Video Killed The Radio Star

The year is 2006 and the creative juices are in full flow. Feeling strong and inventive, fully in charge of what direction I wanted to progress into, the latest album looked towards Tom Waits for inspiration, entitled ‘Innocent When You Dream’, after one of his songs. This was a full-on Dream Pop album, heavy on keyboards and slamming distorted beats with a shoegaze element. The harmonising I had employed on ‘…Our Black Hearts’ still appeared on some tracks. I’d started to use the violin bow on the guitar now which was an added feature making for a lovely fuzzy tone. The resin powder clogged up the strings something rotten though! The track ‘Baby I’m A Star’ not only nabbed a Prince title, I decided to sing in a falsetto/Camille voice. Another new trick I developed in this album to go along with the “shimmer” (see earlier blogs) was the “twinkle”. This trick consisted of firing high piano notes through a delay pedal to make lovely Disney magic sounds. These sounds went to create a very dreamy album that floated along on a cloud of ethereal drones. The cover was another black and white photo of a girl curled up sleeping.

This was swiftly followed up with ‘Johnny Royale’, this time under the slightly less wordy moniker of just Foamboy, for some reason. I’ll go out on a limb and declare this my best album. Aiming for a Phil Spector-esque wall of sound, I threw samples, strings, slide guitar, twinkles and shimmers into the mix to brilliant effect. Inspired by The Dears, the album had a synthy intro of lavish strings mixed with a nice 80s sounding effect. I say lavish, they weren’t really, just my rickety Casio keyboard pushed through a delay pedal. But if that doesn’t float yer boat you may stay away as this is the feature sound on this album. The opening song brilliantly and extravagantly titled ‘Cupid, I’ve Been A Fool’ was based on a sample of the McAlmont and Butler song ‘Yes’ and the chorus was David McAlmont repeating the ‘Yeeeeeesssssss!’ refrain from their song. It’s one of my best songs and is truly glorious even if I do say so myself!

The samples on this album were a key feature and I wasn’t holding back. I took Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ doo-wap classic song ‘Walk Like A Man’ and used the “oooo-wooo-ooo-ooooo-ooooooo!” for the chorus. Bob Dylan’s ‘Is Your Love In Vain?’ gets pilfered for ‘El Matador’, a gloriously melodic beauty of a song with a swooning slide guitar permeating it. Not sure now what the main sample is on ‘I Couldn’t Care Less’ is, but I used Nana Mouskouri again for the chorus, this time speeded up like a chipmunk. Prince’s first song on his first album has an a capella multi-tracked Prince and I took the intro and looped that for the backdrop of ‘Johnny Royale’ (a play on the Beastie Boys song ‘Johnny Ryall’). One of my favourite beats is Led Zep’s ‘Levee Breaker’ and I looped it magnificently for the beat. I added in some of my best violin playing and it makes for a curious song that I still love to listen to.

I was experiencing this weird time thing where I would look at a watch or clock every night at 22:22 and that’s where the song title ’22:22’ came from. Bizarrely, this still happens to me frequently. Prince got sampled again, this time ‘Darling Nikki’ and I added some of my own special ‘funk’ to create an insane instrumental that sounds like a 70s cop show theme. The song ‘This Good Thing That I Got’ lifted a line from Natalie Wood’s disco banger ‘Knock On Wood’ and the underpinning beat/groove was also looped. It’s so smart and inventive. Yet has probably only ever been heard by about 10 people for fuck’s sake. My big brothers were fans of Christian Rocker Larry Norman. We went to see him in the Spires Building, Belfast. I sampled his song ‘Six Sixty Six’ and added a swirling keyboard sound to make a psychedelic folk thing that is one of my favourite things I’ve ever done. You’d need to hear it to understand, hard to describe! The album ended with the glorious choral voices from the Hidden Cameras song ‘Boys of Melody’ looped over a booming Flaming Lips beat. I called the track ‘That’s All Folks!’. The track ends with me sampling the preacher from David Holmes’ remix of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The cover of this album was a photo of Fleegle from 70s kid’s TV show The Banana Splits, who were a band made up of people dressed up in fluffy animal outfits. The photo was tinted in a deep shade of pink.

I’d steadily been picking up credibility with the local radio folks, they would play my music regularly and the opportunity came to make a video for the TV version of Across The Line. I was invited up to Belfast to meet the producer of the show, his name escapes me, but he wasn’t one of the regular stalwarts who I will blog about later as they deserve their own special mentions. Can’t recall the guy’s name but he had long floppy hair and manners that I was less than impressed with! So we settled down in Katy Daly’s bar for a chat. The talk turned to my choice of song, and I can’t recall if I brought it up or if he did, but the song I selected was ‘Johnny Royale’, the one with the Prince sample. The guy’s face screwed up when he found out the sample was unsolicited. What did he think I was going to do? I could hardly get the wee man to allow me to use it, have you ever heard any other song that samples Prince?!!! So I had to rethink and picked ‘Bon Voyage, Sweetface’ from ‘Innocent When You Dream’. I got paired up with a lovely fella from Bangor Tech, apologies to you Sir, I can’t quite remember your name, but I think you may have been called Marty. I went up to the Tech and was filmed performing the song, which featured me playing the guitar with a bow. Adamant I didn’t want to be seen clearly in the video, there was an overload of effects on it, and it was marvellously psychedelic. This was my one and only time on TV. I’m sure the video resides in some BBC archive, I probably have it on a VHS in the roof space somewhere.

It was around this time too that I managed to become one of David Holmes Top 10 friends on MySpace. Yes, read that again. The Belfast DJ/Producer was apparently looking for unknown vocalists for his latest project around that time, I’d heard/read him say this in an interview. Can you imagine the thrill this caused me? To this day, I’ve no idea what the thought process was having me selected as a Top Friend, but there’s a good chance he had heard one of my tunes along the way. As I said, the team at the BBC were doing an outstanding job of raising my profile and some of them were also DJs in their spare time. Anyway, it came to absolutely nothing. But it’s a nice tale to be recalling now!

Just as Foamboy’s reputation started to peak, this was the time for me to start thinking about trying something else…