“It’s just very strange that what we’re doing is successful. It’s a lesson to everyone out there to get up off their arses. […] That’s the thing that keeps us going. Success means nothing. Sales mean nothing. The only thing that keeps us going is getting up realising that we did something useful the day before.”
In August 1994, dSide Magazine’s Donal Scannell caught up with Tim Hannigan of Sound Crowd, at arguably the peak of the Irish dance duo’s powers.
A series of stellar Sound Crowd EPs, including Olympic States, Dream Lover and Sixth Season on Red Records established the imprint as Ireland’s leading dance label, which also saw releases from Nikolai, Liquid Wheel, 4 Rhythm, Johnny Moy and Cork’s Fish Go Deep (then called Fishgotech) and others before it was wound up in 1995.
Sound Crowd also called it a day in 95, with Hannigan going on to adopt the Mr Spring persona, and Kavanagh embracing the harder side of dance with releases on Tripoli Trax, Trade, and his own Baby Doll Recordings. Sound Crowd have reformed on occasion in the years since for a number of one-off performances.
At the time of the article, however, dance music in Ireland was in a strange place, amidst media-fuelled hysteria about rave culture and a clampdown by the authorities.
“I’ve no fear,” Hannigan explains in the article . “The police can say what they like, they can close down as many dance clubs as they like, they can tell lies about everybody. But at the end of the day, this is rock and roll. Again.
“They’re wasting their time. Every chunk they take out of us makes us laugh louder. They haven’t got a clue, they really don’t, they’re just scared of what they don’t know. They see the kids behaving n a way that they never did before. They forget that they did the same to rock and roll.”
As to how Sound Crowd originally came together? According to Hannigan, tying up with Kavanagh to form Sound Crowd came about came about through a mutual appreciation of dance music – the former operating “the only recording studio in the country that was kitted out to do any sort of dance music”, the latter operating as a DJ and fanzine editor.
“It just happened,” he says. “We said ‘fuck it’, why don’t we make a record. Sound Crowd started just 18 months ago. We didn’t know what we were doing, we had to set up a label and learn all that shit. It took twelve weeks to get it out. We sold lots of copies in England, by mistake totally, we learnt a lot of hard lessons.”
He’s also brutally honest about the quality of the duo’s output – “If it wasn’t for Fifth Season, we wouldn’t have made a second record. The other three tracks on that EP are crap.”
Read the full article below. From the August 1994 issue of dSide Magazine. Click to open each page in a new window.
