Catchy Squarehead play Galway show to mark debut album

Garage-pop trio Squarehead play Róisín Dubh on Friday, September 16 as part of a nationwide tour to mark the release of their debut album Yeah Nothing.

The Dublin band is made up of Roy Duff on guitar and vocals, Ian McFarlane on bass and vocals, and Ruan Van Vliet on drums. Some of Squarehead’s musical offerings, particularly the harmonies, evoke the Beach Boys – a band Roy has listened to from a young age.

“My mum was a huge fan, had a couple of ‘best of’ CDs and they were always playing in the background,” he recalls, before mentioning the tracks that grabbed him. “The hits like Good Vibrations and one called Little Deuce Coup – it’s about a car, one of my favourites.

“I only got into it and realised how much I liked it when I was about 16,” he adds. “I guess that’s when you’re at the age where you stop worrying if it’s cool or not to listen to the Beach Boys. So you can listen to them with your own ears, I guess.”

Roy started writing his own songs four years ago, before forming the band in 2009. The singer admits to some collective head-scratching about dates when the band had to write their biography.

“I was playing in bands and writing riffs and stuff when I was younger but I only started writing songs when I was around 20,” he says. “I was playing acoustic gigs by myself for a while. Then about a year or so after that, we started getting the band together.

“We actually went back to when all this was; it was about 2009 when I started doing acoustic gig and then it was the next year when we started practising with Ruan, our drummer.”

Roy cut his teeth as a solo performer on an Eastern European tour in 2009. The experience has prepared him for the role of front man.“It was with another band I played in called Hands Up, Who Wants To Die? which was a lot heavier than Squarehead would be,” he says. “I was playing bass with them at the time; we were all friends and we’d planned this tour, playing with another friend’s band.

“We needed a third band and they just suggested that I would do some Squarehead songs at the start of the night. Which was pretty fun in one way, because it was pretty obvious that the music wasn’t suited to any of these bands.”

Roy and his friends really did clock up a lot of miles on that jaunt.“First we went from Berlin to Poland, to Lithuania. Then we went to Belarus, then we went to the Ukraine, and then back. So it was a long drive! It was amazing playing places like Belarus where we mightn’t ever be again but it was amazing to go there.”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.