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“When We Were Young”
The Dublin outfit Whipping Boy have just three albums to their name– Submarine, Heartworm and their posthumous self-titled effort. Look, all three are brilliant, but Heartworm is considered by many to be a front to back classic. A staggering collection of anger, passion, poetry, and grace, sonically Heartworm falls somewhere between A House and The Fall—it grinds away with staggering melodic beauty and streetwise lyrical grit and it shoots light out from every note that’s played. It is a straight up, stone cold stunner. When they formed in 1988 they were Lolita and the Whipping Boy, but when their lineup solidified, and it was Fearghal McKee (vocals), Paul Page (guitar), Myles McDonnell (bass, vocals), and Colm Hassett (drums), they shortened their name to just Whipping Boy. They were a dark and powerful band capable of staggering beauty and edgy elegies that were redolent with wisdom and philosophy. Their influence can still be heard today in bands like The Fontaines DC and Shame and if you put on any of their three albums, the urgency, the intensity and the muscle sound as fresh as ever.If they’d stuck around? Who knows. They might have ruled the world. They certainly had all the tools at their disposal. But the band were done in ’98 and that was that. Did they give us enough? You and I both know that it could never be enough—we’re fans, we’re greedy that way. In this interview, Whipping Boy guitarist Paul Page talks to Alex about the band’s love for Big Black, his admiration of Johnny Marr and why he hasn’t picked up the guitar in years. He also talks about touring with Lou Reed, what it would take for him to play again and his relationship with the other guys in Whipping Boy. Paul Page is a great guy and this is an honest, unflinching chat about what was, what could have been and all that tricky stuff in between.
