It’s proving to be very exciting times for KEELEY. With their fourth album (Girl On The Edge Of The World reviewed here) just released and garnering great reviews, the band are at the forefront of the resurgent shoegaze scene. It’s the first album for new label Definitive Gaze and the first to feature their new line-up, and as such there’s a freshness surrounding the band that radiates energy and drive. Therefore we couldn’t resist sitting down with singer and guitarist Keeley before the band’s recent gig at The Tin Arts in Coventry (reviewed here).

You are currently residing in North London. How has that environment shaped you as an artist?

Ever since I was a child I’ve been drawn to the landscape of London. I’m originally from Dublin, and in Ireland we had all the English television channels; BBC1 and BBC2 and UTV – the Northern Irish variation of ITV – and Channel 4, and the programmes they broadcast were hugely influential, they shaped my outlook and worldview and I always felt a kinship with far more British music rather than American. That is very unusual – most Irish kids look to America for inspiration and cultural references but I was always far more drawn towards British bands. Much of the subject matter I write about is based in England and Scotland, so when I finally got to visit the UK, and London in particular, all of those places came to life. They’d always been alive in my head, but actually seeing them made them full, living colour.

So what made you work in the shoegaze genre?

I’d heard Loveless which is often regarded as the foremost shoegaze staple, I’d fallen in love with it and then I explored the rest of My Bloody Valentine’s work but it was when I discovered Lush, just before they reformed, their songs really resonated with me. It was what I needed to hear at that point in time. It’s that special thing with music where at certain points in your life you hear certain songs and they transport you to another place and help you cope with situations. The thing about shoegaze, and the music of Lush in particular, was the dreamlike aspect. I love atmospherics and dreamy soundscapes, and music that kind of washes over you, music that you surrender to, and all of those elements were in Lush’s music. Back then I never would have imagined that I’d be in a band and that we’d have Miki Berenyi, the lead singer of Lush, on our new record. She came on stage with us last night in London which was brilliant, such an honour. It’s been so lovely getting to know her over the past few years. They say you should never meet your heroes, but we’ve had such good experiences opening for Miki and for bands such as Babyshambles, Echobelly, Terrorvision, Inspiral Carpets, The Primitives, The Boo Radleys, Northside and The Darling Buds among others. It’s been a pleasure getting to know them, but we’ve also been treated well on the road.

If there’s one aspect of music more than anything else that appeals to me, it’s music that can invigorate and exhilarate you, and music that can propel you forwards with a sonic swagger, and there’s always a place for that, but there’s something about the otherworldly nature of shoegaze and the dreamy, trippy, whacked-out sounds that appeals to me. One band who don’t get talked about are The Mock Turtles, and there’s a song from their debut album Turtle Soup called ‘Lay Me Down’ that has all the hallmarks of shoegaze, although it’s never been recognised as such. When I hear that it’s so hazy and fuzzy, it just takes me to another dimension. So, I think it is just the otherworldliness and escapism, and the ability of the sound to wash over you which is all the more necessary in the age which we live in where civil liberties are under constant attack, and minorities of all persuasions are being marginalised and scapegoated. It’s a really trying time, so music I find, as ever, comes to the rescue.

Do you feel shoegaze as a genre will always be wide and expansive enough for you to say the things you want to say?

One of the things about shoegaze that’s always impressed me is that the lyrics have generally been very blank, and that has led to vocals being utilised as a textural element, they don’t dominate in the way they do in pop music which always has the vocal dominant in the mix, often to the detriment of the other elements. Another thing I love about shoegaze and dreampop is that that music tends to level the playing field and bring the vocals down a peg and conveys the idea that the vocals are just another instrument; they’re every bit as important, but no more important than the bass, guitar, keyboards, and drums. It’s a very democratic thing, which I like. But what we’ve seen as shoegaze has made a resurgence in recent years is that rather than being a temporary, transient thing, it has become something much more lasting. It has even bled into other genres and I hear a lot of shoegaze in dance music and trip hop. I love that fusion of electronica with shoegaze and I think it’s something that we’re going to hear a lot more of.

You have a tight lyrical focus. The sad case of German backpacker Inga Maria Hauser has had a big impact on you, so much so that all your work revolves around that case.

