Hissing Brilliant! - Red Organ Serpent Sound

Complete with an ostentatious name, searing tunes and theatrical, viscerally stunning live shows, Red Organ Serpent Sound really aren’t just any humdrum new band. Visually and aurally, and in the best possible way, the Derry fivesome are a sensory overload. Shortly before the release of their fantastic debut single, ‘In Search Of Orgasmuz’, Gigwise caught up with their enigmatic, fetchingly masked frontman Rory Moore…

Beginning with the first thing that strikes you about this band – their name – Rory is quite unsure why the band settled on it, he struggles “I conjured up the name… it just seemed right, an appropriate title to work under.” Yet, pressed a little harder he reveals that the fully-blown name is very much a benchmark for the band to create music and visuals that are equally as flamboyant. He muses “I suppose it’s about invention and creation in the simplest form. It’s a title to live up to; I think it’s definitely affected the band and made us work harder.”

Indeed, formed just at the end of 2004, Red Organ Serpent Sound’s (ROSS) onstage chemistry and musical output seems infinitely more mature than their infant years. Filling us in, Rory explains: “We’d been living in England doing various bits and pieces and we all landed back in Derry at the same time and decided to get together. We started out by hiring out a cottage in Donegal for a month and rehearsed together there. It was quite beautiful surroundings. We’re living in a Barn house just outside Derry at the moment, which is really cool.” It’s official then: rustic surroundings are the future.

For anyone uninitiated with the sounds of ROSS, rather than following the footsteps of other bands in falling impotent when trying to describe their music, Rory is pretty damn forthright: “It’s an electric circus of sleaze style groove. And also Super-charged country punk… No actually let’s call the music Inter-galactic country funk.”

Yet, despite the creativity of their music, much to Rory’s lament the band have already been compared to The Doors with seemingly casual abandon by journalists. He sighs: “Because we use the organ, people immediately associate us with The Doors. It can be a pain in the arse, we’re not a Doors tribute band. I think some of the early reviews we got were a bit lame in their descriptions, someone said we were Eighties Matchbox meets the Doors which we’re not.” We won’t mention that that review was by the mighty Gigwise. Ahem.   

Importantly, Rory cites that ROSS are distanced from the throngs of new bands knocking around for two main reasons: “I think the intensity of our live shows and the image of the band sets us apart from everything else. But we’re not a gimmicky band that just relies on their image, it’s all about creating a 3D image of the band.” Indeed, for Rory playing live is a crucial aspect of the band: “When you get it right, it can be the most satisfying and gratifying thing. I always enjoy playing a lot of the smaller gigs, intimate ones where there’s an electricity… It’s great when the gig goes well the show is immense and just getting wrecked afterwards.”

Together with his flamboyant onstage moves, Red Organ live shows centre on the somewhat ceremonial un-sheaving of Rory  – from masked, top hat, boxing glove, blazer-wearing enigma to bare chested frontman. It’s a spectacle that Rory deems as very crucial to the ethos of the band: “I like provocative performers. It’s good to unsettle people and get them thinking and get the audience involved. It’s not about people standing there just folding their arms. I’d call it an aggressive embrace.” Fortunately, Rory isn’t going to drop the outfit in the immediate future, as he adds: “We never want to bore an audience, we always want to do what feels best, if we change things and shed the skin like a serpent does then that’s what we’ll do.”

However, for anyone quick to point the finger claiming the band are style over substance, Rory is quick to dispel such empty accusations: “For us music is the main reason why we’re doing all this, everything else is secondary.” In fact, he sees their music as the main asset of the band: “It’s about the songwriting first and foremost because that’s how we got signed on the back of no one even seeing us.”