In Conversation with Blue Deputy
By Mia Romanoff
After years of waiting, hoping, and explaining to my friends how a band with only two singles managed to make it into the “favorite bands” category, Blue Deputy is finally releasing their debut EP, Reeling on September 22. The Belfast based band consisting of Andy Bunting (vocals and guitar), Caoilfhinn McFadden (bass), and Cathal Francis (guitar and vocals) has been busy this summer with the release of their two new singles, ‘Big Fleece’ and ‘Agoraphobe’, following the release of ‘Cypress’ this past October.
Ahead of the release next week, I got the chance to speak with Bunting and McFadden about process, collaboration, and lip syncing in the park.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Hearing Aid (Mia Romanoff): You guys have your first EP, Reeling coming out this September by the Dalliance Records imprint, Under the Rolling Y. Can you talk to me a bit about the experience of making the EP and the places you drew inspiration from?
Andy Bunting: It was a long time in the making – like five years. A version of it got fully recorded in 2021, over the summer, and then I listened back to it and I just hated it so much. So that got scrapped and then I moved over [to Belfast], didn't really know anybody, and then slowly collected band members. When we finally had a unit going, I'd written a couple more songs in between, and then we got together and we were like “right, okay – let’s just record these.”
Caoilfhinn McFadden: Yeah, that took a while.
Bunting: There were maybe 10 million variants of it, and they all kinda sucked. They all were worse than the demo, which is not ideal. So it kind of had demo-itis, for a year and a half.
HA: I was so excited when that demo came out – I was on a plane like “how do I download a SoundCloud song?”
Bunting: I was so excited when it wasn't just the demo that was out, when it was finally out – the relief.
McFadden: Oh yeah, the relief!
Bunting: Thank God that's done. Now I can finally listen to it and enjoy it. For a while it was trauma associated. Then once that was done, we were just like, “okay, well now we know how to do what we're doing, and make it translate well from full band to recording,” which is hard. A lot of [the EP] was written during COVID because I was in Uni in London at the time and that was just the pits, so there was a lot of material. It's kinda like writing a book in a weird way – a lot of people want a full narrative, but I was like, “I'm gonna release songs if it kills me ‘cause I've been threatening to for five years.” So they're kind of disjointed, but it's just about growing up and navigating relationships in our current day with yourself and other people and your parents and the city that you're in.
HA: Yeah, I realized ‘Agoraphobe’, was a pretty old song that I guess came back for the EP. What was the process like for taking those old songs that were made with an entirely different lineup and making them the full band’s song?
Bunting: I thought it was gonna be really hard, but it wasn't really. We didn't really have any recordings of full band stuff. All that we had, all that [McFadden] had to practice with for months was the only recorded full set which was from the DIY Super Bowl, which is [Blue deputy as a two piece]. It was a joke at that point that people would DM us or come up to us and be like, “do you need a bassist?” Because there was no base part there. So he would just like practice with that. Our process now is that I will send Caoilfhinn a song that will be fully fleshed out apart from the base and then he'll write the bass line. That was what we did for live stuff as well. I would say, “here's this song that we've never really decided on a baseline for it.” And he would come up with something really cool. With Cathal, our guitarist, there were some riffs that had to be in there ‘cause they were part of the song, and then there were a lot of blank spaces that either he or I would fill with something. So he's on the EP in quite a few bits where he’d just sit with the song for a while and then would come up with something absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful.
HA: I know for like New Jersey you did a lot of your own production and now the two of you have done the production for this EP. When you're writing a song, are you thinking about the production or are those two separate processes for you?
Bunting: The past couple years when I've been writing a song, it'll always start with lyrics. I'll have a prolific day where I'll be waiting for the bus and I'll be like, “mmh that’s a nice thought.” I'll get it down and then later that day or later that month come back to it and try and sit down – I can't remember whose advice it was – was it the Beatles? Was it in Get Back or something where they were like, “when you write a song, sit down and finish it.” So I try and do that and then I'll usually get an acoustic guitar and figure out a chord progression and then immediately plug it into Logic and record it that way. So I immediately start producing it, but whereas before with the arrangement, I wasn't really thinking about leaving space for other instruments, after the hell that was Cyprus, I've started [leaving space] because it's really easy to make a song way too busy. It's a lot harder to let it breathe and give it space. The easiest way to do that is by making the backbone of it really simple. I'll try and keep the demo really bare so that I can then send it to Caoilfhinn and Cathal and have them do their bits.
HA: This whole EP has been a long time in the making, but you also made your first music video. Did you guys enjoy translating the song into a different medium and was it something that you found interesting and wanna do again? Or is it more so “this is a thing we're supposed to do?”
Bunting: [To McFadden] Well, what do you think?
McFadden: It's a bit of all of those, I guess a little bit. Making it was quite fun. I quite enjoyed it, although it was a bit weird listening to the song really fast.
Bunting: Oh yeah! We recorded it in double speed, like 60 FPS so that we could [slow] it down and it would be 30 FPS, but it would look like it was in slow motion, but it meant that we were playing the song at double speeds, which is like, really weird.
McFadden: It was quite funny.
Bunting: Right next to uni here in Belfast, there's a nice park that's quite touristy and it's also just full of students. We were in [the botanic gardens] and there [were] quite a few people walking by and we were just having to stand there and be cool and pretend to be candid and pretend to talk to each other.
McFadden: Yeah.