Absolutely. It’s very unusual. It had never happened to me before or since, and I don’t think it’ll happen to me again, but Inga’s story completely captivated me a decade ago, haunted me, tormented my thoughts and captured my heart. It has become a part of me, I live with it every day, writing about it, blogging about it, singing about it, talking about it, it’s something unique in music where someone is so overtaken by one topic that it has not only overtaken their life, but their entire body of work. If you include our debut mini-album, we are now four albums down the line and every single song has been about Inga. We’ve been releasing music for five and a half years now, and everything has been about her. What I think compelled me was the nature of what had happened to Inga, the extent of sadness and emotion in her story and the media’s treatment of her. When I read about her story I realised that here was an eighteen year old girl, travelling overseas for the very first time on her own, the sense of joy and excitement she felt, the feeling of discovery we all feel at that age, only to culminate in such tragedy. The circumstances surrounding Inga’s death are unique in the annals of True Crime: back in 1988, Inga’s murder was the only instance of a sexually-motivated murder of a tourist in Northern Ireland ever. Here we are thirty-eight years later, and it STILL remains the only instance of a sexually-motivated murder of a tourist in Northern Ireland ever. There’s also the circumstances surrounding her death which are totally barbaric and very much a case of overkill; the level of violence and barbarity in her death was greater than needed to be the case. Furthermore, there were other unusual, singular aspects to her story: why would someone from Munich go to places such as Stranraer and Larne? Back in 2016 I’d never been to those places before, although I have since in the course of my research in order to retrace her steps. When you undertake a project of this magnitude, you don’t want to be doing anything half-baked or making guesses, Inga is too important to not be willing to go all-out. I needed to know as accurately as possible in order to transmit her story as authentically and as faithfully as I could. I was fascinated with her as a person, but also with that period in time, 1988, it seemed like a much more innocent age. In many ways it was a much more violent time, but the further away we get it takes on a rosier glow.

Something I didn’t foresee happening, although I should have done because it is a golden rule in True Crime, is that you should not become so emotionally involved. They advise that you should always strive to maintain a degree of emotional detachment, but because I’m not a professional detective and I’m quite headstrong and gung-ho, I didn’t pay heed to that, so on an emotional and personal level over the last ten years I could never have foreseen the depths to which I have become drawn into the story and how it would take over my life. But I think it has helped me so much in writing these songs because they are coming from a very emotional place, which wouldn’t have been the case otherwise.

What is the main point you would like people to take from your songs? For me it was the gender aspect, she should have been able to travel wherever and whenever she wanted, but that freedom was cruelly snatched away. What message do you wish to convey?

Several things: on the one hand I really wanted to reclaim for Inga as much of a sense of posthumous dignity as possible. Obviously she is not around to represent herself and she has been subjected to many disgraceful and scurrilous attacks by the tabloid press over the years. The tabloid press in Northern Ireland have produced several articles of what the gutter press engage in, and that is really reprehensible and at odds with the facts in the case and the person that Inga was, and the person I’ve come to know through speaking with her family and friends. There’s a sense of wanting to uphold her integrity and memory, and at the same time a sense of wanting to preserve her mission which was her wanting to set out to explore and see the world and have a fantastic time. I think that if Inga’s backpacking trip had not culminated in such savagery and trauma, it would have continued being something joyous and beautiful, and perhaps it would have only been known by her and the people that she touched along the way, but because her journey was derailed in such a notorious and disastrous way, it has become a byword for disaster, tragedy, murder and darkness. It’s really odd because that darkness is at odds with how Inga was as a person; she was very light, upbeat, effervescent and open. That’s one of the strange dichotomies in this case, but I find that with the songs I write I tend to focus far more on Inga’s life than I do on her death, ultimately I believe in Inga’s life and the vast majority of the songs on the new record are entirely about her LIFE, they show the purity and beauty of her original vision to venture out into the world and to explore in an open hearted and open minded way. That’s the primary vision, but in addition to that what I would dearly love were if my efforts, whether it’s through the blog The Keeley Chronicles, or my music, or the BBC Spotlight documentary I contributed to, or the Netflix documentary Murder In The Badlands that I was involved in the making of, might assist in a breakthrough in what has been such an agonisingly long and glacially-slow case, and for those involved in Inga’s murder to finally stand trial in a court of law. To that end we always include a telephone number on every album that people can phone if they have any information in relation to the unsolved murder of Inga Maria Hauser. I always say that it is never to late to do the right thing. There’s a photo on the inner sleeve of the new album that was taken on a train in Scotland on April 6th 1988, it’s a very early example of a selfie of Inga looking so vibrant and vivacious looking out a train window, or maybe someone has taken the photo for her, we’ll never know, but it’s really heart-rending. The life she lived is a bit of a blank canvas and you can project your own ideas onto it, and shoegaze is the same; you don’t really know what the songs are about and I love that. Our songs have much more of a narrative than most shoegaze songs, we still have that vague aspect in terms of the sound but it’s more rooted in reality and I really like that.

Do you think that if Inga’s case was solved it would bring some closure for you as well and it would allow you to expand your lyrical remit?

That’s a good question and what I’d say to that is, I had several meetings with the various PSNI Detective Chief Superintendents who have presided over Inga’s case since 1988 up to the present day, and while trying to ascertain if anything more could be done to bring about a measure of truth and justice, something was said that never occurred to me before, which is that even if the case proceeded to court, and even if judgement was handed down on those suspected of her killing, Inga Maria Hauser would not come walking through the court room minutes after the sentence was handed down. When that was said to me by the current Detective Chief Superintendent in charge of her case, I was stunned and I started crying in the police headquarters office, because it had simply never occurred to me. It sounds so obvious, but people become so invested in the outcome of a trial that they expect all the wrongs to be righted. It’s a hard question to answer because I’ve lived with this in my heart from day one, not knowing where it would lead, not expecting it to lead anywhere, but people have asked me what is your endgame and if I’ll be able to step away, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to step away. It might be in one albums time, or ten albums time. It could be tomorrow, or it could be in decade, I just don’t know. I’ve lived in this headspace so long that it’s hard to know but we’ll see when I’ve exhausted my passion for this, if that ever happens.

