Melodic indie band Windings play Róisín Dubh on Thursday, August 5 as part of the Strange Brew Summer Shindig. The quintet is led by Steve Ryan, who is still trying to come up with a term to describe the group.

“Windings is a band, or a project,” he says. “It’s a band now. It was a project I was doing for the past seven or eight years, which was running concurrently with another band I was in called Giveamanakick, which finished up at the end of 2009.”

Even though Giveamanakick kept Steve very busy he did manage to release an album under the Windings moniker.

“I had been performing solo, and sometimes with my friend Liam Marley, as Windings,” he explains. “We had released an album back in 2005, which was all home recordings. We hadn’t done much – we were playing gigs every now and then – but Giveamanakick was taking up most of my time.”

Joining Steve in the new Windings line-up are Liam Marley (bass/vocals), Aaron Mulhall (drums), Stephen Purcell (organ) and Patrick O’Brien (chimes, xylophone and saw). Liam and Steve have been collaborating for quite a while now.

“I went to school with Liam,” Steve says. “We were in bands together in secondary school and we’d been writing together since the age of 15 or 16.”

“It’s great to have Liam in the band fulltime now,” he adds. “He’s tipping in with his own songs and things like that. It’s a great change; it’s almost a fresh start with Windings. It was something I could never pay full attention, but it was a thing I always had to have as another musical thing.”

Steve is determined to make Windings a collaborative band, one in which each member is coming to the table with songs.

“The first album was all me,” he recalls. “The second album has a couple of songs from Liam. I’m trying to encourage them – it’s a new band, it’s a new start. We’re finding our feet still. I’m delighted that Liam is chipping in with songwriting and hopefully more of that will happen with the other lads.”

Steve will be well known to Irish indie fans as the front man with the incendiary two-piece, Giveamanakick. Steve, on vocals and guitar, and drummer Keith raised the roof wherever they played, gaining critical acclaim and a loyal fan base. After years of touring the circuit, had the band reached its natural end?

“It had,” says Steve. “Myself and Keith had both agreed that we’d set out to do certain things and we had done them all. We released three albums we were very proud of and a few singles, and we got around the world. Basically, that was it for us – we both realised we wanted to wrap it up. We didn’t want it to get stale.”

Given the praise lavished upon them and the fact that their live show was superb, does Steve feel disappointed that his old band did not get more exposure?

“I’m not going to lie, there were times like that. But we were a band that liked to keep busy as well. If we weren’t busy we probably would had more time to think about that. It never really bothered us for long because we were on to our next gig.

“It didn’t really bother us that we weren’t number one in the charts,” he continues. “People remembered us – whether they loved us or hated us, we didn’t care. Ambivalence, though, we weren’t fond of that!”
Having blazed a trail with his previous project, Steve is happy to be now able to his Windings his full attention. First up is the release of the single Brain Fluid, followed by a new album in October. Both were produced by Tommy McLoughlin, who Steve has worked with before.
 

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.