Colour System Failure

Right now, pop punk seems to be the “flavour of the month” down in Dublin, and when I heard about Colour System Failure I was pretty excited to find out a little bit more about them, so I had a chat with their lead singer, Alan. “We got together in February 2007 and since then we've had a number of line-up changes, but me, Adam and David have been ever presents. We gigged consistently all over Ireland, writing all the while.”

At the minute there seems to be a slight stigma surrounding heavier music that involves screaming so why did the band decide to make this sort of music? “I don't think we ever really made a conscious decision to make any sort of music. I'm not even sure ‘screamo’ is the right term for us; there’s bits of it in there, but some of our stuff would be a bit too heavy for that, and then we've songs where there'd be no screaming at all. We've always just written whatever music we thought sounded best.” It’s good to see that Colour System Failure never set out to follow any sort of trend or make a certain sound. There are too many bands these days, especially within genres like indie, that started out with a certain mind-set and don’t feel they can venture into anything else.

The pop punk scene down south is currently doing really well with bands such as Homestar Runner and Steer Clear, who are both signed up to Blastspace Records, being very successful. This could easily cause problems for other genres, as there may be few people left who believe anything else could work. But is it a problem for Colour System Failure? “Thankfully, no, we've few problems, but you're definitely right in the idea that pop punk is flavour of the month down here. We've always done well with gigs through both the independent and professional promoters but I can see how a band just starting out would find it a bit harder.”

So what are the band doing now? “We started recording our album in March 2008 with Neil Calderwood in Manor Park Studios, finished it last month and it is due for release on October 24th through Grouphug Records.” The new album is very strangely entitled, ‘The Tony Blair Witch Project’ – weird, eh? “Phil our guitarist came up with it and we thought it was hilarious so we stuck with it.” So no political undertones there then.

The rest of the year seems to be pretty busy for the guys in Colour System Failure: “We're going to be promoting loads up until the album comes out, then it'll be a matter of touring as much as we can, and doing whatever we can to get the music out there. We plan to start writing again pretty soon anyway. If we're together constantly gigging, we'll probably have more time to do so anyway.”

Here’s hoping Colour System Failure continue to bring something a little different to the Irish music scene.


You can find out more about the band and check out tour dates at www.myspace.com/coloursystemfailure