Photo credit: Luke Faulkner (@PureGrand)

Pop trio, Babylamb have burst onto the scene with their powerful single ‘Bodyright’. The new release sees the queer band launch themselves at the ever-growing Irish music landscape.Taking time to sit down with our deputy music editor, Babylamb (Tobias Barry, Laoise Fleming and Rían Stephens) talk about friendship and music, their move to London and the importance of queer representation in the music industry.

I want to say thanks for taking the time for this.

Rían: I want to say thanks, actually! Thanks for having us here.

I want to ask about how you guys met, your origin story?

Rían: When we were 18, we met.

Tobi: We met at a party. I thought he was very cool and then I also knew his Soundcloud. I also played one of the songs which was at the time, it was a few piano notes and I was like that’s so cool.

Rían: It was so funny because back then, Tobi was making fully produced songs. I was with a microphone hitting off pots and pans.

Tobi: For three years we both wanted to work together, be a band but we weren’t saying that to each other. We musically flirted instead, sending songs to each other. We would say ‘yeah it would be great to work together’ and then there would be silence…

Rían: It would be three months and then ‘check out this one’. It was first year of college when we first started talking. We didn’t even meet up. He sent me half a song and I made the other half. I thought ‘this is really cool’. Then, that was summer time and by the time December came around, we bit the bullet and said you know what, let’s make a band.

Then Laoise came into the band last year, making Babylamb.

Rían: Since Laoise came, it’s felt like this is it, this is the band.

Tobi: We are a band but we’re also best friends. That’s the thing I love the most about Babylamb is that we’re all great friends.

Rían: The most fun part is the moment you finish the song and you spend half an hour together dancing to it, just together in the room. They’re the moments where I’m like ‘That’s the reason why I’m doing this’ is to dance for that half an hour with each other.

Congratulations on your first single Bodyright. You’re already being included in the Irish music scene with a mention from GCN and Nialler9. How were you feeling coming up to the release?

Tobi: Leading up the single, I was in London. Rían was busy with his degree. Laoise was working and we had the bare bones of it recorded for ages. We started Bodyright in 2018. There’s a demo of it which was wildly different. When I went to London, I was mixing and producing this thing for about a month and a half pretty intensively every day. Started the whole process of putting it to a distributor and the anxiety of that was really difficult. My whole brain was focussed on this song which was about to come out. It was maddening. You get these moments where you’re comparing yourself to everybody else. It’s also the first single so it’s your first impression. I got to a moment where people started listening to it and liking it. It was lovely to see what people said afterwards. People also made a point of saying the production was really good, which made me feel like I’d been listening to a different song.

Laoise: My relationship to Bodyright was different to you guys because I came into the band in July-ish. Bodyright was written a long time before that. It’s really cool because when I joined, it was one type of song and now it’s a completely different song in my eyes. It was really cool to see it do its own journey.

Tobi: For our Workmans gig, we were the support act and everyone in the front row knew the lyrics.

Rían: It’s fun and a bop. It’s also half freeing as well. You feel outside of yourself and present in yourself.

I was going to ask about the small project that you did leading up to Bodyright, Bodybits. You had a few people talking about body image. What inspired that and how did that tie into the single release?

Tobi: We decided on a video series because since the song was written over the rough space of about a year, there’s quite a few different ideas in it. I was thinking if we did a series about how we view our bodies and how that perception is distorted and changed by things like the media or cultural/social contexts. The idea was to get different perspectives, asking people to sit in front of a camera and film yourself talking about your body for a minute.

Laoise: People were really honest which is hard to get. It was really inspiring.

What are your plans for the future?

Rían: We’re going to go to London. Tobi’s already there, I want to go there. Laoise wants to go there. The plan is we’re going to move to London, work jobs and in our spare time, hang out together, make music.

Laoise: Once we’re all together, we’ll have a better opportunity of being able to be productive. Our future plans are to spend a lot of time together. We can take this to the next step. Ideally, we would love to do this properly all the time.

Tobi: What’s nice is that we have so much stuff written, the other stuff we have written is so much cooler and that’s all ahead of us.

Unfortunately, Dublin is lacking at the moment when it comes to the arts.

Tobi: There’s so many gigs happening all the time but there isn’t enough venue space for everybody and that’s a real issue. There’s piss all investment in the arts at the moment so it’s a big problem.

Laoise: That’s a big reason why we’re going to London because we all in some capacity want to work in something creative and there’s just not space for that here. There’s nothing for us here.

Rían: It’s not an option. I’ve lived in Limerick the last four years and coming to Dublin is not an option to work and live as a creative here. There are probably a lot of people around the country who are in the same position.

Tobi: I don’t think being a musician is hugely valued by the current regime, whether they’re still here in a month or not. Historically, Ireland has been a place where creative talent has been encouraged and fostered. To make people feel nice is a huge service and to squash that out for not being important enough is a really big mistake.

Rían: I think everyone in the country values it but the government doesn’t reflect what the country wants and what they value which is so sad. They’re supposed to be here to understand what we want in our lives and to provide that for us.

What are your thoughts on the importance of queer representation in the music industry? There’s been a queer renaissance recently.

Tobi: What’s nice about the queer scene in Ireland is we support each other and all know each other. I’m always slightly scared about turning queer identity in another saleable thing. This is what frightens me. You send out your press release and you realise that’s what you’ve done. It’s a huge, important part of our lives but it feels skin deep.

Laoise: It’s not a selling point.

Rían: We’re more than that.

It’s such a fine balance because it’s such an integral part of yourself. The music industry has become this weird, consumerist centred place, you don’t want ‘we’re queer’ to become a marketing point but representation is still important.

Laoise: I think it’s cool that I find a lot of freedom and comfort in being able to say, ‘I’m bisexual’. I wouldn’t have said that three years ago. I think it’s cool also to say this is what I’m doing and to see other people saying yeah me too. The more bi, gay and all the different types of identities we have in music, the easier it makes it for people. When you see someone like you doing something, you feel you can do that.

Tobi: Should you be called upon to discuss your queerness and your identity as a queer band, you should be as true as possible to your experience because that’s what will help somebody. It isn’t so much you trying to package a piece of yourself in a cynical way, for it to be sold to people, it is much more so an act of compassion and empathy and togetherness.

Rían: What I love about it is I can go to a party and wear a dress. I can dance how I want to dance and speak how I want to speak, we have that in our little group. What I love about hopefully our gigs is we can have that space in a larger sense with more people being able to come to it, to be together and being comfortable doing that.

 

Babylamb play Workman’s on 21st of February in support of UCD Volunteers Overseas.