Woodbeez

Born in a moment’s boredom at a meeting, WOODBEEZ is a new musical property, featuring five Irish Civil Servants. Go figure!The group comprises Audrey O’Byrne on vocals, David Spencer on guitar, bass & vocals, Aileen Treanor on guitar & vocals, Seán Hurley on bass, guitar, programming & vocals, and vocalist,Tony Kavanagh, whom I managed to grab for a few words.With just one gig under their belt – a lowly office Christmas party at that – they have recently completed the recording of their debut album. A bit ambitious surely?“Well, to begin with, we were just going to tape a gig as a memento for ourselves. Then we thought that if we made a bit more effort, we could make something good enough to sell and raise money for charity.”Work on that project started in mid-January. Recording took place in Tony’s kitchen and the mixing in Sean Hurley’s bedroom. A slew of technical problems resulted in the bulk of the material being re-recorded. In all, twelve songs have been recorded. Ten covers have been offset by two band originals.“We knew that the composers and publishers of the songs we covered would have to get their rightful cut of the royalties. But, as this is a charity project, we wanted to find some way of reducing that impact on the profits but, at the same time, keep things interesting for the customers. Seán, David and myself have all written songs in our time, so it was easy enough to come up with material that we were happy to contribute.”Would you agree that the covers selected are reasonably safe crowd-pleasers? The mix of everyone from ABBA to Bill Withers to Kylie is unlikely to ruffle any feathers.“Well, fair enough, if you look at the tracklist, it does contain a lot of tried and proven songs. But let’s be realistic – this is a charity project being sold to a small but pretty diverse audience. We really had to have something for everyone. That said, we’ve done our best to make a definite mark on these songs. For instance, we’ve done an electropop take on ABBA’s "Name Of The Game". We pared back Kate Bush’s "Running Up That Hill" so that it’s totally acoustic and as far as Kylie’s "Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi" is concerned, try to imagine it being sung by Leonard Cohen with gospel backing singers. [laughs] This isn’t straight-ahead karaoke!”To underscore this point, he plays me rough mixes of six tracks. As promised, the old ABBA hit has indeed been given a spanking new make over - a beautiful new piano figure makes it very much the band's own. The Kate Bush song really is quite different, coming with skiffle-ish percussion and even a little ye olde harmonium. Their take on the Stones’ "Miss You" bravely embodies hints of Kylie with a few faint George Michaelisms here and there. Meanwhile, the Yazoo electropop classic, "Only You" happily sidesteps the awful Flying Pickets’ ba-dah nonsense in favour of a lovely Beatles-like treatment.To wrap up, I am played the two originals. "It Beats Living Alone" is an emotionally sung acoustic ballad with a very affecting piano solo. I am quite surprised by its delicacy. The confident Steely Dan verve of "I Done You Wrong" will have wide appeal, with its accomplished playing and energetic performance. With songs this good, why didn’t the band opt for a completely original set?“It crossed our minds for about ten seconds. But we thought that it would be almost impossible to sell a CD of 12 originals to our diverse target audience. But we’d like to record again and do a lot more original stuff. But that’s for another day. In the meantime we have an album to mix, print and sell.”The Woodbeez album "Turn On, Tune In, Cough Up" went on limited release and the stock has been entirely sold out. Proceeds went to the Irish Cancer Society. CD-R copies (with complete original artwork) can be made to order, however. Contact [email protected] for details.