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Published: 9 February, 2012
by ROISIN GADELRAB

“It’s things like that which make me want to shoot myself in the head,” says Richard Fearless of Death in Vegas as he stares out over the mountainous Donegal landscape, having stopped working on the table he’s building in his father’s workshop.

Later, he and his wife will lay out fabric for a patchwork quilt his stepmother is sewing for his soon to be first child.

But in the midst of this Good Housekeeping/Heidi scenario, Fearless is debating the sorry state of the music industry, angry that latest album Trans-Love Energies was available online for free.

“You can work on something, and the next thing it’s worthless because you can get it for free,” he says. “It’s difficult when you have nothing other than that.

“When I work on a record I don’t do anything else. It’s taken me three and a half years to do one album in the past. I’ve worked really hard on it. This record was particularly hit because it’s getting worse – it’s killing the music industry terribly.”

He says musicians have little choice but to license their music to adverts to make up for the loss of income.

“It’s bad for them because they’re used in an ad’ – like Peter, Bjorn and John – and then all of a sudden your song’s associated with Homebase for the rest of your life,” says Fearless. “But in a day and age where your record’s free online two weeks before it comes out, you’ve got no choice.

“Until people sort out the music industry people have to do stuff like that. I’ve done adverts and will probably carry on doing them, it’s not something I particularly want to do.

“I don’t know what the likes of iTunes is doing for the industry. Just buying a single song, the concept of an album is dead, it’s rubbish. I don’t want to make a song, I want to make an album, have an artwork, tell a story, express on the artwork who’s involved.”

Death in Vegas will open The Camden Crawl, starting the weekend’s festivities with a set at Koko on May 4.

Over the Bank Holiday weekend, the Crawl will feature more than 300 events all across Camden.

Fearless promised a sonic and visual spectacle, adding: “We’re really honoured to do it. It’s really good, we’ve never done Koko, it’s a fantastic venue.

“We’ve got a history of doing some good shows in Camden. Our last show on this tour was in the Electric Ballroom and it was a fantastic gig, then back in the day we used to play Dingwalls a lot.”

But for now, Fearless is visiting his father after a DJ set in Dublin, making the most of the rustic escape.

“We’re on the Atlantic coast by this range of mountains,” he says. “It’s always quite mild because it’s very rainy, peat fires, good to get away. It’s kind of breathtaking, very barren – peat bogs and desolate beaches. It’s fantastic to get away.”

It may sound a world away from the massive raves of Death in Vegas’s heyday before Fearless disappeared to the US for seven years, but many of the vocals for their newest album were actually recorded above his father’s Donegal garage.

“I’ve always enjoyed building things,” he says. “And I don’t have the pleasure of having a carpentry workshop at home. I tend to help my dad with things. We built a coracle – a traditional boat – last year, it was pretty amazing. If the music fails, I’ve always got that to fall on I guess.”

Their latest album received acclaim across the board, from rock-based to electronic publications, confirming Fearless’s decision to record his own vocals was a success.

He avoided featuring too many guest vocals after his experiences on 2002 album Scorpio Rising when working with Liam Gallagher “overshadowed the music”.

Despite this, it was a planned recording session with The Kills’ Jamie Hince – cancelled due to his wedding to Kate Moss – which projected Fearless into attempting to record his own vocals.

He adds: “It was in the early hours of the morning, a few smokes and drinks might have been under the belt, I did it and came out of the room and my brother-in-law, who plays guitar and the engineer, were beaming – it was really good encouragement at the right time and that gave me the confidence to do it.

“I kind of felt like I was setting myself up – if I was going to get panned, there was only one person to really pan.”