Whipping Boy

Say Dublin and you think of U2. Or, if you're an indie soul, of My Bloody Valentine. Maybe even the mighty Thin Lizzy, fronted by the late, great Phil Lynott, whose statue proudly stands outside a pub on Henry Street. What's certain is that Whipping Boy are not the first name that comes to mind when thinking of the Irish capital. In the early Nineties, alongside Power Of Dreams, they were hailed by the specialist press as the future of English-language alternative rock. The NME itself, reviewing the latter's stunning debut "Immigrants, Emigrants And Me", wrote: "They will be tomorrow's stars." It couldn't have been further from the truth. Hardly anyone remembers them today, and probably a few more people remember Whipping Boy. Yet not as the band who, more than any other, managed to distill the alternative spirit of their era into a single record. Discomfort turning into vengeance, despair into epic grandeur, emotional emptiness into romantic declaration. The Nineties won by losing. And "Heartworm" is a kind of manifesto for that.

Every note of the second of only three albums Whipping Boy ever released breathes regret. An unbridgeable sense of nostalgia for what might have been and never was. The record that could have been the big breakthrough instead remained a shooting star in the rock firmament, its brightness destined to keep listeners' dreams alive while being forever condemned to see none of its own fulfilled. After the raw, noisy debut "Submarine" (1992), Columbia took notice of these four young men who had taken their name from the "whipping boy" - the child in English royal courts who bore the blame and punishment for the misdeeds of the young prince. Management signed them, and they repaid the faith with an album that eased off the shoegaze abrasions of the debut without abandoning them entirely - if anything, ramping them up into breathtaking outbursts, balanced between a feel for pop melody, arrangements of (psycho)dramatic elegance, and a tonal mood close to Red House Painters. A miraculous balance between British melodic brio - close not only stylistically but also geographically - and the thoroughly American aesthetic of existential affliction, which bewitched critics but failed to make a dent in the gilded world of the record market.

"Heartworm" opens as though it were a Tindersticks record, with a mournful violin sketching a noir interior. It's "Twinkle", a morbid pop lullaby that rummages through the veils of emotional addiction ("She's the air that I breathe, not pure enough for me") before being swept away by the devastating fury of a tremolo tornado. That tornado turns into the southwesterly gale of "When We Were Young", a trembling elegy in memory of a restless youth, lived along the thin line separating adolescent bravado from delinquency, the innocence of eighteen from the guilt of no longer being that age. As the storm of the rhythm section stirs up noise turbulence beneath the jangling guitar melody - which could easily have come off the Stone Roses' debut - the dispatch from those lost years lists drunken mischief, windows smashed to kill suburban boredom, evenings spent between joints, brawls and the lips of girls whose names are long forgotten, and then stolen cars, poems, "Starsky and Hutch" on TV. A stentorian chronicle of a time frozen in place, yet to run its course, yet to shatter the immortality of those who know nothing of death ("when we were young no one died and no one grew old"), of those who haven't yet been split in two by falling in love ("And the first time that you loved, you had your whole life to give").

Two more tracks in comes the album's third missed hit, the peak of an entire career and perhaps of an entire way of feeling: "We Don't Need Nobody Else". Screamed like that, with the urgency of a phone call in the dead of night, after describing incommunicability as imprisonment, the listlessness of a tired relationship staring blankly through a porthole into nothingness, it expresses exactly the opposite. It was written during a period of great difficulty and doubt, when - weighed down by the leap into the unknown that was signing to Columbia - the excitement surrounding the band began to fade and everyone who had supported them up to that point slowly disappeared. "We Don't Need Nobody Else" was a defiant offering, at once proud and fragile.

The rest of the album grapples with unanswered questions, devising ever-different formal solutions, though all bound together by an underlying malaise that finds its own aesthetic signature in the very act of exorcising it. From the nocturnal whisper of "Tripped" (Echo And The Bunnymen shot through with 90s-made neurosis) to the aching Bad Seeds-style crooning of "The Honeymoon Is Over", from the pure noise-pop outburst of "Blinded" to the hypnotic groove of the rhythm guitar on "Users", "Heartworm" reaches its ultimate calm in the moving serenade for strings and acoustic guitar that is "Morning Rise". The dawn rising once again in eyes accustomed to seeing only night: "Let the morning rise, as our hearts desire."

Following the album's release, the band's manager Gail Colson set up a European tour for Whipping Boy in support of Lou Reed, which soon turned into a total disaster, as the band ended up touring Europe doing interviews rather than playing shows, undermining any chance of getting their music known beyond their home turf. The inevitable consequence was the split from Columbia in 1996. In truth, it was a unilateral axing by the label, leaving Whipping Boy with no choice but to find another home for the new material they had already started writing. Their final, third and, not by chance, self-titled album came out on Low Rent in 2000; since then - aside from a half-hearted attempt at a patched-together reunion - Ferghal McKee (vocals), Paul Page (guitars), Myles McDonnell (bass) and Colm Hassett (drums) have shown no interest in getting back on stage or having another go at the music industry.

However things turned out, Whipping Boy's story is a closed book. Success doesn't just mean getting rich and famous - it means having the power to make something happen. It means finding "Heartworm" at the top of a list of the 50 greatest Irish albums of all time - compiled by listeners of Phantom FM, Dublin's leading radio station - ahead of "Loveless", "The Joshua Tree", "Astral Weeks", "Jailbreak" and "Rum, Sodomy & The Lash". It means binding emotions to one another, holding onto them, not letting them slip away. That's what "Heartworm" is, and even now, years later, Ferghal McKee knows it: "We captured something beautiful, something true. That's fucking success."

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04/06/2017