It’s looking like a very exciting time for you with the new album dropping and your first UK tour in two years. How do you let go of your work? Once it is out in the world it doesn’t really belong to you any more.

That’s true. I love the fact that for now the record is still ours, you become so protective of a record, especially when you’ve been working on it for so long. We actually mastered the new record last July, so it could have come out last Summer, but for various reasons it didn’t. I haven’t been in a big rush to release it, because I love the fact that it is ours, and letting go is a strange feeling; there’s a joy to letting it go, and a joy to retaining it. I’ve studied the careers of enough artists to know that there’s a peril in developing a phobia about releasing new material. There are artists who tinker with their work for so long that they miss the optimal juncture in which to release it. The ideal vibe I wanted to create, even before I formed the band, was where we released an album on a yearly basis. One of the things I always loved about R.E.M. for example was you had their first EP, Chronic Town, in 1982, debut LP, Murmur, in 1983, Reckoning in 1984, Fables of the Reconstruction in 1985, Life’s Rich Pageant in 1986, Document in 1987, and Green in 1988, every year they had an album out and they also became a far tighter band through touring relentlessly. Although it’s much harder for bands to tour now, I do believe in creating a discography that is punctuated by as many albums as possible, not so much that you are overloading people with material, but certainly one per annum so that you can trace your creative development over your whole career.

How do you create a space between yourself and your work and stay subjective? How do you know the optimum moment when to step away and know a song is finished?

Working in tangent with our producer and our manager, they are both very wise counsel, I really trust their opinion and judgement. We don’t agree on everything, but we always come to a consensus. But no one hears a moment of the music on an album until it is finished, and I’m quite determined to maintain that; we’ve been on three labels so far and none of those labels have heard the albums until they’ve been in a finished state, and I think that’s the way it should be. I’m often shocked when I hear about other artists who have a label sticking their oar in halfway through recording, and that certainly wouldn’t happen with us. The great thing about the label that we are with now, Definitive Gaze, is that they understand that and they are constructively critical enough that they don’t want to hear something until we think it’s finished and then the discussions start which are ongoing. They have a say in the mixing, but everything up until after post-production is all us. I often tend to find that the song tells you when its ready because the way that we work is very instinctive. One of the few positives of living in this era is that because commercial success is so much more elusive, it allows you to retain your objectivity, you are not trying to second-guess yourself and follow up a top ten single or top ten album, as no one can really have those any more, so you are in a situation where you are not being interfered with by the wider world or the media, people tend to give you enough time to do what you need to do. I wonder how I would maintain my integrity if I were in a more pressure cooker environment. For example, I remember an interview that Duff from Guns ‘N’ Roses gave, he was one of the last people to speak to Kurt Cobain before he died and he said that when you become as big a band as Nirvana became and as big as Guns ‘N’ Roses became, you have no control over your life. I believe that’s the case; when I see how busy we are these days, and yet we are nowhere near as big as the likes of Nirvana, so I can understand some of the pressure.

Your latest album is the first recorded with your touring musicians. How has that altered the dynamic of your sound?

It’s changed the dynamic of the studio sound because of what each member brings, it’s a physical presence, but also tonality; Lukey has got a very particular bass style, you can hear him all over the record, particularly on the opening track. He has got not only a real zest and energy, he brings a real force, Andrew too. What I find is that whenever we rehearse or perform a song, I’m always finding something new in it. I’m always tweaking my guitar parts and my vocal melodies, and you can definitely hear that in our live set, the continual ongoing evolution of the songs.

Operating as a three-piece. Was that by accident or by design? I think there’s something special about a musical trio.

Absolutely. Some of my favourite bands have been three-pieces: The Jam, Manic Street Preachers, Nirvana, The Police. Partly it’s due to logistics; we came here today with a car packed full of gear and I had my guitar with me in the front seat, so I don’t know how four, five, six, seven-piece bands manage?! It’s also not wanting to overload the sound. I find with a three-piece you have to do more, it’s more of a challenge and it means you never get complacent. When we toured with Terrorvision they performed as a seven-piece, they are a great band and lovely people, but even though we’re a three-piece band, I don’t think KEELEY were outgunned at all, because our live sound is so full, so rich and wild.

And will your bandmates influence your sound going forwards?

For sure. I think there’s a lot of creative scope in this band, we’re such big fans of music and on car journeys we’re constantly cranking the playlists, we can’t get enough and living in sound is just a dream. It was my dream as a teenager to be in a band and touring the UK. I’d like to tour other countries, but if I could choose just one place to tour forever, it would be the UK. I love the people in England, Scotland and Wales. You hear a lot of negativity in the media, but I find the people here are so lovely.

Finally, what is one question interviewers never ask, but you wish they would?

[long pause] You’ve stumped me! [laughs].

There’s nothing I want anyone to ask me. I’d be happy never answering another question to be honest.