RUBYHORSE.com

Many images come to mind when you hear the term "Irish rock band." And whether it’s a young, long-haired Bono waving a white flag at Red Rocks, Bob Geldof addressing 70,000 strong at Live Aid, or something else rebellious and grand, the feeling conjured is always emotional, spacious and strong.

And when you talk to an Irishman about his homeland, you get alluring, inspired stories - tall yet true tales of great artisans, traditional music and dance, and images of turreted castles, pretty Irish girls and soaking wet pints of Guinness beer served in musty pubs older than the beverage itself.

Cork City, IRELAND

Cork City, Ireland’s most important seaport town, contains a lot of those musty, dark pubs. It’s a blue collar town of approximately 250,000, located in County Cork, Ireland’s largest county. A magnificent, rocky coast contours its southern shore, giving way to hilly roads and small, rocky coves. Cork City is home to the Rebels, the League of Ireland football club that wears red shirts adorned with the famous Guinness logo.

This is where we begin the tale of Rubyhorse, or, as they were once known, five nameless city lads who started a band from scratch, with not a rock and roll skill between them. It’s the place that will serve as the band’s old stomping grounds, where these five lads - Dave Farrell (vocals), Gordon Ashe (drums), Decky Lucey (bass), Joe Philpott (guitar) and Owen Fegan (keyboards) - grew up, explored and eventually realized they wanted to make music. And like any good Irish tale, it’s the city they’ll eventually leave behind in favor of strife, struggle and the pursuit of good, old American rock and roll.

Chapter 1:

Like anywhere else on Earth, Cork City afforded little in terms of teenage kicks. There were plenty of pubs and bars, but age limits restricted such activity. There was sports, but everyone played sports. There was school, but, well… school’s school. And there were girls, but you had to be cool to get girls, and being cool meant excelling at sports.

"We were no different than any of our friends, really," remembers Decky. "But we had this extra thing - we had Rubyhorse. We were friends before we decided to start a rock and roll band, but something else clicked when we had those instruments in our hands."

"We were 14 years of age when we started doing this," Owen remembers, looking back to the earliest Rubyhorse days. "Shoot me if you want, but at that age, there really isn’t much room for a musical vision. We were in secondary school (high school), we were bored, and even though we all loved music and listening to songs and bands, the truth is we had nothing else to do.

"The band began as the BFG, a name lifted from the 1982 Roald Dahl book, but upon hearing of an English group of the same name, they moved quickly to acquire a new moniker. The band settled on Rubyhorse, Joe recalls, lifting the tag from the title of a Wonderstuff song. "I’m looking forward to the lawsuits," he jokes.

"Our friend’s sister had this band in her garage," he remembers, "and we used to sneak in there and just stare at the equipment. We were fascinated by it. Then one day, we decided to designate roles - you know, we sort of said "You... you play the guitar," so I was the guitar player, and Decky drew the bass guitar, and so on."

SEVEN YEARS OLD: Dave, Decky and Owen (L to R) among classmates at their First Holy Communion at Scoil an Spioraid Naoimh, Bishopstown, Cork

And just like that - without a lick of rock and roll experience between them, these five teenaged lads fancied themselves as a rock band, employing a school friend named Dave to handle vocal duties.

"No, we had no experience with these instruments at all," Joe confirms. "But what fascinated us about what we were doing at the time, even from the very first rehearsal we had, we kind of felt there was something happening, even though it must have been the most horrible racket anybody had ever made."

In short time, five lads with nothing better to do became Rubyhorse. There would soon be lengthy practice meetings - loose noodling sessions that Owen recalls as productive fits of expression.

"It quickly turned into something I wouldn’t say we were very good at, but something we were making work," he says. "No one in the band had ever had any formal training. We didn’t even know what instruments we would play when we formed, because none of us could play any instruments."

"In hindsight," Owen reasons, "we started a band to have fun. Our friends were playing sports and drinking in the bushes. There isn’t a hell of a lot to do in Cork when you’re 14. You can sit home and watch TV, you can try to get beer and sit in a field and drink it, or you can form a band."

"So," he laughs, taking a second to appreciate the irony. "We formed a band and drank beer in our rehearsal room."

"It was really an escape from boredom, and it was a very teenage way of setting ourselves apart from our peers in high school, and climbing the social hierarchy."

In time, Rubyhorse began playing their first gigs, including a makeshift show at the local high school. Hundreds of kids showed up. "Did they come to see us?," guitarist Joe asks. "I’m guessing they showed up because there was fuck all else to do."

"We hired a PA system and got some lights and all that kind of shit," the bassist remembers. "And we got all of these established local bands twice our age to open up for us. God knows why they did it, but we hung around town a lot, and we knew all these people. We were at my house before the show, waiting for a ride from one of our parents. We had no idea what to expect when we got there… whether we were going to lose our pants, if there would be people there. We had no idea."

"I think maybe our peers were like, ‘Let’s go watch the lads make idiots of themselves,’" Joe jokes. " But we didn’t. I guess it was because we rehearsed to the point where we actually sounded like a band. It was a load of fun, and I think that night was when we got bitten by the bug of being in a band."

Fast forward three years. The dreamy-eyed, seaport city lads are high school graduates, gigging back and forth in Cork City, home of the Rebels, the place of blue-collared careers and enough pubs to pour a million pints nightly. Rubyhorse, a five-piece outfit complete with a new drummer named Gordon, and an indie album "A Lifetime in One Day" are the toast of the coastal town, playing occasional national gigs in Dublin, around the country, and practicing five nights a week beside a dank, pork-scented meat processing plant. On Saturday nights, they’d invite friends in for beers and music. Anytime else, though, it was strictly business: honing the Rubyhorse sound, and crafting music the band members hoped would take them away.

ON TOUR: Rubyhorse, Tour Manager Phil and their first van; "Big Herbie" on tour in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1995.

"In Ireland, there’s only so many times you can play a market," Joe explains. "We’d only get to play out once every four or five weeks. It never made sense to us, because when you’re in a band… playing live and sharing your music is a part of the experience. And we were just stuck in this room, playing for ourselves all the time, like the city’s biggest secret."

"And things were getting pretty bleak for rock bands anyway," Gordon remembers. "The whole DJ thing was taking over, and a lot of venues started getting leery about live bands. What it came down to was five guys showing up at a venue knowing they were entitled to a free meal, or one DJ with his deck looking for a lot less pay. For the venues, it meant having to do a lot versus doing a lot less. Trying to get live shows back then was pretty difficult."

"We had achieved a sort of success in Cork," Owen says. "1,500 people would attend our shows, but that 1,500 people was pretty much Cork’s entire gig-going audience. So we’d have to wait a month or two between shows, because you can’t over-saturate such a small market."

"We were getting bored. We started drifting away from the band, because the challenge was going away. I started DJing at a club, Joe did PR for the same club. It came time to shit or get off the pot. We knew we might not be able to stick together any longer unless we had a challenge or something else to achieve. The only thing that seemed to make sense to us at that point was getting up off our asses and going someplace else."