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Hothouse Flowers.
Starting off as The Incomparable Benzini Brothers in 1985, Irish band Hothouse Flowers were soon spotted by Bono and signed to the U2-founded Mother Records. Shortly after releasing one single, Love Don't Work This Way, Hothouse Flowers went on to be a part of London Records, a subsidiary of Polygram and the rest, as they say, is history.
Their 1988 debut album 'People', reached number one and two in Ireland and England respectively and with the help of the single Don't Go launched the band to greater heights internationally. The 1990 follow up, 'Home' spawned the singles Give It Up and the Johnny Nash penned I Can See Clearly Now, and went on to just fall short of the top spot here in Australia followed by the critically acclaimed 'Songs From The Rain' (1993). Physically and mentally exhausted from extensive touring demands, vocalist Liam O'Maonlai soon called for time out only to resurface with 1998's low key, 'Born', which became the last we'd hear of them.
Reforming sporadically for festivals and benefit gigs, as well as just a bunch of mates getting together to jam in the studio, the band later released an independent album, 'Into The Heart' back in 2004.
"Because it's an independent the wheels turn a little bit slower,"
explains O'Maonlai, "we now have to concentrate on one country
at a time, so that's why the album's not out in Australia yet.
A lot of the songs were actually individually formed and shaped
by Peter [O'Toole, bass] and Fiachna O'Braonchin, guitar],"
he tells me. "They did a lot of work on the sound and recording
of each song, and then I later worked out a vocal melody or
interpretation."
This was a big departure from the way the band operated when, as the band's singer, O'Maonlai directed much of their material. "That was a big part of the first album," he recollects, "but then the second and third were also written out of jam sessions. The first album brought about a lot of touring, and I mean years of touring where we'd be away for eleven months out of twelve, and in that time we'd play a lot of music during our sound checks where we'd go off into incredible places jam-wise. We would record everything on to cassette and take notes on everything that seemed to resonate and then we'd go through the process of committing the songs."
Entering the world stage at a time when electronically-based music was dominating the charts and bowing out during the peak of grunge, I wondered if, in retrospect, such extreme shifts in the global mainstream climate had an influence on the band's popularity.
"We were just so busy and there was no time to really measure or even notice what else was going on," he recalls. "Because we were moving around so much the significance of grunge only became apparent to me later. I remember seeing Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV and thinking that it was great, and I guess when something like that comes out everyone's attention is distracted and that probably did have some effect on us in some way."
Bono has been often quoted as saying that O'Maonlai was the best white soul singer in the world. How did such praise affect or sway what he was doing, especially considering the already overwhelming demands put on him by their record label and fans? "No, I know he knew what he was doing," he considers. "I think he knew that he was giving something to us that would be observed the world over because Bono is observed the world over. He knew that when he gave something like that it became the basis for the media to discuss.
"It was a strange kind of compliment because it's purely an observation by somebody famous. But I just sing and I like singing, and I like the way I sing because I'd be lying if I was selling something that I didn't believe in."
Steve Jones
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Hothouse Flowers play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Wed 5 April.
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