POST-BURNOUT
The Irish punk project Hubert Selby Jr. Infants has quite a pedigree of seasoned players. It features Jamie Grimes of the experimental metal project Drainland and the death metal bands Lamentations and Vircolac, respectively, on guitar and vocals; Andrew “Bushie” Bushe, the host of the internet radio show Little Plastic Radio and of the prog rock band Yurt and garage rock band Weird Feelings, on drums; the music journalist and former Drainland bassist, Peter McNally, on guitar; and Kunal Nandi, of the British sludge metal act Art of Burning Water and the noise band Tractor and the founder of the indie label SuperFi Records, on bass.
The members have been longtime friends with varied backgrounds but common interests. “The pair of us, specifically – me and Bushie – have the exact same flashpoint, when we were both ten or nine years of age,” Jamie tells Post-Burnout when we spoke with them. “Before I got into punk or hardcore, I was really into metal, which, being fourteen in 1991, death metal was taking over the world, and I got into tape trading. A lot of that was horror-based, so you’d be buying ‘zines and demos.
“All of those things would have samples from fuckin’ Hellraiser as intros. There’d be trash movie reviews in death metal ‘zines, like Anatomia or Corporal Arts or whatever. A lot of people I would trade tapes with, I’d get copies of video nasties off them and stuff like that as I got older.
“Then, at the same time, growing up in the ‘90s, at that point, things like Nirvana were happening. Faith No More were a big thing, and they were very much a way in for me for Mr. Bungle, the [Mike] Patton connection, they would constantly be wearing shirts of bands like Steel Pole Bath Tub or DUH or whatever. Even things like [MTV’s] 120 Minutes would show stuff like Bad Brains and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was a little bit more accessible in some ways if you knew where to look. It’s too accessible now.”
“Kind of the same as Grimes, I came up through metal,” adds Andrew. “A lot of what I would’ve listened to would have been grindcore, is what it is now, or, like, crust music, but, at the time, we just thought it was all metal. So, in my head, as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I would have had no huge differentiation between, like, Kreator and Electro Hippies.
“Then, through listening to stuff like Electro Hippies and Napalm Death and buying the Earache records when I was a kid, there were older guys who used to buy all that stuff. I wouldn’t have been able to afford a lot of that. We did this thing where we’d go to Sound Cellar and literally count the songs on the back and go, ‘This one has fourteen minutes of music. This one has eleven,’ and then you’d buy the one with the most music, you know?
“For me with hardcore, I’m kind of a D.C. hardcore person…” “Yeah, I think that’s fair to say for all of us,” adds Jamie. “Yeah, it’s kind of that great clipped, fast sound,” continues Andrew. “But, for me, what happened was, I started getting tapes from these older lads – so you might get a Benediction album on it, a Dr and the Crippens album – and someone, eventually, gave me a tape with the two Minor Threat records on one side of it, and that was kind of it for me after that.”
Taken from Intagram/@hubyinfants
Their love of trashy, exploitative flicks was as integral to their friendship as their common musical interests. “We’re big fans, in general… – and the name is a hint to this – …particularly myself and Andrew are fans of trash culture, in general,” Jamie says. “So, stuff like bad TV, bad films, bad music.” “Yeah, all day long,” concurs Andrew. “We’re all big fans, particularly, of trashy Italian giallo and things like that, which is generally an influence on us, musically, as well,” adds Jamie.
“Personally, I’ve been really interested, like Grimes, in fringe culture, you know?” explains Andrew. “Even the kind of music we play, originally, would’ve started out in a place for deviant people, and I don’t mean that in a negative way; I mean your standard person wouldn’t often end up in punk rock or underground music or one of these things. So, the influence of that stuff is huge for me and Grimes, I know, particularly, and I could probably say for the other two guys, as well. I have a cat called Lucio Fulci [named after the Italian horror director], you know? So, it’s a big deal.”
The birth of Hubert Selby Jr. Infants happened organically and with no pressure. Proudly proclaiming to be a band of middle-aged men, the band is mainly an excuse for a bunch of lifelong friends who are now working fathers to hang out. “For me, I have no desire to sell a lot of records,” Andrew says of their intent.
“I’ve had opportunities in my life to play with people who do that. I’ve had opportunities to, perhaps, be a person who did that stuff, but I think… – it’s something that comes up a lot when we talk about this stuff – …I think if, in this day and age, you form a band thinking you’re going to be famous and make a living, you’re a fuckin’ idiot. Like, it’s chaotic to think that way.
“So, I think if you don’t have that baggage, you can just make music. I think if you do have that idea, you’re compromised from the moment you start making music, because your intent is to try and sell it to a degree. Whereas, what we do, for example, we go in a room, we play music, and then we go, ‘Here’s the songs.’”
