The Boys From 'Brasil
From starting out playing accordions to supporting the La’s and parting ways with their record label, Hybrasil have a lot of stories to tell.
Stephen Errity, 27 Sep 2007
For a band just about to release their debut album, Hybrasil have been through a lot. The Wicklow five-piece have been plugging away since 2004, when a group of childhood friends returned from various overseas sojourns in the UK and America, built a recording studio in their mate’s house and decided to form a band. Although the five members had all played in a variety of garage punk groups as teenagers, this early incarnation of Hybrasil was like nothing they had done before or since.
“At the start we were more like an Americana or country band,” says lead singer Spud Murphy, grateful for the excuse that a phonecall from hotpress gives him to take a break from lugging the band’s equipment into The Village. “We used accordions and lap steel guitars – it was a more organic and acoustic sound.” Shortly after the band played the Hard Working Class Heroes festival in 2005, an unfortunate accident had unforeseen consequences. “I broke my arm and I wasn’t really able to play guitar for a while,” recalls Spud, “so I started messing about with drum machines and synthesisers and our first single (‘We Got Music’) basically came out of that.”
Things gathered momentum nicely after that – the We Got Music EP was released in the UK, Germany and Japan and the band toured Ireland and the UK with names like Republic Of Loose, Idlewild and The Chalets. After completing another Irish and UK tour with The Frank and Walters in 2006 and releasing a second EP, the band capped off their year with an appearance on Ryan Tubridy’s RTÉ show. But despite the seemingly relentless upward progression, all was not well behind the scenes. “What we expected from our record label and what they were doing for us were two different things – we got fed up of it,” says Spud. Although they had had a completed album on their hands for almost a year, by November of 2006 the label seemed no closer to deciding on a release date, so the mutual decision was made to part ways, leaving the band in a determined mood. “We did learn a lot from being with the label, but we figured that we could do just as good a job ourselves,” declares Spud.
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