Fighting With Wire

This aint a scene, it's a fight

It took four years to record the debut album, but Fighting With Wire’s frontman has been rather busy. Cahir O'Doherty (pictured centre) kindly lets Music News use the quiet of his tour van to explain why it all took so long...



"The thing about this band is there are no gimmicks," says the vocalist and guitarist for Derry's Fighting With Wire (FWW). "There’s nothing but three people playing rock music."

But it nearly wasn’t even that for the group that started out as a side project to four-piece Jetplane Landing. "People knew about us, but nobody really took any notice," he says.

The band took to the studio anyway for what turned into a lengthy recording process, namely due to O’Doherty’s availability - "I was playing bass with Seafood as well. I was doing a million and one things," he admits. Then last year was spent doing nothing except sending the fruits of their labour, 'Man Vs Monster', out to people, who "completely ignored it".

O’Doherty admits the group, completed by old friend Craig McKean on drums and bassist Jamie King, almost disbanded in December deciding they literally couldn’t afford to not make it. "We’re not spring chickens!" says the 30-year-old.

Fortunately, the Zane Lowe 'Midas touch' and a little trip to New York courtesy of Atlantic Records later means the band are now standing in the 2008 'best new' poll queue, and are fresh from their first ever Download appearance.

"We’re excited again, for the first time in a while," says O’Doherty, who is determined to restore honesty in music with his "rehashed early 90s rock" influenced by Dinosaur Jnr, Nirvana, Fugazi and The Pixies, to name a few. "These bands are three or four people on stage just rocking out playing good songs - that’s what it’s about," he laments. "It’s all fashion over content today."

Honing the no gimmicks ethos of FWW, O’Doherty, refreshingly genuine and ardent, regales stories of turning up for gigs to find "kids with unbelievable haircuts, and extremely tight jeans cutting off the circulation to their brains, playing scene music". He says: "They just look at us going: 'he’s not even screaming'. I just want to throw myself under a bus!"

Clearly passionate about his cause, O’Doherty also touts the small but mighty line-up of three. "I think some of the best bands ever were three-pieces," he says. "When you go and see a three-piece live, it always, always kicks your arse." And that’s a point well exampled by FWW themselves.


'Everyone Needs A Nemesis' is out on Monday 7 July
Taken from the album 'Man Vs Monster' on Smalltown America
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Recommended track: 'My Armoury'

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