Episode Notes

Episode 29 of To Here Knows When - Great Irish Albums Revisited focuses on Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside by Boa Morte.

“The band favors a similar approach to the kind of subtle, slow-burning intensity patented by the likes of Will Oldham and Smog.”
Billboard (August 10, 2002)

Episode 28 featured Jubilee Allstars and their great album Lights of the City, and there are links between Jubilee Allstars and Boa Morte, the focus of this episode. Boa Morte were inspired to work with the recording engineer Marc Carolan because of his work on the first Jubilee Allstars recordings and Boa Morte also played with the Jubilee Allstars on a couple of occasions.

Boa Morte - Paul Ruxton, Cormac Gahan and Bill Twomey play guitars, Paul and Cormac sing and Maurice Hallissey plays drums. The lads formed Hubble in Cork in the mid-90s and previously Bill and Cormac had been in The Lemmings. In mid-1998 Hubble became Boa Morte and have to date released four incredible albums.

In 1998 Hubble were making a transition from what I suppose we’d call an Indie band into something mellower, slower, something influenced more by Americana and folk music. It was a really interesting time, indie guitar bands were experimenting and new sub genres were emerging, sadcore or slowcore and postrock. Bands such as Low and Tortoise were making really exciting records. Around this time indie/noise heroes Mercury Rev even turned from the neo-psychedelic sounds of See You On the Other Side and ventured to the Catskills Mountains enlisting Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of The Band to join their recording sessions. Deserter’s Songs followed in September 1998. A landmark album if ever there was one.  

Within months of that May 1998 Triskel gig Hubble had changed their name to Boa Morte and as mentioned earlier made contact with the recording engineer Marc Carolan.

I mention in the episode that I can recall Bill, Cormac and myself driving from Cork to Dublin to see Mercury Rev in the Mean Fiddler on 20 October, 1998. When I got off Zoom with the lads I immediately doubted myself about this. I know we had bought copies of Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One but that album had been released a year earlier. I found a diary from 1997 and suddenly remembered - it had been a trip to Dublin to see The Go-Betweens in the Mean Fiddler on Tuesday 03 June. I remembered that Conor O’Toole from Cork bands The Orange Fettishes and Grand had also been at that gig and he confirmed that yes, we had traveled to and from Dublin with Bill and Cormac. The diary also revealed that Hubble had supported The Frank & Walters the previous Friday. I think this was a Sir Henry’s gig just before Grand Parade was released.

I then remembered the Prolapse tape! Brian O’Shaughnessy - designer of the above Triskel flyer, a couple of Boa Morte albums and this podcast’s logo - had recorded Prolapse’s album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places onto one side of a C90 for me. The Leicester band’s debut is a firm favourite of mine and I still find their mix of indie-rock and krautrock truly thrilling. At some point on our journey I asked if the lads wanted to hear the tape.

A few minutes into ‘Tina, This Is Matthew Stone’ the near 8-minute climax of the album, wherein the shouted dialogue of duel vocalists Linda Steelyard and Mick Derrick sounds as if it’s collapsing into a violent physical argument. Cormac and Bill looked at each other, the tape was unceremoniously ejected from the car stereo and handed back to me. Prolapse’s cacophony had been rejected.

Boa Morte’s debut EP, Passenger Measure Your Time, was released in September of 1998 and on its release the band themselves described it as, “sparse, lo-fi and country-ish”. And indeed it was. It was the start of the Boa Morte adventure.

In terms of an official timeline the release of that EP will be regarded as the beginnings of Boa Morte, for me though I always associate the beginning of Boa Morte not with the release of the Passenger Measure Your Time EP but with that car journey to see The Go-Betweens in the Mean Fiddler in Dublin and the moment while sitting in the back seat of Bill’s car I was handed back my Prolapse tape. The noise of old was being rebuffed, a new way forward had been found.

In this episode we do talk about those early years all the through to the band’s latest album The Total Space and the sonic progression the band has made over the last few years, but our main focus is Boa Morte’s gorgeous debut album from 2002.

An album of which Uncut magazine wrote: “Occasionally a record comes along that's so intimate and immediate you want to disconnect the phone, get under the duvet and forget the outside world.”

Now if that doesn’t make you want to hear the album, I don’t know what will, Uncut were spot on, it really is that beautiful.

For Further Listening/Reading:

To Here Knows When column in The Goo on Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside…

Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside can be purchased on Bandcamp:

The Total Space can be purchased on Bandcamp:

In the episode I read a few lines from Ian Fletcher’s review of Soon It Will Come Time To Face The World Outside taken from Issue #11 of the much-missed (by me) music magazine Comes With A Smile. Fletcher’s full review is reproduced below.