Feeling Is What They Get (or a recounting of a Post-Party show)
- Matthew O'Reilly
- May 18, 2023
- 10 min read
Updated: May 19, 2023
A slightly different "gig review" (a recounting of a Post-Party show written by your favourite member from Post-Party).
Words by Matthew O'Reilly
Photos by Patrick Coyle & Izzy Sorreano & Post-Party
Edited by Lia Qin
Are you also curious about what bands do/think around the time of a show or am I just nosy? After the countless nights of seeing little bands playing their little music on stage, I'd say I'm quite familiar with this whole process and people that get involved as audiences, but it's always fascinating to me what's inside THOSE people's head? I guess I am a bit nosy. Luckily I know someone who likes to share (overshare sometimes). Matty from Post-Party was kind enough to write a piece about their Workman’s Club headline last week. You don't have to know Post-Party or be in this show to enjoy his writing, of course you are more than welcome to check them out:
So… Lia asked me to do a diary (I did). The contents of which pertain to our headline show in Dublin’s Workman’s Club on May 12th. I was a bit flattered by the offer. Classic “Oh my life isn’t entertaining” or “You seriously wanna hear about MY life?” type of stuff. But as much as a compliment as I found it to be, I found its qualities to be more reminiscent of a favour. What maybe we both saw as a good opportunity for (dreaded) content was simply using the said label to mask its true identity. An act of service.
You see, I’m TERRIBLE at being present. It’s very easy to be in a band and preach reception and attentiveness but the reality of it all is that those two things are skills I don’t have. Almost a year removed from our last headline show in the Workman’s Cellar and I find it very hard to recall. It was a teardrop in the rain. It was the vocal sample at 0:24 in One Point Perspective by Arctic Monkeys. The passing of time, and its cursory behaviour (if you couldn’t tell from our lyrical content) scares me and terrifies me as much as it fascinates me. I get very caught up on it and thusly amplify its transience. Everything is just something that’s going to end.
- 04/05/23 Thursday
This is the first entry in this diary. Like many things in my life, its genesis lies within the dark recesses of my notes app. We’re a little over a week out from the show at this stage but the delaying of the record casts a cloud. But one that lets you see the sun through it as long as you’ve sunglasses on. In what may have been one of the tougher decisions in our five years together, we decided to delay the EP. It’s all due to production delays with the vinyl.
A listener of ours Tara suggested on Twitter the theory that the new Taylor’s Version was the cause of the delays (She’s affecting Mattys of all shapes, sizes and social statuses so it seems). This theory makes sense because, like a Taylor Swift announcement, the whole thing was about as sudden as a box in the teeth. We lost a molar in the process but our incisors and canines are still intact. The smile of Post-Party is still beautiful. Although someone was daft and pushed for a split release (me) and someone (Keelan) communicated to them how daft that was, the best thing was to delay it all as a whole. Having cited my copy of Drunk Tank Pink by Shame arriving a week after the digital release as a case study that weighed in my favour, some sleuthing (reading emails) revealed that that was completely Tower Records’ fault. I haven’t told the guys of that discovery yet. God forbid I admit a lapse in judgement or anything of the sort.
- 06/05/23 Saturday
May 6th actually had nothing to do with the show but was an important part of the process. On this day the show was a thought localised entirely to the back of the head whereas the front was home to the music video we were shooting. The brain inside my head was to be rattled endlessly when I, Colin and Keelan were lobbed around in the back of a moving GoVan. The video for our tune Everyone’s A Liar is the perverse and deformed brainchild of fascinating director Willow Kennedy. The four of us are massive fans of his and we approached the opportunity with not an excitement, but a childlike, joyous whimsy that was brought about by his work with Bricknasty and Khaki Kid. I was immediately taken by Willow. His first greeting to me was a big hug which I could telegraph from miles away as his strides were characterised by the sound of cowboy boots. Even within the confines presented by guerrilla methods, his vision was one that he felt no need to explain. The only semblance of an explanation anyone ever got was simply an “I like it.” His trust in himself and his teammates, Iarla and Theo, was enough to warrant ours.
