If there is a word that describes The 4 Of Us, from Newry, it's resourceful. They've been knocked down, kicked around, threatened by the IRA (back in the early 1990s, in a tour bus "incident" close to their hometown), and dropped by Sony. The band has also been in hiding for the past five years, which has nothing to do with paramilitary organisations and everything to do with their lackadaisical recording methods. Seven years after their second album, they've finally released a third, Classified Personal (on their own independent label, Future Inc.), but lead singer, main songwriter and mini-mogul Brendan Murphy is at odds to figure out who will buy it or how it will sell.
To put his concerns into context, it's important to remember that at the start of the decade The 4 Of Us were one of the country's biggest rock acts. Sell-out shows, good songs and hit singles, billowing white shirts, tantalising glimpses of male nipples, hair that hung just so and a solid dose of sex appeal really were the order of the day. The band's 1989 debut album, Songs For The Tempted, heralded a collection of pop songs with substance, style and more hooks than a rail full of coat hangers. The follow-up, 1992's Man Alive, highlighted even further the song-writing talents of the band. It looked as if they could do no wrong: critically acclaimed and loved by the public, the only way for The 4 Of Us was up, wasn't it? How wrong we all were.
But now, The 4 Of Us are back. But what took them so long? Hard drugs hell? A lifesapping rock'n'roll lifestyle? Creative burn out, blackout and block? Actually, none of these, just the same old thirtysomething doubts and fears that clog up the arteries of our lives. That, and the fact that they couldn't get out of the studio.
"We made a record but chucked it out," explains Brendan Murphy, initially all stops, starts and nervous tics. He has been off the interview treadmill for some time as well, and it shows. "After Man Alive, we made the third record in a studio in Belfast in and around 1994. There were samples and loops on it, and it was quite fast and aggressive. Making it was great fun. We never had to make a decision - there was always tomorrow. We didn't have severe money problems. Part of us just loved being in a recording studio. But the seasons started changing, as they do, and suddenly it was like Fisherman's Blues! We had loads of tapes but - let's put it like this - they weren't concise."
Spending so much time on the record instilled not only a near religious fervour to make it work but also a mordant, creeping realisation that they would tire of it sooner rather than later. Despite their love of basic studio technology and trickery (which kick-started their career via a series of demo tapes made in a portastudio in Newry back in the late 1980s) the band, says Murphy, just grew out of it.
"The general rule is that records which take a long time to make are generally shite," says Brendan. "After a series of low-key gigs playing the new songs, we just felt the sound didn't work. I thought, if we release this album, I'd have another two years of talking about it, of how happy I was with it, and I just couldn't do it. So we decided we had to change everything about how we worked. Normally a band in that scenario would have called it a day, and gone off and done something sensible."
The band decided to make an album quickly (stop sniggering at the back) and to make it, sonically at least, in the same way as their first demos - acoustically. They wanted to be as close to the sound of the instruments, the voice, the real sound, as possible. "If acoustic music can be ambient, we said at the time, then we wanted to make it like that. We decided not to try to fit into any style, and just to be ourselves. We also wanted to make it intimate but not boring, and with an edge."
Classified Personal is an album that works very much against the odds. Low key and almost funereally-paced, it's a collection of songs that is never less than superb. Fragmented, fractured and fragile, the lyrics are borne out of emotional confusion, bewilderment in general and screwed-up relationships, socially and otherwise.
"There is this preconception that as you get older you lose vitality. Everything gets a bit soft and mellow and loses an edge," says Brendan. "The funny thing is, when you're 18 everything is black and white. Black and white turns into a murky grey, however, and by the time you're in your 30s, you have compromised on so many things you swore to yourself you wouldn't. In your 30s, despite things being a bit more complicated, you know what you're talking about, and when you make a response, it's usually a bit more measured. You know what the score is. People in their 30s are a lot more dangerous to me than those who are 17 or 18.
"Loud guitars may be scary to a 14-year-old, but to me Leonard Cohen is far more scary than Henry Rollins. All you have to do is to make a record that explains you, where you are and what you're doing. Not a record that attempts to compete with what a post-punk youth band is doing. Peer pressure in your teens is excusable, but by the time you're in your 30s you need to have sorted yourself out, even if it's only to realise what kind of a quagmire you occupy, morally or any other way.
"You carry a heavier weight when you're older. This is the point of Classified Personal. This is where The 4 Of Us are right now. It's not soft, and it's not the most light-hearted of records, either. This is uncertainty. It's being true to yourself. Being true to yourself gives it weight and an edge."
BRENDAN is in no doubt that his band's effective disappearance from the public eye has done them a-bucket-load of harm. A week is a long time in pop music. Five years? Forgeddaboudit.
"Nobody, but nobody can disappear for up to five years without it doing them harm. Even the big acts. A band like us? Definitely. At the end of the day, you're just trying to make something that works. It took too long to release another record? Fair enough, but if the record is good, people will buy it. There are other elements involved, of course, but this is our record in a way that very few acts can say their record is. I don't know how commercial it might be, but it's a good record and if people get a chance to hear it and if they give it a chance, then they'll get into it.
"We haven't thought just how much it will sell, but it doesn't need to sell too many copies for us to make money. I'd rather adopt that approach - keep overheads down, costs down and other people's interference down. Then you'll be able to make records your own way. Independence is fun. I don't mind making my own mistakes. What I'm not prepared to do is make mistakes for other people."
Now walking the business walk that was taught to them by their dealings with Sony ("an invaluable experience, I don't regret a day of it"), The 4 Of Us are looking into the year 2000 with collective head held high, and a justifiably tight grip on the company expenses.
"This is a different sort of fun, a bit more grown up," remarks Brendan. "A limo doesn't impress me any more, though. If a limo arrived for me at an airport, I'd be thinking, who's paying for this?"