“The immediate start of this band – Bushie, Pete, and I had been trying to play in a band together again for about ten years, and the timing just hasn’t been right,” explains Jamie. “After Drainland, I had spent about seven or eight years in a death metal band called Vircolac, which was quite busy, which put out quite a couple of records, [and] went to play with fuckin’ Mayhem in Norway. I left that band and was like, ‘You know what? I’m done with playing heavier stuff. I’ve spent my entire life doing it.’ Me and Pete’s first band when we were teenagers sounded like Weezer and Jawbreaker, you know? I’ve always loved more gentle music.”
After forming the band with this post-hardcore influence, they needed a name. They arrived at a combination of the countercultural and oftentimes controversial American author Hubert Selby Jr. (best known for his works Requiem for a Dream and Last Exit to Brooklyn, respectively) and Junior Infants, the name for the youngest age bracket in primary schools in the Republic of Ireland. They soon found that the second part of their name doesn’t have a universal understanding when they pitched it to their English bassist, Kunal, as the term is exclusively used within the Republic.
“The name, as I’ve explained to other people, was kind of like, do you know The Be Sharps in The Simpsons, where it seems funny at first but becomes less funny?” laughs Jamie when discussing picking their name. “Everything with our band, most of the titles…like the first EP was called Good Evening Pricks [It’s…the Hubert Selby Jr. Infants], which suggests that we don’t take it too seriously.
“And everything we do is, unfortunately, funny for us for about ten minutes, then becomes less funny. We were originally called Difficulties for about five minutes, then – as Bushie will confirm – once every six or nine months, I’m going, ‘Lads, can we just change the name?’”
“It’s stuck now!” responds Andrew. “I don’t know, I’m always saying, to me it’s got that…you know like [the American hardcore band] Jodie Foster’s Army or something? I think outside of Ireland, it’s probably a weird name.” [Editor’s Note – For context, JFA’s name was an allusion to Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassin, John Hinckley Jr., to underscore the band’s discontent with Reagan’s presidency. Infamously, Hinckley claimed not to have shot Reagan as a political gesture, but to impress Foster after becoming obsessed with her from repeatedly watching Taxi Driver. He has since apologised.]
“We could’ve gone with Danzig O’Donnell, which was the other one, and maybe we should have, but that would’ve travelled even worse. I don’t know,” Jamie says. “Just to note, we are also fans of Hubert Selby Jr.,” adds Andrew. “Yeah, but not infants. We’re not fans of children,” Jamie continues. “I want to make that very clear. It’s a ridiculously over-the-top…If you’re familiar with the author Hubert Selby Jr., a lot of his characters are very troubled people. It was a joke, originally. Like, ‘Hubert Selby Jr. Infants’ kind of seems like a school for troubled children.”
Yesterday (at the time of publication) Hubert Selby Jr. Infants released their debut album, Bingo. The album was recorded with the producer Shaun Cadogan at Last Light Studios in Dublin, with its production emulating the style of the ‘80s D.I.Y. records that inspired them: Cheap, fast, and as condensed as possible.
“We didn’t sit down and say, ‘We’re going to write an album. Here’s the concept,’ you know?” Jamie says of Bingo. “Funnily enough, there were things that tied the songs together that we only realised afterwards. So, with this record, ‘Notions’ – the first song, the opening track – existed in some form when we recorded the previous EP. We were playing it live, but it wasn’t ready to record at the time, and we kind of got it recorded and got straight into writing new songs.
“With this one, we kind of decided to do what we hadn’t done before, which is give ourselves a deadline. Generally, how we know it’s time to record is, if we feel we’re going to get bored of certain songs, we need to document them. So, the record is essentially chronological, in terms of it starts where the last one ended, but then ends where we started, because it has those two older songs on it.”
To celebrate Bingo’s release, the band will do two shows supporting the Australian punk band Chimers, tonight in Cork and tomorrow in Dublin. On June 8th, they will support Mike Watt, Mike Baggetta, and Stephen Hodge’s new band, mssv. On what to expect from these shows, Jamie says, “The album is called Bingo because a friend of ours had joked a couple of years ago…After she had seen our first couple of gigs, she was like, ‘I’m going to make a fuckin’ Hubey Selby Jr. Infants bingo card.
“‘You get a bingo when Bushie takes his shirt off. If Jamies talks about being old or shitting on stage, you get a bingo. If Pete looks at the audience, you get a bingo card, because Pete never looks at the audience.’ We’ve never worked out what Kunal’s thing is, although Kunal sings now, so maybe we’ll review it.
“So, basically, if you’re going to see us, you’ll get Bushie taking his shirt off, me talking about shitting between songs, Pete not looking at you, and Kunal being mysterious. You might hear some songs off the album. You might watch me lose my voice. You’re guaranteed to watch me stand on the wrong pedal at least once or twice.”
Hubert Selby Jr. Infants’ debut album, Bingo, is available to stream and purchase now. You can keep up with the band through Bandcamp and Instagram.
You can see Hubert Selby Jr. Infants at:
May 16th – Cork – Nudes Craft and Cocktails (w/ Chimers) (TICKETS)
May 17th – Dublin – Anseo (w/ Chimers and Soft on Crime) (TICKETS)
June 8th – Dublin – The Grand Social (w/ mssv) (TICKETS)
Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.
Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.