("the puppet")
Derived from Peter’s Absence, Willow concocted the idea of a poorly-treated, Willow created puppet drummer going rogue, locking his bandmates in the back of a van and going for a spin. It was this depiction of joyriding that exemplified Willow’s bravery as a director and filmmaker. He did not ask but demanded the three present members of Post-Party, six days out from their biggest show to date, genuinely hop into the back of the van and be driven around recklessly in a Howth car park risking physical and mental scarring. Even with the reasoning of audience believability, it would be a lie if I said wasn’t immediately up for this. My raising on WWE and Jackass and TGF took control of me in a way that can only be compared to Plankton’s control of Spongebob in that one episode of the former's tv show. Writing about it now I'm imagining Johnny Knoxville, John Cena and Romell Henry wrestling for control of my brain to see who can make me hurt myself more.
Shooting the Liar video was just pure and unadulterated FUN. After the week we’d just had: delaying the record, stressing over rehearsal dates and times and general nervousness for the show, Willow, despite his push for us to indulge in casual masochism, took a massive weight off of us. He shouldered the responsibility of the film, a responsibility normally taken on by our Colin. That day was something we needed.
- 10/05/23 Wednesday
Free samples are always great, aren’t they? Do you ever be walking down the street and someone in a Lucozade fleece comes up and hands you a can that you take without question? It’s always for that Lucozade Alert (a drink I actually never understood. Like isn’t Lucozade ALREADY an energy drink?) and you crack it and sip away at it. It’s ok and it does the job but it’s never as good as the actual proper Lucozade. That’s how I feel about production rehearsals.
Team P-P descended upon The Workman’s Club at around 11 am, (criminally early for workman’s) to do a dry run of Friday’s show. Having navigated the bête noir that is the lack of a van in my band’s roster, we were given our first look at what it was we’d been planning (a first look that would be significantly less sweaty than Friday the 12th).
EVERY small, Irish band worth their salt plays The Workman’s. It’s a right of passage. It’s a venue and club that’s gained infamy from the artsy folk that go there. If a euro had to be paid for every time a SoundCloud link to an unreleased demo had been sent in that club following a braggadocios and hyperbolic description of what it actually was, I’m sure you could quadruple the size of the place.
Our main goal was to make it feel like not The Workman’s and to make it feel like it could be any venue, big or small, anywhere in the world. To create something that was transferrable from clubs to festival main stages. Omnipotent in a sense. We did this with the help of Ben Phelan. Arriving to us like a recently deceased but now risen messiah or a master race that has travelled light years in a mere second, Ben Phelan is the true mastermind behind what the show has become. An owner of many beanies, patterned fleeces and facts that will be the most insane, mind-blowing thing you’ve heard that day, Ben came on board at the start of April and, although it would be more dramatic and cliché to say “we haven’t looked back since,” or something of that ilk, we DO frequently look back but if only to wonder what on EARTH we would have done without him. Ben’s knowledge, his patience and his excitement were such a breath of fresh air to us. After the rehearsal and whilst dining at a small Italian called Da Mimmo, I was struck by what it was that was happening.
We were all starving I remember. It had been such a long day of loading in and loading out and playing and tweaking and blah blah blah. I expected our desire to eat would consume our desire to speak. But as I took a moment to revel in my disappointment at what I ordered (Anchovies, capers and olives on a pizza. Salt overload. I literally have no idea why I ordered this. Genuinely couldn’t tell you), I looked around at Luke, Ben, Keelan, Colin and Peter all entrenched in separate but also overlapping conversation. In this Italian, I saw them all create conversational spaghetti. I realised we had a team. A team comprised of the people I admire the most out of anyone I have ever met and a team I know can take us to the best shows we’ve ever put on.
- 11/05/23 Thursday
People ask me about pre-show rituals a fair bit and I do actually have a few. The last song we listen to in the dressing room has to be Sha Sha Sha by Fontaines D.C. I need to have one bottle (no more, no less) of beer before going on stage. I need to sing We Have To Move On in the toilets of the Green Room (An activity that acts as my vocal warmup whilst Keelan and Colin do ACTUAL vocal warmups). I need to have a cigarette no later than 15 minutes before we go on.
