Oliver turns over a new leaf

By Nick Bradshaw

Between 1998 and 2006 Oliver Cole (then Ollie Cole) was the frontman of Indie three-piece Turn. Turn did quite well, working hard and gigging a lot to build up a decent fan base, and they made a few quid when their songs were played by a couple of US teen TV series. Their music was strongly melodic, the sort of stuff you can happily like, and would find hard not to like.

But bands break up, and Turn broke up after three albums. Since then Ollie (now Oliver) did what all self-respecting frontmen do – he went solo. Not with any sense of urgency, however – his debut solo album being released almost four years after Turn called it a day. That album is We Albatri, a collection of smart, radio friendly grown-up pop songs.

“I’ve only ever really been in one band, and that was Turn. We were like brothers. After Turn I knew that I had to go on and do something else,” Oliver says.

“I always had this idea to go and to play everything myself. When you write a song you have an idea of how it will sound, and all through what I did with Turn, it never turned out as anything like I’d imagined.

“So with We Albatri I got to play most things myself. Having said that, I would never do it that way again. It was really hard – I missed having other people around all the time. But I’m glad I did it because I got people like Paul from Bell X1 to come in and do some percussion. It gave me the scope to pick and choose exactly who I wanted on each track.”

Breaking up

At the end of 2002, prior to the main break-up, Turn lost their bassist Gavin Fox to the band Idlewild. Even though a replacement was recruited, Oliver is quite upfront about the negative effect Gavin’s departure had on the dynamics of the band.

“After Gavin left it wasn’t the same band any more – especially on the third album,” he explains. “Towards the end I wasn’t enjoying playing. We only made that one album without Gavin. He left before the second album came out, but he’d been involved in the writing. You wouldn’t miss Gavin live, but in the writing process he was great to have there.

“He’s a great musician, a great ideas man. I’d have half a song and between us both we’d bash it out into something. Interestingly he’s playing with me now in my current live line-up and it’s really nice to have him playing on some of the tracks on the album.”

One of the rites of passage of any self-respecting Irish musician is to perform a track on The Late Late Show, something that Oliver (a self-respecting Irish musician) did when We Albatri was released. It’s something all musicians do, but it’s not something that’s easily done well.

The sound in RTÉ Studio 4 is notoriously dodgy and the sight of white-haired ageing matriarchs chewing on toffees with their arms folded as they wait for an appearance later in the show by that lovely Dana or that charming Daniel O’Donnell doesn’t have the makings of a great rock audience.

It’s strange when you have a heavy rock band on and the whole audience looks absolutely terrified.

“It’s really strange,” Oliver admits. “I’m so bad at stuff like that. I didn’t know where to look. There’s no point in playing to that audience, and also you’re off to the side so you’re playing sideways on to the people there.  Just before we’d gone on, Ryan Tubridy had been talking to a priest on a really serious issue and I’m standing there waiting to play a pop song.

“It’s actually quite terrifying. You’ve so much time there with your thoughts, plenty of time to build up the nerves; you’re there for about seven hours in total. It’s strange when you have a heavy rock band on and the whole audience looks absolutely terrified.”

There’s nothing terrifying about Oliver’s music. That doesn’t mean it’s easy for it to find an obvious audience here in Ireland. We Albatri is a bit pop, a bit rock and definitely grown-up, so it’s not easy to pigeonhole it.

“I really love a lot of the people who write grown-up pop music that sounds a little like ELO. There’s a massive market around the world for it, but I don’t know if there is here in Ireland, though. People here tend to like their singer/songwriter stuff pretty straight up. Either that or they like their rock music. If you give them rock music that’s poppy, that confuses people. My album seems to confuse people a lot.”

Aside from his own album, Oliver has a track included on the recently-released A New Breed, a compilation of tracks which have been gathered together to showcase a wide range of contemporary Irish acts. Those providing tracks include The Coronas, The Blizzards, Delorentos, Cathy Davey, Lisa Hannigan, Mick Flannery and Two Door Cinema Club.

“There are about forty of us on there,” Oliver says. “It’s good to have something out there that pushes Irish bands as it’s not easy here. In one way it’s because there’s so much good stuff out there. Irish bands have always had it rough – there’s so much talent on this tiny little island.

Two-a-penny greats

“People have come to expect to see great unknown bands at Whelans and just take it for granted that they’re great but won’t go anywhere. If I was just starting Turn again I’d go to New York or LA because here great bands are just two-a-penny. In New York there only tends to be the odd band who stick out like that.

“We’re not great at supporting our own. We don’t have a great radio policy for supporting bands, although I’ve been lucky to have DJs like Ian Dempsey and Paul McCloone on Today FM liking my stuff and playing it. A lot of DJs aren’t into their music, though. They’re more like talk DJs who are on their way to TV presenting jobs and who just intersperse what they’re saying with records.”

These are pivotal times for the music business, with sales of albums well down on a decade ago. These days it’s all about touring and digital downloads. If bands (and record companies) are going to make any money, they need the downloads to be legal.

“Record companies are having a tough time. They are having to evolve and be a lot more creative,” Oliver says. “I was surprised just how much music is downloaded – it’s something like 90-something percent of sales.

People who’d downloaded my album were coming up and buying it again just to have it in vinyl form.

“Things like iPhones do push people to pay for their music, which helps. It’s impossible to download illegally onto them. There’s an immediacy to buying now – you hear something on the radio and you can download it through iTunes within a couple of minutes.

“You can actually sell a lot of records at a gig. We printed our records on vinyl to sell at our gigs, and that went down well.  People who’d downloaded my album were coming up and buying it again just to have it in vinyl form.”

Next up for Oliver is the release of the album beyond our shores plus plenty more gigging closer to home.

“Next we’re bringing out the album on the Big Life label in England. They look after Snow Patrol and a lot of big producers. We signed with them before we got the Irish record deal and the plan was always to release the album in Ireland first. We’ll be doing another single and another tour. The last tour was great –with the exception of Waterford,” he says, shrugging. “No-one came to see us in Waterford.”

We Albatri and A New Breed are both out now on EMI Records