Sound of the underground
Jeremy Hickey, aka Rarely Seen Above Ground, has become one of the most acclaimed artists in the Irish indie scene. He talks about the intriguing origins of his unique musical style.
Patrick Freyne, 11 Jun 2009
In the pages of classic boy’s comic Roy Of The Rovers there was a story called ‘Billy’s Boots’, in which a precocious young whippersnapper played international standard football thanks to a pair of magic football boots that had previously been owned by a veteran soccer superstar. Such totemic ancestor-worship can also be found in the music industry, and it could explain why young Jeremy Hickey, the one-man-band below the surface of Rarely Seen Above Ground (R.S.A.G.) plays such amazing swamp-blues-funk-pop-indie (live, this is a whirlwind of drums and vocals accompanied by shadowy projections of Hickey playing the other instruments). Is this because (like Billy and his boots) young Jeremy has a Fender precision bass that was played by his father back in the showband era and this has given him mad music skillz?
“My dad was involved with showbands back in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the bass was his pride and joy and it really is a pleasure to play,” he explains. “I still use it and there’s a bit of a history there... a legacy.”
Now, Jeremy doesn’t personally suggest that the four stringed “big guitar” has imbued him with any magical sonic powers, but he does credit his musically-talented family as an influence.
“My dad was involved in music his whole life and my mother was always into music as well, so there were a lot of styles going around the house. I started playing drums around 10 and I got my first kit when I was 11. It was a pretty old kit. I’m not even sure what it was. It was basically a bass drum and a tom and I built it up from there. I saved money and would come to Dublin and buy new bits every couple of weeks.”
At this point Jeremy got swallowed up by the local Kilkenny music scene.
“I was in bands from the age of 14,” he recalls. “It was just local bands. People that were in my school, a year or two ahead, they’d hear I was a drummer and approach me and ask would I be in their band. Then we’d disappear into a practice place or garage and spend a few months doing covers. It was everything from The Cure to The Jesus and Mary Chain to Spaceman Three to the Pixies. You’d just go in and perfect the songs. That was the thing back then when we started – it was all about covers. It’s not like now, where people are encouraged to write their own songs much earlier. People would do covers and learn to play them first before you’d get on to writing songs.”
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