Fox Avenue lead singer Patrick Rhatigan on newfound fame and Jared Leto fist-bumps

Dublin-based band Fox Avenue have had little time to celebrate their breakneck ascent to fame over the past 18 months and with a gig at the Academy on the 27 December expected to be another trademark manic night, we caught up with lead singer Patrick Rhatigan to discuss the secrets of their accelerating success, greeting Jared Leto and that unusual bandname.

By Emmet Purcell

JOE: So Fox Avenue have had a sell-out tour, you’re coming to the Academy, you’ve released a new single (On My Own), you’ve performed at Oxegen and the O2 and yet, you’re still unsigned?

Patrick: Yeah, people always seem to think we’re rolling in cash but that’s not the case at all. Everything we’ve done, we’ve done off on own backs. We’ve got an awful lot of help from tour promoters MCD as well, they’ve been phenomenal for us. There’s a awful lot of people there that have faith in us. They’ve [MCD] thrown us a few Hail Mary’s and it’s paid off for us, which has been brilliant.

Our first headline show was in The Academy 2 in February and that sold out three weeks or four weeks before the actual show went on. We got a shock by that, so we played the show and it was literally the first time MCD said that they’ve ever had to have security down there – we kept having to stop the set and say, “Can you just push back a little bit?” and "Can you just calm down a bit?". People were getting squished, we couldn't understand what was going on. We couldn't even hear out of our monitors because the crowd were so on top of us.

Fox Avenue's latest single is On My Own, embedded above

So after that, MCD presented our music to the management of 30 Seconds to Mars to see if they’d be interested in having us play with them. When a big act comes over they (the management of a big act) tells local bookers, “look we’re not able to bring our touring support with us”, because it costs too much to bring over a support act for just one night, so then the management will be presented with around 5 or 6 or 10 or 20 bands and then they pick the band that they want.

So we got picked and we played that show and made a huge following from that. From there we built and built and built. We had a single, Tonight, and out of nowhere managed to get into the charts, the Zoo Crew charts on Spin 1038 and then it got nationwide.

We’ve only actually played, believe it or not, twenty-something gigs.

JOE: [Laughs] That is quite tough to believe...

Patrick: It’s mad, we spend so much time in the rehearsal studio that when we perform, we're noticing that we can do things a little bit better than before. Don’t get me wrong, we make mistakes but we concentrate and make sure that we don’t take every single gig offered to us for a bit of money. So I think that’s why we’ve been doing okay. We’re working really hard to get this show in The Academy on the 27th to be our best show yet.

We’re investing a lot of our own money into just making the lighting show a bit better and having a bigger drum riser. We're investing so much time into the set, just the smallest things, so our fans will notice and think “that’s kinda cool”.

JOE: So for anyone that hasn’t been to see Fox Avenue before, how would you describe your sound?

Patrick: The sound is pop-rock. We’d be more on the side of rock when live and more on the side of pop on tracks. We’d be inspired by Jimmy Eat World and Blink 182, but also I’m an avid Beatles fan, so when I brought my Beatles style into the mix alongside the Blink 182 and punk sound of drummer Sean Maxx and vocalist/guitarist Dara Quilty, it moulded really nicely. We’ve got our own spin on what’s being done at the moment so I think it sets us apart a little bit.

JOE: So when did you first meet Dara and Sean?

Patrick: Well, Dara and Sean themselves would go a lot further back than I would. What happened was, Dara was in my class in college. We were in DIT doing Marketing and on the first day we had to pretend we had to tell our stories to the class, basically so that everyone in the class would get to know each other, but myself and Dara were taking the piss the entire time.

Because we were taking the piss so much, we buzzed off each other for about an hour, started chatting and got talking about music. He said “we should play music some time.”

It worked out, we just jammed – actually, this is going to sound strange - the first time we jammed I said “let’s just go to my bathroom because my bathroom has the best acoustics” and he was like “...alright...”, and we actually wrote our first song there and then. A few days later we had our first gig.

JOE: I’d say he hesitated before following up that offer!

Patrick: [Laughs] Ah, it worked out.

JOE: As you mentioned, you’re unsigned but people can find you on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, all sorts of social media. Do you think you might be subconsciously using some of the tools from that marketing course for the band?

Patrick: Yeah I think so, we’re a lot smarter than we let on. My biggest bug-a-boo are bands that are arrogant about their knowledge of the market and we’re always being told every five seconds, “You’re too young to understand the industry, this is what you need to do”, and we’re like, “Look, calm down, we want to be on Facebook and write a message...”.

Actually, we recently wrote a message asking who fans would like to support us in The Academy and the page got absolutely spammed. Hundreds and hundreds of comments and one guy wrote ‘typical Irish band with your big label behind you and big MCD corporate heads destroying and embarrassing younger bands’.

We just wrote back saying that we’re sorry he felt that way and (a) We’re not signed plus (b) We’re just doing this to give a band or two bands an opportunity to play the Academy with us, because that’s what got us off the ground. No-one seems to get that – people think we’ve got a huge label and lots of money but it’s not the case.

JOE: So what would be the highlight for yourselves thus far? Would it be Oxegen? The O2?

Patrick: There’s so many different parts that I’ve loved. I loved touring with Scouting For Girls. It was a week with a really nice group and they were so forthcoming with advice. The best thing we’ve done was probably The O2 because it was playing a landmark venue.

JOE: You played with 30 Seconds to Mars at the O2, wasn’t it? How was Jared Leto?

Patrick: A really nice guy and surprisingly not that tall. Real pleasant and I remember when he came into our dressing room, I was going to shake his hand, and he goes “naw man, we bump fists in America”.  I was like “Alright, man – bump away!” Their bloody sound check went on forever, we were nervous that weren’t going to get our own sound check and afterwards he came over to apologise and we were like “No problem Mister Leto, no problem!”

JOE: Tell me about the actual name of the band, Fox Avenue. It sounds a bit like a D4 girl band...

Patrick: [Laughs] Aw no! Basically, the lads Dara and Sean went off to San Diego, California for three months during the summer and I went off to Vancouver. In America, the lads weren’t really able to go out because they were 19, so they needed fake IDs and they needed to come up with an address so in the end it was '32 Fox Avenue, Portmarnock, Dublin' for their fake ID address and that’s what we called the band. What I wanted to do was ‘Fox Force Five’ like in Pulp Fiction.

JOE: Or StarFox Avenue? I kinda like that one...

Patrick: There ya go now! We saw it on the licence though and we were like ‘That’s awesome, let’s call it that.”

JOE: So just to wrap up, looking forward to the New Year – what would be your most immediate wishes for 2011?

Patrick: We’ve been in talks with labels in the UK and Ireland but we’re waiting for the right thing to be offered to us. We’re just basically playing it by ear. Obviously if the right deal came along, we’d love to get signed because it’d be great to just have some money to record and do everything we need to do.

I think what we’d like to do is get a regional tour going, we’ve people from outside Dublin that would love to see but for whatever reasons, can’t make it to our shows. We’d like to get that tour going and have everyone that would love to see us come down, say hi and we can play a show for them.

Fox Avenue's official website can be found here. The band also update their own Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages.