GuilFest 2006. The 3 Day Guildford Music Festival on 14th, 15th and 16th July 2006

About the bands
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Artist: Hal
Genre: Rock
Performing: 16th July 2005 /BBC Radio 2 main Stage
Website Address: [] ,
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The showcase gig has long adhered to certain rules. More often that not, it takes place in a London venue. A&R men will hog the bar. Free beer will be imbibed. Unless, of course, your name is Hal, the Irish quartet – brothers Dave and Paul Allen (vocals/guitar and vocals/bass respectively), Stephen O’Brien (keyboards) and Steve Hogan (drums) – whose showcase in 2002 was held in Kiliney, Dublin at the siblings’ dad’s house. In a cramped room. On the beach.

“The guys from the record company got drenched from the waves walking up to my dad’s house,” recalls Dave, “so they were sitting in their pants and socks and drying off their clothes on the radiator while asking us questions about ourselves in-between songs.”

An inauspicious start, perhaps, but the group’s songs are so gorgeous that the evening’s intimacy surely underlined their charms. Whatever, Hal are a hymn to blissful isolation, theireponymous debut album both populist and arcane, modern yet infused with an old school quality. This much you will know if you heard their first single, ‘Worry About The Wind’, a tribute to The Band’s Rick Danko, which – not unlike the aforementioned ‘70s folk-rock gods – married the kind of harmonies that never go out of fashion to a sylvan verve and otherworldly sensibility. Except the Band, or indeed any other outfit, weren’t endowed with vocals as breathtaking as Dave Allen, whose falsetto-voiced delivery adds Hal’s songs a saintly lustre and evokes the days when rock was blessed with a sun-kissed innocence.

“We’re pretty removed from any band scene at all,” says Dave, whose parents were a double act on Ireland ’s folk circuit. “Every so often people will recommend a new album to me and I’ll play it for a couple of days or whatever. But I always return to the artists that I love – people like Harry Nilsson, Brian Wilson and Van Morrison.”

It’s this respectable distance from the conveyor belt pop culture that makes ‘Hal’ such a sublime, inimitable album. That and their glut of delicate, potent melodies. Shot through with a young man’s preoccupation with love in al it’s myriad incarnations, ‘Hal’ belies their tender years with eleven supremely crafted songs. ‘What A Lovely Dance’ is a poignant, multi layered ballad shot through with a heady brew of longing and despair, while ‘Play The Hits’ is a joyful jolt of new wave euphoria, like Steely Dan racing Saint Etienne down Route 66. Indeed from the optimistic mantra of ‘Keep Love As Your Golden Rule’ – surely the best song Neil Young never wrote – to ‘My Eyes Are Sore’ ‘Hal’ is, for all it’s accessibility, awash with the kind of esoteric touches that separate the exceptional from the everyday. It’s Van Morrison in his blue eyed soulful heyday,

it’s Brian Wilson jumping out of the sandbox. It’s both a perfect piece of pop joy and a aching heartbreaker of an album

“Every time we stick on the records we love,” says Dave, the mouthpiece of the band, “we always hear something new. There’s an old Buffalo Springfield song called Expecting To Fly that Neil Young wrote that he took a month to record because he wanted to get it just right. We’ve done that too. We’ve deliberated over a guitar sound that we know is in there somewhere and would make the song sound amazing.”

Needless to say, Hal are equipped to do just that. Aside from Paul, 23, whose first band this is, they bring years of experience to bear upon their songs. Dave, 26, has been in groups since his early teens, having joined a shoegazing outfit when he was 14. Stephen, 27, an ex-archaeologist, started even younger, gracing his first band aged just 12. He had referenced everyone from The Cure to Joy Division before, via a friend, he met Dave in the late ‘90s. Immediately, the pair struck up a rare songwriting bond, composing for two years every night, though both of them had day jobs, obsessing over each and every aspect of Hal’s sound.

“We’d hang around at my dad’s house, in his backroom,” says Dave. “He’d come in sometimes and see us, a piano, a keyboard and piles of his dirty washing, and mutter something about us needing more lead guitar.”

Instead of heeding Dave’s dad’s advice the pair enlisted Paul, who’d cycle home, post-practice, from his father’s in Kiliney to his flat in the city centre, crashing out at 3am . The core of the group in place, they wowed The Sugar Club in Dublin , securing a gig a month until - six months into their schedule - Rough Trade beat a host of labels to their signatures. Since then they’ve enjoyed a spate of on the road adventures, touring with The Delays, Starsailor and Grandaddy, none of whom sound like Hal. Then again, who does?

Maybe the idiosyncratic nature of the band can be ascribed to Dave, who is lovably odd himself. Not only is he blissfully unaware of other bands (“People say to me, ‘Do you know this band and that band?’ And I’ve never heard of any them”), but he enjoys collecting postcards and badges (“I’ve got a very nice one of the zebra crossing at Abbey Road”); recording conversations which he slows down and/or speeds up, adapting them for use on his answerphone at home; and unearthing 18 th century, er, gentlemen’s manuals.

“I found this book called A Gentlemen’s Companion: A Guide To Victorian Vices, which is a collection of all these stories about brothels and what a good brothel keeper should have in her boudoir. It lists all the addresses of brothels in London , Amsterdam and Edinburgh , and what you could expect to get for your money. I read out a chapter every day when we were on tour.”

Hal – they’re not of this world. Join them in theirs.

For further information please call Ruth Drake @ Sainted PR on 020 8962 5700 / ruth@saintedpr.com