Dunstaffnage: Popup

Published on Friday 11 July 2008 16:44

Popup headline the main stage the Dunstaffnage festival, near Oban, on Sunday 20 July.

It's taken years to fund their debut, but Popup are springing up all over the place now, writes Chitra Ramaswamy

SO MANY bands are pronouncing themselves independent these days that when the real DIY deal comes along, they're hard to pick out from the fray. Like Popup, for example. This scruffy Glaswegian quartet – three boys with guitars, one girl with drums – make some of the best melodic post-punk around in Scotland and have been plugging away for years. In that time they've been awarded Single of the Year by XFM (2006) and deemed Scotland's Biggest Unsigned Band by the NME (2007). Only now, though, are they bringing out their debut album, a decision that has seen them move back in with their parents and pretty much fund it by themselves.

I'm expecting them to be cooler-than-cool poster kids for independent music, especially since their album is being co-released by Glasgow's SWG3 Studio Warehouse, an art and performance space that has become the successor to the Chateau, a venue made famous by Franz Ferdinand's early gigs. Actually, Popup seem broke and a bit fed up. "We get good feedback from the music industry but no hard cash," says the band's frontman Damian Gilhooly, who is every bit as deadpan in person as his vocals are on their brilliant debut, A Time And A Place. "We're hardly rolling about with loads of cash," points out bassist Nick Giudici, although he does note that the Scottish Arts Council helped to fund the album. "We basically beg, steal and borrow to do everything we do."

Gilhooly is refreshingly open about what he wants for his band. "If you were to ask us whether we want to trade with Glasvegas then the answer would have to be yes," he says, talking about that band's speedy success. "We could glorify independence, and we might as well because there's not much else to go by. We like the idea of not having anyone interfere in our music but there are drawbacks."

We meet at a rehearsal studio in Glasgow's Southside, where all four of them grew up. They're here to record their second album, and are moving much faster than they did with their first, which was recorded during the course of a long year before gigs, after work and late at night. As a result it's an idiosyncratic and surprising listen, at times pure rock'n'roll, at other times boy-girl harmonies that recall The Delgados or angular, stripped-back punk. They've been described as Arab Strap on happy pills, and the owner of SWG3 says "they are brilliant – sharp, irreverent and deeply Glaswegian".

This is largely thanks to Gilhooly's dark lyrics and his thickly accented delivery, putting Popup in the same league as Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad. With song titles such as 'Stagecoach' and 'The First Weekend Of The Smoking Ban,' Gilhooly's grim tales are of bad chat-up lines at bus stops ("We shared a cigarette/Turns out he had Tourettes") and betrayal between conjoined twins. He happily finds ways to make "Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire" rhyme with "indie boys with their pretty hair". Gilhooly says the essence of the band is the music he grew up with: Prince, Deacon Blue, Nirvana and The Fall, though "we're not influenced any more by Aidan Moffat than we are by Bob Dylan".

So how did they meet? "Adie and I were married for a brief period when we were 17," Gilhooly says of the drummer, who is Nick's younger sister. "We didn't see eye to eye though, and then she married (guitarist Michael] Cross. But he had an affair with Nick. We don't really get on now and that's why it works." I sense my leg is being pulled, and Adrienne rolls her eyes and explains that they've all been friends since primary school, which is presumably why they find each other so annoying. "I met Damo in English and thought he was a pure sarky arsehole," says Nick, and Gilhooly beams when he adds: "I still do."

• 'Love Triangle/Pull The Fuse' will be released on Art Goes Pop, August 25, with the album to follow on September 1

• www.popuptheband.com