The Walls
The Walls played their first gig in Dublin in 1998 having returned a few months earlier from a two-year label stint in London. Fronted by brothers Steve and Joe Wall - previously the main-men in multi-platinum Irish band The Stunning - the band included new members Carl Harms on guitar and keyboards and Rory Doyle on drums.
They set up their own label, Earshot Records (later changing it to Dirtbird Records) and recorded and released a string of singles. A remix of one of the album tracks, Bone Deep, finally clicked with radio and put the band on the map.
Their debut album Hi-Lo was released in May 2000 to brilliant reviews and has since outsold Gold status in Ireland. Many of the songs have featured on a number of TV series and feature films such as Dead Bodies, Goldfish Memory and On the Edge (starring Cillian Murphy).
In the summer of 2001 a rare occurrence happened. The band sent four copies of the album to U2. Bono loved it and offered The Walls a slot at their second sold-out concert in Slane Castle. That day the band played to their biggest crowd to date – around 80,000 people.
To the Bright and Shining Sun was the band’s next single and the most-played track by any Irish act that summer, reaching No. 11 in the Irish charts. That June the band were also invited to support the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Landsdowne Rd. stadium in Dublin.
In February 2004 original member Carl Harms left the band. They recruited bassist Jon O’Connell, who had just 2 weeks to learn all the songs before a two week tour of the new EU accession states: Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
For the next album they went to Studio Black Box in France to record with producer and ex-The Frames guitarist David Odlum. They wanted to make a more guitar-based and organic-sounding record than it’s predecessor. The band loved the sound of recent albums by Wilco and Kings of Leon and they concentrated on capturing the magic of a great live performance - four guys in a room doing take after take and trying not to lose the soul of the music in the process.
In Oct 2004 they released a taster, The Drowning Pool EP. Drowning Pool, a blistering, spleen-venting, blues explosion, two minutes fifty two seconds in length, took people by surprise and divided opinion - exactly what the band wanted. They supported Bob Dylan to a capacity crowd in Galway that summer and played a storming set that showed there were changes afoot in The Walls sound.
By March 2005 the album was finally finished. It was mixed in Dublin and France and the mastering was done in Los Angeles. They called it New Dawn Breaking after the final and longest track on the record. The album went straight into the Irish charts at No.5 in the first week of June 2005 and has since reached Gold status in Ireland.
The Walls have just returned from the US where they played to full houses in New York, Los Angeles and at SXSW in Austin Texas. They also performed a live session on Morning Becomes Eclectic, Nic Harcourt’s flagship radio show on KCRW in LA. Watch it here: www.kcrw.com
New Dawn Breaking is now available as a digital download from I-Tunes, Napster and a host of others.
To hear some music visit the bands MySpace page: www.myspace.com/thewallsband
Go to: www.thewalls.ie for free MP3’s, gig info, photos, Walls shop, press releases etc.
Check out Neil's review of The Walls CD's here
