Tee Tolmar
Budapest born, Edinburgh based. Cultural journalist & photographer, with a passion for music and fashion.
Gurriers take over London’s Moylett’s for the launch party of new album ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’
There is already a crowd spilling out onto the pavement when we arrive at Moylett’s on a Thursday night. The smoking area is busy, the pub is humming, and the queue inside moves slowly enough to suggest that everyone has arrived with time to kill. Before heading downstairs, Izzy, our resident photographer, and I order a pint of the house lager, the Moylett’s lager, and join the queue.
At the end of it, we are handed our goody bags: a copy of DIY Magazine, stickers, a tiny lighter, little posters, a tote emblazoned with the Gurriers name and, perhaps most importantly, a Gurriers T-shirt. It is the kind of collection of things that makes an album launch feel less like a press event and more like being invited into someone’s world.
Downstairs, Moylett’s transforms. The room is dimly lit, hot and already sweaty, with the particular atmosphere of a club that has technically not started yet. People cluster together talking, surrounded by band T-shirts: shirts from all sorts of other bands, and, of course, plenty of Gurriers ones from across the years. It is a young crowd for the most part, though not exclusively, and there is a comfortable mixture of committed Gurriers fans and music-industry people.
Before long, an introduction begins, bringing attention to the visual world surrounding ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You.‘ The album is then played in full, with its music videos projected onto the screen. Heard collectively in the dark, the record takes on a different kind of momentum. People dance through it; some sing along, despite the album having only been out for six days; others simply stand and watch the videos unfold. The launch becomes less about listening to a new album for the first time and more about watching a room of people collectively inhabit one that they have already begun to make their own.
When the playback ends, four members of Gurriers join the stage for a Q&A: Charlie McCarthy, Ben O’Neill, Mark MacCormack and Pierce Callaghan. The host begins with a few questions of his own before opening the floor to the audience. The questions range from the serious to the wonderfully stupid. At one point, someone asks which song they would want the Minions to cover. It is exactly the sort of question that breaks up the solemnity of an album launch, and the band seem entirely at home with it.
There is also a striking confidence to the way they talk about themselves. Asked about their ambitions, Mark MacCormack makes no attempt to downplay his belief in the band, saying he thinks Gurriers are one of the best live bands at their level and that they have been overlooked for awards. Even nominations, he suggests, would be a good place to start.
I ask them what “making it” actually means.
For Charlie McCarthy, there is no straightforward definition. You do not necessarily know what making it means until you are already doing it. The fact that Gurriers now have the problems that come with a growing career, particularly the demands of touring, is itself evidence that they have reached something they once imagined from the outside.
Ben O’Neill gives an answer that is both simpler and, perhaps, more revealing: freedom. He wants to be able to create as much as he wants. Ultimately, he says, all he wants is enough money to smoke green and make music.
Mark’s answer has changed considerably from the version of success he imagined as a teenager. Growing older has altered his priorities and he’s less focused on chasing shifting goals. Now, he jokes, he would just quite like to get a mortgage.
Pierce Callaghan takes a more philosophical route. Placing too much of your self-worth in external gratification, he says, is a difficult road to go down. You cannot really explain the feeling of success. Instead, there are moments when people you love suddenly recognise that what you are doing is big. For him, one of those moments was his homeboys realising the significance of Gurriers playing Electric Picnic.
Taken together, the answers offer four very different ideas of what “making it” might look like. There is freedom, stability, recognition, touring problems, mortgages and the people back home who finally understand why you keep doing this.
The conversation also touches on Gurriers’ politics and activism. What is interesting is how little distance they seem to place between their beliefs and their music. There is no sense of presenting activism as a separate role that the band occasionally takes on. These are simply things they believe, things they care about and things they intend to keep talking about.
They also offer up recommendations for Irish artists worth listening to, including Madra Salach, Makeshift Art and Another Day, before the evening shifts gears once again.
Charlie and Pierce take over the decks.
By this point, the Thursday-night crowd has thinned considerably. There are people who have work in the morning, after all, and the room is no longer as packed as it was for the album playback. But those who remain are clearly in no hurry to leave. The DJ set becomes its own little afterparty, with the band members on the other side of the room from where they had just been discussing the meaning of success.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, I get one of my posters signed by the band. Gurriers cupcakes are handed around. The night carries on with the unceremonious warmth of a good pub party: nothing especially grand, just people lingering because they are having a good time.
And perhaps that is what makes the whole evening feel so fitting for ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You.‘ Gurriers are clearly ambitious. They are confident in their live show, increasingly assured in the visual world around their music, and unafraid to say that they think they deserve more recognition. But at Moylett’s, none of that ambition feels particularly distant.
It is four band members answering ridiculous questions in a basement. It is a signed poster and a tote bag. It is a room full of people already singing along to a record that came out less than a week ago. It is Charlie and Pierce staying behind to DJ on a Thursday night while everyone else gradually remembers they have work tomorrow.
Whatever “making it” ultimately means, for one night at least, Gurriers seemed perfectly happy to be right there.
Photography by Izzy Reeve