Tom Dunne: The Blades should’ve been bigger, but maybe Sprints will last the course

Is mid-January too early for a hot take? In the debate about whether it is easier to “make it” in music “these days” than it was in ancient times, I have an answer, and a clear one too. It is easier now. Yes, easier today than yesterday.

This revelation came to me in two ways. The first was watching The Blades on Tommy Tiernan. I was gobsmacked to see them. The music guests on Tommy’s show are wonderfully selected, but rarely of that vintage. I found myself a little emotional.

“They still have it,” I thought. The swagger of Brian Foley on bass and the coolness of Paul Cleary beside him delivering lines like “I’m not waiting at an airport. I’m standing at a bus stop” that nail 1980s Ireland to the wall. Yes Paul, you got it in one!

Back then, despite what Paul Weller might have said about life across the water, in Ireland, this was not the modern world.

These thoughts, happy thoughts of The Blades playing sell out shows in the Magnet Bar on Pearse Street, the walls dripping in sweat, the dancefloor heaving, ran though my head as I listened to the first great album of 2024: Sprints’ Letter to Self.

It is a glorious album. The word “punk” features in most reviews, an area I know well, and speaking from the well of that experience I would have to concur. Plus, it has what punk valued above all else: an original voice.

This is funny in a way as the voice in question — voice meaning, the lyrics, ideas, passions, odd takes, wonderful turns of phrase, wry observations, screams of rage and anger — is that of singer and guitarist Karla Chubb, who was once a contestant on The Voice of Ireland.

Yes, I know, a show set up to spot and nurture unique voices. It ran from 2012 to 2016. Failed to spot one voice. Failed to spot this voice.

Here, that voice is propelling Sprints to a truly wonderful first week of release. Dates are selling fast. The UK tour is sold out, as is the date in NYC, all others throughout Europe are following suit. The NME (still hanging in there) gives it a five-star review, Stereogum give it album of the week.

But it is in the weighty digital atmosphere of online publications like Pitchfork that the real work gets done. They give it a 7.1 — a mean spirited and conservative score, quelle surprise — that is contradicted by the wild enthusiasm of the review.

In the review they quote Chubb from a DIY magazine interview. “Anger doesn’t mean bad,” she says, “Anger means standing up for something.” Yes, anger is an energy, as a wise old man once said.

NME heralded a new addition to the “wave of Irish guitar music” that we thought had peaked with Fontaines DC. If Larry Gogan was alive, he’d be slipping current single ‘Heavy’ in lovingly between two pieces of daytime fodder. And God would we thank him!

But The Blades on Tommy got me thinking. The Blades had all of that, and possibly more. A local Ringsend band, for local Ringsend people, they sang of bus stops, and summer love, and pregnant brides and dead-end streets.

They looked amazing, all matching suits, tight haircuts and mod influences. Live they were spectacular. Paul Cleary only had to walk on stage to electrify the room. You knew he had it. The songs, the words, the moves. He was/is world class. Our Weller, our genuine punk songsmith, a man for his times.

I could write a separate essay on how the wind was taken from their sails — they didn’t have a Daniel Fox from Gilla Band to produce them, or a UK music press high on Fontaines-love to champion them — but the reason I would argue they would succeed more so today, and why it is easier now, is this: the internet.

Love it or loathe it, and it is complicated, it is an echo chamber. And if you have something, a song, a look, an attitude — it gets out there a million times more easily. You find your tribe, and you find it the world over.

The only caveat is, you have to have something — for example, a ‘Take me to Church’. A band now, as perfectly formed, as talent rich as The Blades were in 1979, with so many “somethings”, would rule the world.

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