The sunny side of setting up a US Laundry Shop

Dublin band The Laundry Shop – best known for ‘Highs and Lows’ from the Discover Ireland ads – are off to LA to record their second album and take a shot at success. It won’t be easy, ‘but at least it’ll be sunny’

ONCE AGAIN we have a scenario where a sense of ambition precedes the dull clang of pragmatism, and where bright optimism bests the most difficult challenges. Over the past 18 months, Dublin rock band The Laundry Shop have been busying themselves with mostly under-the-radar activities, in preparation for their imminent departure to the US.

We’ve been here before, of course – many times, in fact. The notional theory is that an Irish band makes ripples in their own country and then decides to try to make waves elsewhere. The vast majority of bands return home after several months, their heads in shreds, their finances in disarray, their career strategies in tatters. What starts off as living the dream swiftly turns into a waking nightmare. The only items remaining are a worn passport, a torn piece of paper with a faded phone number, and stories about the night they brought the room to a standstill in Boise, Idaho, or the day they bumped into a ZZ Top roadie in Lubbock, Texas.

The Laundry Shop won’t be the last Irish rock act to look to the US, but if main songwriter Stephen Robinson has anything to do with it, they will not buckle under the weight of expectation or hype. Rather, they will undertake things at their own pace, at their own level, reasonably secure in the knowledge that in their base camp of Los Angeles they are at least at the centre of things, that there are radio stations that will playlist their songs, and that within a radius of several hundreds of miles there are more venues to perform in than they’d ever dreamt possible.

“It’s a challenge for an independent act in Ireland to get on the radio – a huge challenge. With the exception of the more popular bands in Ireland that receive airplay – typically The Blizzards and The Coronas, who are each more of a pop thing than we are – I just don’t see the infrastructure here for having a long career. Ireland has swallowed up a lot of great bands because they never got out – and the bands that did have a long-term career got out of Ireland straight away. Bands can play up and down the country in a week. I’m not saying that when we head over to America things will take off straight away, but at least it’ll be sunny.”

Robinson is an imposing figure; he’s improbably tall, incredibly ambitious and a self-confessed control freak. “I’m an instinctual person,” he says. “In relation to being in a rock band, you’d have to be slightly mad to do it. It’s like acting or writing: you have to be prepared to take so much rejection – and take it with a pinch of salt – before the opportunities arise.”

There is, however, a seriousness to his talk of wanting to make things work for his band. At 30 he's no innocent with fluffy dreams of success. Stints in a number of previous bands (notably Meteor award winners Angel of Mons) have hardened his reserve and his resolve. And all this is not to mention his songwriting skills – The Laundry Shop's debut album, Grandstanding, features the kind of rock that is both scattershot and streamlined. The fusion gives the music a serrated edge that sounds as if it was made more for the stage than the studio. The songs for the follow-up have already been demoed, says Robinson, and are ready to go. Hence the US, a Los Angeles-based manager, and a "name" producer.

Time to live the dream, then – but what’s so different in this instance is Robinson’s experience and the band’s collective independent spirit. He relates how Angel of Mons went from being headline news to a footnote in a matter of months. “We won the Meteor award, we were hyped up, and then Snow Patrol’s management came on board. They flew us over to New York, where we played the Mercury Lounge in front of no punters, just industry people. There was complete silence. Very daunting. We did about four showcase gigs, played for pretty much every record company in America, and came back to Ireland with our tail between our legs. Nothing happened, and because at that stage we had no financial backing – we had totally drained all our resources – we couldn’t push ourselves or even afford to put out a single in Ireland.”

Despite the knock-back, Robinson has refused to budge from his ideals, a stance that threw up some surprising results in the shape of the song Highs and Lows, which has been used to good effect on a Discover Ireland television marketing campaign. "A music publisher approached me and said he could get the song on the ad. Which he did, and for a while it was fine, but at some point we felt that while everyone knows the song, they didn't know the band. Trying to put a face to the song was our job. The song has been around for almost three years now – it's almost a national anthem – but I don't think it's one of my best.

“Being in a band has changed an awful lot recently,” he says. “The light at the end of the tunnel for so many used to be the record deal with a major record label, but now that has disappeared – major labels just aren’t signing bands any more, because they don’t have the money. That change is going to sort out who is serious and who is in a band for other reasons.

“People who love doing it are going to continue doing it, regardless of whether there’s much income in it. I believe that lots of people are driven to do it, and that’s what I mean by living the dream. It’s not signing the big record deal and making loads of money. It is, literally, to get in a van, drive to places, play in a bar or venue, sell a few CDs and T-shirts, and see how it goes.”

Will it work? Robinson is philosophical. “How do you define ‘work’? We made the album and it worked. What happens now is fun.”

Grandstanding is out now on RMG