But my favourite pre-show ritual is having Peter stay over. And he actually wasn’t going to this time. Not up until around 4 pm. I hadn’t even thought to ask him to but I think after this outing I won’t ever not think to ask him again. Peter is the foundation of the Post-Party machine both musically and emotionally. He is as important FOR me as he is TO me. He’s a quiet, deeply thoughtful, generous boy who is frequently hidden away in the back doing everything to keep the three of us up front safe. A bit like Batman actually. The only thing Peter has that Batman doesn’t have is the love and fondness of my mother. Peter does land at my house and we do spend our evenings talking about the show the next day and watching YouTube videos. We discuss music which will become my soundtrack for the following day. A tradition that started with Fantastic Man by William Onyeabor and succeeded on this occasion with a live version of Amoeba by Clairo.
- 12/05/23 Friday
I never really eat on the day of a show. I can’t. I don’t understand how people do. Everyone feels nerves and excitement differently but it's really hard for me to imagine it feeling a way to welcome a solid of any kind. That being said, at around 6:45 pm we went and got food. I got a slice of ham and mushroom pizza. Then we went and played the best show we’d ever played.
Something was touched upon the previous night during one of Peter and I’s discussions. He’d gotten up and walked over to my wall where I have a photo hanging. This photo was taken 5 years ago and it shows us sitting in front of the crowd in the Workman’s Main room. We were so young then. The faces in the front row are the faces of people we love but they are the faces of people who are no longer in our lives. “Now that is a trip” he says to me and at that moment I relive the trip in reverse before being thrown forward to the present. In that frame, I see a band that doesn’t know their arse from their elbow. A band that can’t dot their i’s and cross their t’s. I see friends that become more than friends and then become not friends at all. I see love and I see hate and I see loss and I see everything that comes in between. But most of all I see myself with my 3 brothers that I am so incredibly in love with. To see how much we’ve grown in this 5 years. Going from a team of 5 to a team of 11. The shows we’ve gotten to play. The wonderful listeners who interact with us on a daily basis. The things we’ve been through personally. And to still only be at the start of what Post-Party can be.
It’s a very beautiful thing man.
(slide to see more)
That was the last thought really in my head before we walked on to our new intro track which I refer to as Feeling Is What You Get. We then launched into June etc etc etc. At the start of this entire thing, I mentioned how terrible I am at being present. This diary has been great at helping me practice that and the EP, with its identity as a scrapbook, too has helped me reason with my own fears about time’s passing. It’s an EP about hindsight and whilst playing its 4th track entitled The Body Electric (A song that explores the conscious dissolution of a moment and is written as a juxtaposition to Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name) I think I had a breakthrough. I was hyper-conscious of what we’d accomplished. It was a huge deal to us.
- 13/05/23 Saturday
I'm finishing this piece where it began, in my notes app. An iced coffee and an açai bowl are fighting for the lion-share of grip in my one hand. The sun’s out. We sold out last night but it really felt like there was double the capacity in the room (thanks everyone). We get to do it again in Belfast in a week and some changes. I love you.
That's it for Matty's diary. I know you've enjoyed reading it just as much as I did. He will soon be back for another ALD article. He doesn't know this yet but trust me he will.
If this looks like something you would be interested to write - not necessarily a diary or about a show, just your experience as someone works IN the music industry - please reach out to us on instagram or email (notaluciddream@gmail.com). We are excited to hear and share your story :)
Check out Post-Party on Spotify / Twitter / Instagram, and everything else
Post-Party's new EP "WE ARE NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER" will be with us on 30th June, pre-order here / outside Ireland pre-order
They will also be playing live shows at:
Ulster Sports Club, Belfast (Northern Ireland) - 25th May 2023 (ticket link)
Sea Sessions Festival, Bundoran (Co. Donegal, Ireland) - 17th June 2023 (ticket link)
Otherside Festival, Slane Castle (Co. Meath, Ireland) - 7th July 2023 (ticket link)
Indiependence Festival, Mitchelstown (Co. Cork, Ireland) - 6th August 2023 (ticket link)
Love, ALD
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