When Philly Byrne, lead singer of Gama Bomb, began discussions about a documentary on his durable thrash-metal band, thoughts of a much-loved pastiche from the mid-1980s were unavoidable.
“Well, sometimes the reality is more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap,” the Newry man says. “Obviously, we’re all huge fans of the film. Just last week we were on tour and we drove past Stonehenge.”
Ah, yes. As replicated in accidental miniature for one of the Tap’s most hilarious mishaps.
“The comparisons were inescapable!”
There seems to be one oblique reference to This Is Spinal Tap in Kiran Acharya’s rambunctious Gama Bomb: Survival of the Fastest. We hear of Domo Dixon, the band’s lead guitarist, being laid low with a mysterious “trouser accident”. Come on, now. This is surely a nod to the fatal “bizarre gardening accident” that did for a Tap drummer.
“Correct reference!” Byrne says with a bellow. “He put his hand in to push his boxers down and something snapped. It’s called ‘baseball finger’.”
The conversation is a bit unfair to Gama Bomb and to Acharya’s low-budget flick. This Is Spinal Tap, like so many genuine rock documentaries, is a study of terminal dysfunction. It is about relationships warping and cracking under the glare of publicity.
The wonder of Gama Bomb’s story is that they survived for more than 20 years without (if the film is to believed) any major fallings-out. Purveyors of warp-speed comic bangers, the band have never been enormous, but they have sustained enough of a following to keep them trundling on while members worked jobs, raised children and otherwise pursued “real lives”. It is, to use a sentimental cliche, an inspirational tale.
“We are mates, which I think the film does a really good job of showing,” Byrne says. “There is love there. So there’s that. None of us are hired guns, and that’s really important. The other thing is we had realistic expectations. Coming from the type of families we come from, we didn’t walk into this naively. Whenever we got signed, back in the noughties, we didn’t put a down payment on a guitar-shaped swimming pool. We kept our real lives going.”
In the film, Byrne, a fiercely smart fellow with a very south Down line in self-deprecation, points out that bands often conceal the fact that they maintain “day jobs”. Gama Bomb have no such inhibitions about acknowledging their parallel straight lives. Why should they?
“You have to reach compromises,” he says. “You end up with a job where your boss doesn’t really mind that you use all your holidays to be in a band. You end up married to someone who isn’t insulted by the fact that you dress up like an idiot for a gig.”
Byrne was a journalist for a while, but “the arse fell out of that when the crash happened”. He still does a bit of that, but most of his work is now in marketing.
“In the band we’ve got a man who runs supercomputers for cancer research,” he says. “We’ve got a guy who is one of the directors of a theatre. We’ve got a guy who owns a hotel.”
The film is a laugh. But it is also a touching study of middle-aged men managing complex lives. Acharya, an experienced multidisciplinary film-maker from Northern Ireland, had known and worked with the band before, but he was still taking on a notable responsibility here.
“It was a strange experience that revealed new dimensions for both the subjects – that is to say Philly and the boys in Gamma Bomb – and the film-maker,” Acharya says. “Our friendship and our working relationship precedes the making of the documentary. I made several Gama Bomb videos in a variety of incredible locations: Malin Head, out by the lighthouse; that time Philly called me up and commanded me to make my way to a sex dungeon in Edinburgh.”The film also features a touching thumbnail sketch of Newry. Byrne clearly has great affection for the city, but that affection is tempered with an awareness of political tensions that haven’t quite gone away. We get a brief visit to an Orange Hall. A band member talks about IRA attacks before the ceasefire.
“It’s hard to explain,” Byrne says, minding his words. “It’s kind of a one-sided love. Newry is a hard place to love. But, in retrospect, even with everything that was happening at the time, it was an amazing place to grow up in. Even during the Troubles it was fairly safe. I was never in any real trouble growing up there. Never in any real bother.”
In Survival of the Fastest we get the sense he feels the old place has got slightly left behind. His dad lives in nearby Warren Point, which has “really nice vegan restaurants”. Joe McGuigan, the band’s bass player, lives just across the Border in tourist-friendly Omeath.
“Newry at the moment is just like another Wakefield,” he says, referring to the city in Yorkshire. “It’s got the air of a depressed UK town. And I think it deserves more. And, as I say in the film, the slang and the attitude in Newry is amazing. The people quality is excellent. I just think the town itself needs a bit of a shot in the arm.”
The band members are a little too old to qualify as ceasefire babies. They have clear memories of the violence. They’ve seen how the jurisdiction has changed. Before Kneecap were even a twinkle, popular music – first punk, then rave – played a part in moving young people away from sectarianism.
“Music of all kinds was the common currency that you bonded with,” Acharya says. “Happy hard-core, Scooter, rave or whatever it might be. It was, and it still is, something to be passionate about. Music fans are my people, so to speak. Live music, punk, metal: everything like that is second nature to me.”
The genre the once-young band settled on was thrash. The theology of metal has become ever more complex as decades intruded between relatively uncomplicated roots in Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. You have your death metal, your folk metal, your glam metal, your neoclassical metal and so on to apocalyptic eternity.
Thrash has its origins in the speedy sounds of early Metallica, Slayer and Megadeath, but, whereas those bands favour a death’s-head glumness – “None more black,” as Tap’s Nigel Tufnel would have it – Gama Bomb and their ilk lean towards a comic-book school of macabre humour: titles such as Beverly Hills Robocop, Smoke the Blow with Willem Dafoe and – one of their most popular numbers – Miami Supercops. The riffs are tight. The lyrics are a hoot. In a fairer world they’d be as big as BTS.
“I love thrash metal because of when it came into my life,” Byrne says. “Everyone in the family loved music at a time where there was lots of guitar music. Then thrash metal showed up. And me and my best friend Joe got into it when we were teenagers. We already liked heavy metal – bits and bobs of it, like Ugly Kid Joe and all that kind of thing. We discovered this and it appealed to us. We found it hilariously funny.”
Byrne argues that the genre imploded after “Metallica changed their style in order to become more successful”. He seems relaxed about it all.
“They became a heavy-metal band. And then everyone swam after them, trying to do the same thing,” he says. “And the genre collapsed. It’s got all its own weird signifiers. It has codes and shoes that are appropriate, but I feel like it’s a type of music that gives people an excuse to behave like kids – which I think is a brilliant, healthy thing.”
It would be insane to ask if he felt Gama Bomb will continue. The lesson of the film is that, for those who properly commit, there is no reason to quit the church of rock’n’roll. Real life can accommodate the music and the music can accommodate real life. It’s a thumping yarn.
“You should be proud of things you’ve done,” Byrne says. “And, with the band, apart from the music, the one thing I’m proud of is that we can say we’re all friends. Even the people who aren’t in the band any more are still mates with us.”
Gama Bomb: Survival of the Fastest is on limited release from Sunday, May 18th
