Roll.