With Le Galaxie it's always 2am

David McGloughlin of Le Galaxie chats to Owen Sweeney ahead of the band’s upcoming Westport performance

Interview
Owen Sweeney

The Westport Festival of Music and Food won’t know what hit it when Ireland’s premier dance music act ride into town. David McGloughlin, Michael Pope, Anthony Hyland and Alistair Higgins, better known as Le Galaxie, will be bringing their unique style of crowd-pleasing dancy antics to the Róisín Dubh Stage. And there’s not long to to now – the band will perform on June 29, the two-day festival’s Saturday night.

Anyone fortunate enough to have come across the band’s well-received debut ‘LASERDISC NIGHTS II,’ will be surprised to see how much musicianship is involved in the band’s live set. In many cases, live performances in the dance-music scene are dominated by one-man shows centred on a single laptop. This is not the case for Le Galaxie. Guitars, percussion and live locals combine with samples and synthesisers to create something unique, and almost indescribable. 

The band’s much-spoken-about headline slot at Electric Picnic’s ‘Little Big Tent’ last year has become somewhat legendary after hundreds flocked to the 2am gig. Lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Pope successfully rocked a fishnet tank top in the foreground of an impressive light show that was easily fit for The Who or Bon Jovi, while his energetic displays curated the gig to atmospheric ecstasy. Le Galaxie’s closing cover of N-Trance’s ‘Set You Free’ left many still singing all the way back to the campsite with a new appreciation for both the band and dance music, content in the knowledge that they had just witnessed a ‘we were there’ moment.

But can a band that is more suited to club nights and midnight shows pull it off in the grounds of Westport House at the ‘early’ time of 9.30pm? I asked David McGloughlin, who joins my reminiscence of the Electric Picnic gig.

“That’s great … you weren’t at our previous Electric Picnic show though. I think it was 1.30pm in the afternoon, but to be honest there was as much energy and enthusiasm as there was at the 2am gig. The thing is, you’ve got to create that and take people there and try and do what we are doing without any ‘half-assedness’ or excuses because of the time of the day … If you’re not going to go for it, people aren’t going to come.…We approach the show the same way we would approach a later nightclub gig we would have done, and I would like to think, certainly from the [crowd] reaction that we’ve pulled it off at that time of the day.” 

It’s fair to say that the current manifestation of Le Galaxie nearly didn’t happen. Born from the alternative-rock band 66E, the group drew early comparisons to Radiohead and Mogwai. While the former incarnation of the band performed a soft post rock, each member was also  interested in electronic dance music. The turning point came when the departure of the former frontman created an opportunity to further showcase the electronic aspects that were slowly creeping in. 
The band members themselves were surprised with the direction that things took, but embraced the evolution as a positive change. “Eventually I think what happened was we were booked for a late-night show in The Button Factory following a couple of DJs, so we picked the ‘dancier’ tunes that we had at the time. It was like ‘Hell yeah, this is where we want to go’,” says David. 

The band clearly has their audiences screaming out for more, but how goes the business end of things? Twenty years ago a band would go out, get signed, tour the world and make a shed load of cash. Today, however, bands have to work harder, and for a lot less financial return. 

With Le Galaxie, let’s just take the maxim ‘we’re not just in it for the money’ as a given. Still, its encouraging to hear they have the business side of things somewhat figured out. People might not be buying brand new cars or houses, but the enterprise side of the music, that lets them release material and tour internationally, has become self-sustainable. A symbiotic relationship with the Delphi label and a booker in the UK delivering new audiences to the band, are just some of the benefits that the hard-working band has recently reaped from the industry.    

“You kind of just have to rely on yourself and pull yourselves up by your own socks. You hear people talking negatively about the industry, but we have been lucky enough to be doing what we wanted to do in terms of getting the songs and the music right and working with the people that you feel good about,” explains David.

Le Galaxie are hard at work on new material, and are hoping to release a new record before the end of 2013. David has hinted that anyone coming to Westport on June 29 ‘might hear four or five new songs that haven’t been put on a record yet’.