Artist News
Bjorn Baillie
Hailing from Dublin, Ireland… Bjorn Baillie has played music since he was a teenager…from late night clubs as a 15-yr old drummer, to touring the world as singer/guitarist and chief songwriter of La Rocca…playing from London to New York, Montreal to Sydney (via Baton Rouge & Lincoln, Nebraska!)
Grabbing inspiration from Sam Cooke and John Fogerty, [...]
La Rocca
MYSPACE | FACEBOOK | TWITTER | OFFICIAL SITE
The La Rocca lads have lately slayed audiences in their adopted home of Los Angeles, which makes you wonder: How did four blokes from towns with names like Delgany and Rathcoole end up in La La Land? They confess that Los Angelenos have a hard time understanding them and that they’ve had to Americanize their repertoire of curses. You also have to wonder why they chose to cash in their chips, leave the cozy college town of Cardiff, where they met, and strike out for terra incognita.
For one thing, they wanted to record with Tony Hoffer (Beck, Supergrass, The Thrills), who’s based in L.A. But, says Bjorn, What made us a band straight off was this feeling that we had something to contribute, something that could not be contained by geographical boundaries, something bound and determined to reach a wider audience.
Bjorn, keyboardist/guitarist/singer Nick Haworth, bassist/singer Simon Baillie and drummer Alan Redmond duly progressed from the stages of Cardiff to Dublin and then to London. Bjorn remembers the band’s inauspicious beginnings: Nick told me to come by if I had some songs because he had a band. Complete lie! They were just some lads who got drunk and loved a sing-song. No shape or order at all. So one night they played me a couple of songs, and they were fucking dreadful. I’d been writing since I was 15, first on piano and then on guitar, so I played them a couple of mine, and Alan kept saying, Play us another. So I played six or seven songs and finally said, Look, if we’re doing this, let’s do it right. So my brother Simon moved up from Bristol under very false pretenses to play bass.
Bjorn has played in bands with Simon since they were teenagers. The two grew up in Delgany, about 20 miles south of Dublin and a stone’s throw from the Irish Sea. My old man had Cosmos Factory [1970], by Credence Clearwater Revival, Bjorn says of one of their earliest influences. We’d never heard anything like it. I’m still in awe of that song Long as I Can See the Light.
Once Simon joined La Rocca (named after a dank, downstairs bar in Bristol with this massive hole you crawl through to get to the dance floor) the band began rehearsing regularly. Nick, from the Lancashire town of Burnley, was already an adept pianist. Alan, from Rathcoole, west of Dublin, had been playing drums since he was 15 and had what Bjorn calls a managers head. He’s very savvy about what needs to be done, Bjorn reiterates. He’s a genius hustler.
In 2003 the Limerick-based label Wet Clay released a four-song EP that garnered glowing reviews and La Rocca their first airplay.
We’d had label interest because of the EP and our success in Australia [where the song Sing Song Sung had landed in heavy rotation], Bjorn relates. We talked to all these people, including Tony Hoffer’s manager, who also happens to co-own a label called Dangerbird. Of all the labels, Dangerbird instantly felt right.
