Power pop from General Fiasco

Date Published: 28-Nov-2008

BELFAsT based trio General Fiasco play upstairs in the Róisín Dubh on Monday next. The band is made up of brothers Owen (vocals/bass) and Enda (guitar) Strathern with Stephen Leacock on drums.The band formed just over two years ago when the lads were looking for a new project. "We'd been playing in different bands for a couple of years and we kinda got fed up playing in them," Owen recalls."One was heavily influenced by Oasis and the other was heavily influenced by another band. We wanted to do something a wee bit different to what we were doing, something that was a bit less trying to be like someone else, to just do whatever we felt."Did Owen find the transition to front man a difficult one? "No, not at all," he asserts. "Because the band i was playing in, the sort of stuff we were playing wasn't anything like what i was into. it wasn't my influences because i wasn't writing in the band. it was easier doing our own thing rather than trying to be some other band."The newly formed trio gelled quickly and Owen took to songwriting with gusto. "The first four or five songs wrote themselves," he says. "it wasn't hard cos we were just doing it for the craic, it came easier. We figured we had something there.”General Fiasco's first gig was ...