Zen Overboard
He used to be one of Irish rock's pre-eminent hedonists, a man rarely seen without pint in hand. Now Republic Of Loose's Mick Pryo has ditched the booze and embraced eastern spirituality. With a new album on the way he talks about his conscious decision to tone down the group's commercial overtones, the importance of good karma and, er, being banned from South African radio for promoting anal sex
Peter Murphy, 02 Nov 2010
Everything's gone Zen again. It seems like every second Irish musician you speak to is seeking solace in the detachment of the Tao, the teachings of Alan Watts or websites with titles like Zenbitchslap.com. No new thing in western culture. 'Tomorrow Never Knows' channeled the Tibetan Book of the Dead and was exhumed 30 years later by the Chemical Brothers, the RZA propagated Shaolin soul, Ghost Dog had his Hagakure, Tony Soprano his Art of War. And Republic Of Loose singer Mick Pyro has Chuang Tzu.
Mick once cut a Rabelaisian figure around town, but a lot of that was psychic smokescreen: the Bukowski soul-boy growl always belied a formidable intelligence. It's a fit and focused individual we meet in a Dublin bar on a Thursday afternoon in September. For over an hour the singer nurses a soft drink and speaks in an almost uninterrupted monologue on how the precision engineering of modern American dance music freed his band from the commercial expectations that might have inhibited their fourth album Bounce At The Devil.
"There was a lot of stuff on the last two albums (influenced by) expectations of Irish radio," he admits. "It was kind of debilitating in the sense that if you keep chasing that the rest of your life... Is that really what it's all about? I suppose I come from a different perspective. When we got to make our first album I was 27, so my goals were never completely industry or monetary based. I just wanted to create music that I liked, that I hadn't heard. We did want to have success in the sense that we wanted to continue, but I suppose when people start getting their hopes up about success in the industry, sometimes you can write in that direction, which we did after the first album. We'd been hanging around with a few record company types who were pushing us. But we made some great pop songs, and I love those songs.”
And to be fair, one can hardly say singles like 'Break' or 'The Idiots' were compromised in any fashion. The former got briefly banned on South African radio when a DJ proclaimed that it promoted unprotected anal sex. The latter boasted a chorus that went, “Fuck those idiots/They don't know jack about love” and mumbled about being drunk in the middle of a doughnut shop.
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