The NIZLOPI duo arrived on stage as though recently dragged off the couch, shoe-less and dishevelled, and slowly meandered into the reasonably large crowd in Whelan’s on Monday last. It was from there that they began to belt out their soon-to-be-released second single Girls without a microphone in sight. And so it began.
It would be a lie to say that the gig was not entertaining. The night itself was littered with some seriously weird moments which ranged from the unusual to the sublime. The most noteworthy of these had to be Suzie, the middle aged mother from Bristol, who climbed onstage mid-gig and demanded a singsong from the slightly perplexed audience. Then there was the token fanatic called Brian, who gave up his job in the UK and ran away with the band to another country. “It’s definitely unusual”, John concedes when I question him on their number one fan, “he has our mobile numbers and everything”.
Post-gig, I asked the band the first logical question that came to mind. ‘What on earth does “Nizlopi” mean? Double bassist and human beat boxer, John Parker promptly gave me that knowing ‘we get asked this all the time’ look and proceeded to explain. “It’s a Hungarian surname”, he began, “When we were younger, there was a gymnast called Nina Nizlopi on the telly all the time. When we heard this name we thought ‘Wow, that’s bizarre – what is a Nina Nizlopi?’ so we named about band after her, really. It was funny because round Christmas, when we became popular all of a sudden, we had to phone her to make sure she was ok with it. I think she was a bit shocked, but in all seems pretty happy.”
“I started playing the double bass when I was pretty young. My brother, Robert, is profoundly deaf and was given a double bass as a child so that he could feel the vibrations from the instrument. When I saw it I thought, ‘hey this is great’, so I stole it off him! It was only when Luke and I were on Richard and Judy or something that Robert text me and reminded me. I suppose he should get a cut of the profits.”
Having met on a bus at the age of thirteen and discovered their mutual appreciation of music, John and his JCB-song-singing mate, Luke Concannon got on like a proverbial house on fire. “Both Luke and I are dyslexic, and were always quite useless at school. When we met on the bus we realised that we both were pretty big into music, so we thought ‘hey let’s form a band!’ I think we wrote our first song about two weeks later.”
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Nizlopi shot to fame with their now signature JCB song in during the Christmas number one season of last year. Because of the dates upon which Christmas fell, the singles chart was not compiled until half way through the day. This meant that Nizlopi held the throne for half the day and Simon Cowell’s latest X-factor protégé Shayne Ward for the other. However, when I broached this issue with John, he was quick to set me straight. “We were Christmas No.1 until seven o’clock that evening, so it was more than half a day” he laughs, “Oh, is that a bit petty?”
“But seriously though, it doesn’t really piss me off. I think it was sad that it was ‘that’ song. It would have been great to have been beaten to number one by someone credible. It doesn’t feel good to be beaten by something so terrible, but it wasn’t a surprise. It was like the battle of Tesco and the local green grocer, really. We didn’t stand a chance – Shayne Ward sold something like 700,000 copies and we couldn’t even afford to print that many. Having said that, my family still believes Nizlopi was Christmas number one!”
Christmas number one or not, from the scenes I witnessed in Whelan’s, Nizlopi seem to have accumulated a pretty solid fan base. Despite cancelling the last three dates of their Irish tour (due to Luke’s not-very-rock-n’-roll chest infection) the two promise to return to Ireland just in time for the festival season.
(Taken from the album ‘Half these songs are about you’, the second single Girls is released in Ireland March 27th. Check out www.nizlopi.com for more information.)
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