Friends in The Crossfire hoping for the big time

Citing Kodaline, Coldplay and U2 as influences, Dublin based five-piece The Crossfire will come to Monroe’s Live this Saturday, December 5.

The band is made up of Seán Buckley (lead vocals), Matt Brady (guitar), Chris Murphy (guitar), Sean Keeley (bass) and drummer Adam Shanahan and their aim is to produce anthemic songs complete with sing-along hooks, pounding drums and melodic guitars.

“We’d been friends long before even the notion of starting a band got into our heads,” Seán says of how they got together. “Slowly, but surely, the ideas started creeping in and we did a few talent shows and Battle of the Bands. It all went really well, we enjoyed it and we thought we’d go for it. It turned out well, we kept going and two years later we’re still here.”

They recently released their debut EP and are relatively new on the live scene. For Seán, it was important to have a bunch of quality songs to play before hitting the road.

“We’d been writing songs together a long time before we started gigging. We wanted to be a band that had a lot of songs and we always prided ourselves on writing on our own songs. By January 2013 we had a batch of songs we really liked.”

Their first release is simply titled EP 1 and it was recorded in Cauldron Studios, just off O’Connell Street in Dublin. The songs were mixed by Phil McGee, who has previously worked with The Script and Kodaline. How did a young unsigned band secure his services?

“The likes of Kodaline are someone we love and the albums are amazing,” Seán says. “I’d known Phil as a producer. It was a chance meeting, we were out in Swords one night, going to see a few friends playing and I spotted him across the room.

“I got one of my friends who kind of knew him to introduce me. I said ‘we love the records you produce, is there any chance we can get you on a track?’ We sent some stuff on and he said ‘let’s do it’.”

Coldplay and U2 are two of the biggest bands in the world, and Kodaline have two sold-out shows in the 3 Arena this December. Citing these groups as influences must be a sign of big ambitions.

“Definitely,” Seán says. “I’ve always liked bands who wear their hearts on their sleeves. I think we’re the same. We just want to be straight out there and say ‘yeah, we want to take this as far as it can go’ and be a big band. That’s what we want, the same as anyone who starts playing guitar at an early age.”

But still, those are big and bold plans. Have they had any interest from big labels?

“We’ve been talking to someone industry people and sending on some tracks, getting some really good feedback from the likes of labels and management companies,” Seán says. “We got picked for Guinness Amplify last year, which actually brought us to Galway. We were on billboards all over Dublin, which was great.”

So far so good. Now have they any plans to release a full-length album?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.