Bunting: Because we don't talk to each other.
McFadden: No.
Bunting: We don't really like each other, so it was really hard. No, but it was fun to push the envelope of what you find awkward in a way. I was standing there and I was like “other artists do this and they don't feel weird, just get over it.”
McFadden: There's weirder things happening.
Bunting: But I still can't really watch it.
HA: I know that you've spoken a bit about Cyprus being about feeling like the bad guy at the end of a friendship or relationship, even when you're doing a right, justifiable thing, which is an incredibly relatable feeling. So much of your writing gets at these really small moments that carry a huge emotional weight. Do you ever feel hesitant putting it out there, or once it's a song and it's been through production, it feels like it's own separate thing?
Bunting: At the moment that I've like written a song or when I'm writing the song, I will have it in the back of my head. It used to be terrifying, with ‘New Jersey’ and [‘I Hate Steven Singer’] – they're so cutting, they're both very bitter, very vulnerable songs. I always try to make them unspecific, because it gives me a little bit of protection and it also helps people actually listen and apply it to their own lives. I am not a celebrity, people don't really care about my specific relationships. Like why would I share that? You know? I feel like it's much more useful and protective for me if I make it more general, about a feeling that I know is universal, even if it feels very personal. So I'll have that in the back of my head when I'm writing a song like “this is very personal. I'm digging quite deep here.” And then honestly, after you've spent so much time on a song and put so much effort into it, you just don't really care, you’re just like, “I need to put this out.” I've put days, months of work into this song and at that point it is its own separate thing. You're not really thinking like, “geez, I hope people don't think this is about X. Or, oh, I hope Y isn't offended that I put this out.” Because you're just like, ah, who cares?
HA: Do you fill in Caoilfhinn and Cathal on the emotional backstory first, or do you give it to them and they can put into it whatever you guys [McFadden and Francis] want. Like “I've heard this, this is my reaction to this and this is what I'm putting into this.”
McFadden: It's probably more like what I get from that demo or whatever you [Bunting] send me. So it's just “this is what feels right over that part.”
Bunting: Yeah, I don't really fill them in unless they ask. Unless it's a very cryptic song, which I don't think I've written a very cryptic song yet – maybe I will just to test you guys. The lyrics are never that confusing, I feel I don't have the capacity to write confusing lyrics, but sonically I'll be like, here's the vibe, and they'll kind of get the gist.
HA: Although, I will say I grew up in New York and I never really got ‘I Hate Steven Singer’, and then I was driving to go visit my friend in Delaware through Philadelphia, and the song came on as I passed an I Hate Steven Singer billboard and it clicked.
Bunting: Oh, no way! So many people have DMed the band, and been like, “oh my God, I know what you're talking about now.” It's funny that you bring that up because the brand, it's a jeweler, and their marketing is really weird. It was a story where a guy got his girlfriend a ring and then they got married and then, I don't know, he was like, “oh, I hate Steven Singer,” because like the ring convinced her to get married or something. I can't really remember the specifics. That might be wrong. But it got to a point where the brand followed us on Instagram and then they sent us a mug. I think [the mug is] in America, but they're allies to us and they help our SEO as well.
HA: I saw that you're doing a master's degree in law. How does that experience fit in with or change your relationship with music, especially ahead of an EP release where it's more labor intensive?
Bunting: I just knew that I wanted to do law for a while. I'm quite interested in the intersection of music and law. I've known a lot of small artists who've gotten so screwed over by crappy contracts and people really, really just screwing them over constantly. They didn't really know what they could do in that situation. I think part of me just wanted to become more competent with that. The other part that I'm interested in with music is IP, and more recently AI, so I'm hoping, fingers crossed, I can do my dissertation this year on IP and AI – like training an AI on another person's copyrighted work. There's a lot of cases in the states, but there's only been one, I think here. It's very interesting to me ‘cause I hate AI so, so much. In regards to workload, it has been a lot. We've had to really pace ourselves with what is achievable. If I have exams in May, I'll just be like, “okay guys, sack, April, we're just not gonna be able to do anything.”
Obviously all of us have stuff going on, [McFadden and Francis] have day jobs, our drummer doesn't live in this country, he lives in Ireland (the Republic), so it's all a balancing act, but I feel it's [like that with] most bands. Then because I'm at Queens, we have access to gigs at the student union which is really fun. There's a good music community here.
HA: If you're ever in St. Andrews, I'm sure our union will take you…
Bunting: We really wanna go back to Scotland. We played in Glasgow at the Audio Lounge in Maryhill.
McFadden: That was great fun.
Bunting: It was a good one. We wanna come back, we'd like to do Edinburgh, but it's tricky.
HA: So you have Reeling coming out later this month, but what's next for the band and is there a tour in the near future?
Bunting: We really want to. We do Dublin occasionally if we're asked. We really wanna do a tour, but we just have to make sure that it works with people's jobs and my degree and then it also has to be affordable. There's a sea in between us and like everywhere that has asked us to play. Recording wise, after Reeling, we have four?
McFadden: yeah, another four tracks that are –
Bunting: – Technically five.
McFadden: Another five, we're working on.
HA: Are we ever getting ‘Lucky Star’?
McFadden: We'll say – we'll see, we'll see.
Bunting: Yeah ‘Lucky Star’ is…
McFadden: somewhere.
HA: okay okay I’ll leave it at that!
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Stay tuned for the release of Reeling on September 22nd!