Radar – The Boxing Plot
By Rebekah Rennick | Feb 4 2014
From disjointed beginnings to hip-hop inclinations, Rebekah Rennick gets the scoop on Dublin’s hottest new band The Boxing PlotThe plethora of artists arriving on the already bubbling Irish music scene has never been more explosive, diverse and downright exciting than in the last 12 months. While many bands listed in the chronic “Ones To Watch” articles that spring forward each January seem to sink into obscurity before we’ve even decided upon our New Year’s resolutions; Dublin based quartet The Boxing Plot are certainly ones to keep an eye on.With a polished, mature sound floating in nuances of early Interpol, lead vocalist Harry Ó Cléirigh and resident drummer Maurice Healy are very much the typical student pair, wondering as much as anyone else how they’ve made it this far.As a strong four-piece crew, The Boxing Plot’s beginnings weren’t without some mixing and matching. “I was in a band with a different singer, with the other two members (Oliver Kelly and Oscar Leonard),” explains Healy.“We broke up and I kept telling them that Harry should be our new singer. Basically, they were distrustful of him because he played rugby and they weren’t into that, but I kept telling them he was into Bloc Party.”“We were all in the same year in school,” adds Ó Cléirigh. “I think what really unified us was our mutual appreciation of ‘Humbug’ when it first came out. Bombay Bicycle Club and The XX had some big hits in 2009 too and we all decided it’d be cool to make music like them. Of course, our very early works are nothing like any of those bands.”Emerging in 2009, it’s obvious that behind the welcoming four faces is a cooking pot of thought and well atuned musical ability “About this time last year we kind of had a sit down and decided to take ourselves and our music a little more seriously,” explains Ó Cléirigh.“The two singles we have now, ‘Geist’ and ‘Heidecker’, are kind of the brain child of that process. Beforehand we had been a little bit disheartened because we had been playing very impotent and fruitless gigs that weren’t really getting us anywhere. We’d gotten a couple of recordings that had been delayed, or hadn’t been recorded properly, and were just weak sounding.”Since then, The Boxing Plot have been grabbing the attention of radio and event managers alike, winning Phantom’s Next ICON, playing a roaring set at Hard Working Class Heroes and notably coming out tops in Budweiser’s Future Sounds, which subsequently led to the chance to work with the legendary producer Rob Kirwan.“We kind of adopted him as our surrogate father for a while,” says Ó Cléirigh. “We were suspicious and skeptical because we were like, ‘Why is this huge corporation just investing money into nobody’s from South Side Dublin?’ It defintiely took us by surprise.”While Ó Cléirigh describes their creative process as both “collective and corruptive,” this formula certainly seems to be working perfectly, with the exciting Other Voices festival in Derry being their next ever-rising musical pitstop.
From disjointed beginnings to hip-hop inclinations, Rebekah Rennick gets the scoop on Dublin’s hottest new band The Boxing PlotThe plethora of artists arriving on the already bubbling Irish music scene has never been more explosive, diverse and downright exciting than in the last 12 months. While many bands listed in the chronic “Ones To Watch” articles that spring forward each January seem to sink into obscurity before we’ve even decided upon our New Year’s resolutions; Dublin based quartet The Boxing Plot are certainly ones to keep an eye on.With a polished, mature sound floating in nuances of early Interpol, lead vocalist Harry Ó Cléirigh and resident drummer Maurice Healy are very much the typical student pair, wondering as much as anyone else how they’ve made it this far.As a strong four-piece crew, The Boxing Plot’s beginnings weren’t without some mixing and matching. “I was in a band with a different singer, with the other two members (Oliver Kelly and Oscar Leonard),” explains Healy.“We broke up and I kept telling them that Harry should be our new singer. Basically, they were distrustful of him because he played rugby and they weren’t into that, but I kept telling them he was into Bloc Party.”“We were all in the same year in school,” adds Ó Cléirigh. “I think what really unified us was our mutual appreciation of ‘Humbug’ when it first came out. Bombay Bicycle Club and The XX had some big hits in 2009 too and we all decided it’d be cool to make music like them. Of course, our very early works are nothing like any of those bands.”Emerging in 2009, it’s obvious that behind the welcoming four faces is a cooking pot of thought and well atuned musical ability “About this time last year we kind of had a sit down and decided to take ourselves and our music a little more seriously,” explains Ó Cléirigh.“The two singles we have now, ‘Geist’ and ‘Heidecker’, are kind of the brain child of that process. Beforehand we had been a little bit disheartened because we had been playing very impotent and fruitless gigs that weren’t really getting us anywhere. We’d gotten a couple of recordings that had been delayed, or hadn’t been recorded properly, and were just weak sounding.”Since then, The Boxing Plot have been grabbing the attention of radio and event managers alike, winning Phantom’s Next ICON, playing a roaring set at Hard Working Class Heroes and notably coming out tops in Budweiser’s Future Sounds, which subsequently led to the chance to work with the legendary producer Rob Kirwan.“We kind of adopted him as our surrogate father for a while,” says Ó Cléirigh. “We were suspicious and skeptical because we were like, ‘Why is this huge corporation just investing money into nobody’s from South Side Dublin?’ It defintiely took us by surprise.”While Ó Cléirigh describes their creative process as both “collective and corruptive,” this formula certainly seems to be working perfectly, with the exciting Other Voices festival in Derry being their next ever-rising musical pitstop.