The Murder Capital: 'Human nature has a tendency to swing the pendulum'

McGovern is himself a student of the art of performance. “There’s something to be taken from all different kinds of performers, even if it’s to revolt against it,” he says before hastily adding: “Not with Nick.”

Before Cave, they supported grunge veterans Pearl Jam. “It was an amazing year,” McGovern recalls.

Seven years on from their formation in Dublin, The Murder Capital have evolved as songwriters with their third album, Blindness, McGovern feels.

“I think we began by having no major understanding of what we were doing at all,” he says. “We were just working instinctively on the first record (When I Have Fears). We had some chops, I suppose, when it came to songwriting but looking back now, it was really just scrambling around trying to eke it out. Then as we developed we were looking to experiment more and to move away from the sound of our first record on the second (Gigi’s Recovery) which sort of led us to a whole different path.

“Like with most things I feel, human nature has a tendency to swing the pendulum and within change there’s something gained but also you lose sight of things along the way. I think we rearranged those happenstances on the third record.”

As a consequence, Blindness feels like “the most complete body of work” to him. “We were pulling for the same side (as a band),” he says.

With group members now scattered between Dublin, London, Paris and Berlin, it has “affected the way that we work”, McGovern acknowledges. “For Blindness, we would just go to each one of those cities for two weeks at a time (to write),” he explains. “It was really just breaking up the process and obviously getting a revitalising nature out of the new geographical location that we were heading to, sort of being hosted by the person whose city you were in. That feeling brings a deeper connection.”

The week we speak, McGovern and bandmates Damien Tuit, Cathal Roper, Gabriel Paschal Blake and Diarmuid Brennan are already in a studio in London writing their next album. “It just breaks things up, and for our relationships it’s good because people are happy, they’re living where they want to live, it’s not a forced folly of having to live in the same place,” McGovern says. “Although at times we probably suffer for having to organise things and make plans with everyone scattered around the world, but everyone has one life so they should just do what they want it.”

Where on Gigi’s Recovery they had spent 18 months during the pandemic demoing all the songs – “That was to the fault and sometimes to the benefit,” McGovern notes – with Blindness they had little more than “phone recordings” to work from when they arrived in John Congleton’s studio in Los Angeles. “That was new for us and I think it paid off,” the singer says. “I think the vitality and the energy of the record that we wanted is in there because of that.”

To achieve the “energy and intensity” that they wanted the songs to have, they were “very cut-throat on the cutting room floor”, he adds. Most of the vocals were done in one or two takes. Even songs such as Trailing A Wing and Love of Country that are “maybe not the most uptempo” have “their own intensities and character that’s worth bringing to the table, and it’s undeniable, so you have to bring them along”, McGovern says.

Besides, he finds the songs take on a life of their own outside the studio environment. “The finishing touch is the 150th show of the tune that you’ve played, then you’ve written it, I think,” he says. “When it leaves the studio at a certain point it’s finished, obviously, it’s immortalised onto wax for the rest of time, that’s cool and all, but it can be epiphanic (to play it live). It’s where you notice things about the songs that you haven’t thought about before when you’re playing them every night and often it can be frustrating because I often find those little embellishments to the vocal melody or to the delivery that aren’t on the record forever. You have to accept that as well.”

The song Death of a Giant is a homage to the late Shane MacGowan, singer with The Pogues. McGovern found himself observing the moment while watching MacGowan’s funeral procession in December 2023. “We were at the procession when it passed through on its way down through Dublin on its way down to Nenagh,” he says. “We were there to pay our respects and to honour in some way his memory, and it just ended up having a great effect, I suppose.

“I went back to the studio that day not really intending to write about it but those are my favourite moments, when you’re not really intending to write about something and lo and behold, there it is. That’s the most nourishing part of the expression of any kind of writing.”

MacGowan’s impact not only on the music of Ireland but more widely was profound, McGovern feels. “You only have to listen to songs like Summer in Siam for me, or the more well-known Rainy Night in Soho – there’s an undeniable purity to his writing. Here’s someone who’s so deeply rooted in the human world and our innate connection to each other and to the spirit. He was an enriching person that we were lucky to have pass through. It’s a shame he had to have so much pain and struggle throughout his life, but what he made of it it’s tantamount to the possibility within each of us.”

Love of Country’s questioning of patriotism seems particularly pertinent. “I’ve always had a strange relationship with patriotism,” McGovern says. “Oftentimes you find a sense of entitlement over a country, as opposed to a sense of pride, which would be entangled in a patriotic behaviour, so that was a distorted feeling for me that’s now showing its face in so many different ways, and it repetitiously does so throughout history as well. It’s not the first time that far-right politics has been on the rise.

“It’s worrying, I think it’s scary for everyone, more so for minorities and immigrants. Love of Country was another one that just sort of spilled out. I write that poem within two or three minutes. That was in the same few days that Death of a Giant came about. It’s an itch that I’ve creatively wanted to scratch for quite a long time to be able to write about that, but the water that day was just the right temperature, I guess.”

Blindness is out now. The Murder Capital play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on April 21 and 22. https://themurdercapital.com/