Patrick Freyne

And then I met my friend Dara, who like I loved in...

in the 80s the way like there was all these like little subversive things around the edges of stuff so you would be reading things like the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy or smash it which would have like really subversive things in there in the jokes and stuff um but dara was like a punky cure head and he um he asked me to play a song one day and i played wonderful tonight where i clapped and

And he was just like, no, no, no, no, this has to stop.

Okay, so he took you in hand, did he?

He did.

He was like, this has to stop.

And he basically took it on himself to educate me.

And he gave me all these family trees he'd done in Bayreuth, like punk and indie and how they all connected up.

And all these C60 tapes with the Dead Kennedys and Crass.

And also bands I still really love, like the Pixies and the Violin Femmes.

And I kind of learned about, I guess, alternative culture through all that.

And did you realise then, actually, this is who I am?

Yeah, absolutely.

In that I like the subversive stuff.

I love, I still love stuff that has a bit of a melody, but has like a little bit of weirdness in there.

I still, like, I've gone back to all that yacht rock stuff that I used to pretend not to like in my 20s.

Like, I'm back now telling people that Phil Collins is actually a genius again.

Yeah.

But it was like, at that time, there was just something really lovely about finding, I don't know if it exists so much anymore, but this kind of tribal identity, you know, where you find a world where there's rules, you know, like Dara would have been the first person to introduce me to the rules, which was like no song longer than three minutes, no solos.

Did you change your look then to go with your new tribe?