Sultans return
It's 30 years since the Sultans of Ping's debut album, Casual Sex in the Cineplex, made Cork cool. For frontman Niall O'Flaherty, the moment is worth revisiting.
One night when he was 20, Niall O’Flaherty crept in home after a gig and, too excited to wait to break the news, wrote a note to his mother.
“We’re signing a record deal,” it read. It was the early nineties.
“We were absolutely astonished that we were signed,” the Sultans of Ping frontman, now 52 and talking over Zoom from his London home, tells me.
“Even when I woke up in the morning and read the note again, I thought, ‘God, that’s got to be nonsense.’ But it happened within a couple of weeks, and we were gone. We hit the road.”
The resulting debut album, Casual Sex in the Cineplex, released on Epic Records 30 years ago, enjoyed a certain amount of success in the UK, with You Talk To Much making it into the Top 40 for three weeks, following on from the break-out phenomenon that was Where’s Me Jumper, released as a single the year earlier.
Back home, it became, of course, the stuff of legends, not only due to the fact that these were Cork lads who managed to “get signed” and go off to live the dream as international rock stars, but also because the album was peppered with references to Cork landmarks, title included.
The idiosyncratic humour of Niall’s lyrics, the band’s particular mythology and terminology have become a part of the very fabric of Cork city’s identity.
It may hurt Cork pride somewhat to consider this, but Ireland is very small fry when it comes to the international music business. In fact it’s too small a market to be considered its own territory: for the purposes of international touring acts, it’s considered to be in the UK territory.
It’s a money thing, not political: Dublin is the only city with an audience big enough for it to be profitable for many acts to bring a stage show to.
This is why you see Irish dates on large international acts’ tours tacked on at the start or the end of their UK run. And it’s also why, when you go to Irish festivals in counties Laois or Westmeath, the headliners will come on and roar, “Helloooooo Dublinnnnn!”
Cork, then, is a sub-region, Ireland itself only ranking as something along the lines of a main regional city in the 68 million strong UK market. And for young musicians this was the feeling when Sultans broke through: you had to come from somewhere else, somewhere on the map, if you wanted to make it in music. Cork bands were keenly aware that they were perched on the periphery. But you could always point at the Sultans of Ping and go, ‘they’re a Cork band and look what they did.’”
Actually, though, Niall thinks that Cork in the late eighties and early nineties was the perfect Petri dish for their creativity. And he says the availability of venues, the amount of young people who went to gigs, and independent alternative predecessors like Stump were all a part of the agar.
“There was a lot of doom and gloom around, extremely high unemployment,” he says. “Half of Cork was over here, for economic reasons. But we never felt that: we felt very optimistic, or at least not pessimistic and not fearful of the future. But we didn’t look very far ahead.”
An early iteration of the Sultans of Ping played at a school concert at Niall’s school in Rochestown, in the Cork suburbs.
“But our first proper gig was in the Phoenix in Cork,” he says. “The Phoenix was a great spot to play. All our friends would be there and they’d just fill it. The audience were entertaining, in themselves. They made the whole thing, generated little customs that still happen at the gigs today. It’s a lot to do with that punk culture in Cork. You think about bands like Stump, for example: how the hell did they come out of Cork?”
One thing that Niall always had in spades was an unmistakably audacious stage presence. His louche, bum-wiggling onstage antics and the band’s love of performing in PVC seemed to owe as much to Glam Rock as to their punk sound.
“We wanted to entertain all the time,” he says. “One of my favourite bands is The Cramps and that’s all about occupying the space and keeping people’s attention and pushing it further and further. Some say that, at some points, we might have pushed it too far.”
“As we went along, we got more flamboyant because we could access the clothes. But I don’t think we were ever all that good at putting the clothes together, to be honest with you.”
There exists on YouTube a hilarious video of them performing Indeed You Are to a bemused and elderly audience on a show presented by Bibi Baskin. Niall is clad in a yellow PVC mac and stripey tights.
When I mention it, he laughs. “That was a fetching combination, wasn’t it?” he says. “And then the camera turns to the audience, and there’s just this misery and astonishment combined.”
Niall, with Pat O’Connell on guitar, Alan McFeely on bass and Morty McCarthy on drums, set off to promote Casual Sex in the Cineplex in the UK and Europe with “astonishing excitement,” Niall says.
“We were going to get the most out of it”
“We gigged very very hard. We arrived in England and we had a small van and we travelled every bit of it. THere’s nowhere in this country I haven’t been, every one horse town.”
“The first gig we played was in Hull and we got there at half eleven because we’d had traffic trouble and the venue was closing. But the promoter let us go on anyway. The gigs were packed from day one and the excitement was incredible. We decided, ‘we’re going to enjoy this’. I won’t say we didn’t think it would last long, because we thought it would last forever. We were just going to get the most out of it.”
Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? He smiles. “No comment. There was certainly rock ‘n’ roll.”
He’s more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie, and says it’s a small mercy that the band’s wildest moments were in the pre-digital era. Because these days, far from the spotlights, Dr Niall O’Flaherty has a successful academic career and lectures in the History of European Political Thought at King’s College, London.
“Every student now will google your name,” he says. “There was a time when I could keep the two worlds separate.”
After Casual Sex in the Cineplex, Sultans would release two more albums, Teenage Drug in 1994, with the catchy Wake Up and Scratch Me and Michiko both highlights. But after a third album, Good Year for Trouble, in 1996, the Sultans would be dropped by their record label. Rumours abound that its cover, which now seems positively tame if a little dark, made too much reference to BDSM and that damaged its ability to sell, but things had changed anyway: Britpop had come along.
The Sultans had been vaguely anachronistic, coming a little too late for the tail end of Punk and rise of New Wave, even before this.
“You build a band by putting them on tour with a band that’s in a similar kind of vein, and there wasn’t another band in a similar kind of vein,” Niall says. “We went on tour with Carter USM and they were lovely fellas but not what we were doing. We became increasingly anachronistic and then the Britpop thing came along, and then we were totally out. When the Indie thing was going on, we could be a little bit part of that because of the stage show, but we couldn’t be part of Britpop.”
Chasing hits
The band members took on other jobs: “Pat is in finance and Alan works in the film industry,” Niall says. They all live in London, except Morty, who moved to Sweden.
“What was lacking with us was a bit of patience,” Niall says. “You are under a bit of pressure to produce the hits, radio friendly records, because in our day it was all about the radio, less so now. It’s detrimental to what you’re doing because you’re chasing the next hit a lot. I’ve never been a fan of say, U2 or something, but you have to admire them for churning out the hits.”
Sultans were always a live act first and foremost, Niall says.
“We gave it our all. The gigs are gruelling and we gave it 100%. As Morty has said, you do 30 shows and then have two days off, and then you do 30 again, and then you’re off to Germany and you do 20, and then you go to the Netherlands and do 10….it was relentless, but we loved it, so you can’t really complain about it.”
“When it gets problematic is when you’re not selling as many records. The fashions change, as where as there might have been the space for you at one time, there’s no space for you now and that’s hard to take for a while. But then you move on.”
Niall was still songwriting and had produced an album for a London-based Japanese girl band when he had a “moment of clarity” that saw him move away from a career in music while signing a publishing deal for a song he had written.
“I said to my publisher, ‘this is it, finally we’ve done it.’ And he said, ‘you still don’t get it, do you? it’s not about signing deals, it’s about selling records.’ And I realised I was in the wrong game.”
Cork gigs
Now that it’s 30 years since Casual Sex in the Cineplex was released, the Sultans of Ping are coming back to their hometown to play two anniversary gigs in Cork Opera House.
It’s by no means the only time the band has reformed or played one-off gigs, in the UK and Ireland: they’ve played the Savoy, and a memorable, and Niall says chaotic, gig at Electric Picnic in 2015, and many other bits and pieces. In fact, they’ve done so frequently.
But it’s their first Cork gig since 2014, and the first time they’ll ever play Cork Opera House.
“It’s a bit of a thrill and a bit weird to be playing there as well,” Niall says. “We’re rehearsing for these ones. The muscle memory is gone from the big gaps between the shows. Morty, the drummer, bashes us into shape. He’s quite a strict task master so he ensures that we’re tight enough to do it.”
But despite these occasional outings, Niall says it’s very unlikely that we’ll see the band back in a studio or planning any albums or tours any time soon. Their music, he says, was steeped in the boiling water of youth: as their adult lives progress - Niall is a father to 12-year-old Lucy - trying to pin their punk sound to grown-up themes would sound stewed.
“Adult life experiences are just not interesting to the rest of the world,” he says with a smile. “It doesn’t feel like the stuff of music.”
He says this is partly a genre thing: “Punk music is about youth. There are certain types of music that grow better with the age of the performer, like Leonard Cohen, who just kept getting better and better, but The Buzzcocks didn’t get better and better, and the New York Dolls looked like my aged godmother by the end.”
“Besides,” he says with a smile, “it’s hard to buy PVC trousers online when you’re a 52-year-old man: it takes you to all sorts of places you don’t want to go.”
Niall is looking forward to the Cork gigs, to meeting up with friends, staying with family. And he’s very much looking forward to that hometown gig vibe, the number of friends and familiar faces that will be in the crowd.
How would he like the Sultans of Ping to he remembered?
“I’d like us to be remembered as a powerful live band with a few decent songs,” he says with a shrug. “We always had modest ambitions and therefore we fulfilled them. That’s the secret of success, isn’t it?” but he’s laughing as he says it: “We set the bar very low for ourselves, and we made it.”
Sultans of Ping live at Cork Opera House is sold out on Saturday, February 11. Some dress circle tickets remain for Friday, February 10. You can view them here.
