The Answer wins critical praise while proudly carrying the torch of Irish guitar-rock

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON NOV. 26, 2008

By Steve Newton

Three months ago, Answer vocalist Cormac Neeson was asked by an L.A. music mag which band he would most like to tour the States with, and his immediate reply was the Black Crowes. Shortly thereafter, Neeson’s group was offered the opening slot for AC/DC’s sold-out North American tour.

At that point he felt it best not to declare: “Nah, we’re waiting on a call from the Crowes.”

On his cellphone from an Acca Dacca tour stop in Rutherford, New Jersey, Neeson explains how supporting the legendary Aussie earbusters pays dividends beyond a rider that guarantees a steady backstage supply of Guinness.

“The venues are generally 80 to 90 percent filled for us,” he says. “I think it’s just as much to do with the cold weather as the lure of the support band, but it works out very well. We’re not getting any bottles thrown in our direction or anything like that.”

The Answer is a shaggy-haired quartet from Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, that’s heavily indebted to the likes of Led Zeppelin and Free, as well as the aforementioned Black Crowes. Following the 2006 release of its debut album Rise, the group won major praise from leading British hard-rock publications. “Phenomenal,” raved Classic Rock; “fucking stupendous” added Kerrang! Before long the band was opening stadium gigs for the Stones and the Who.

Rise was distributed only in the U.K., Australia, and Japan; the group’s North American debut is Never Too Late, a four-track EP/DVD whose Crowes-like title track was featured on Guitar Hero World Tour, the fourth installment of the hugely popular video game. Neeson played the game once, at its European launch in London six months ago.

“I thought I’d better give it a go so that I had a notion of what I was talking about,” says the 26-year-old rocker. “But when it comes to computer games we’re normally a bit more into our racing cars than our guitar-hero skills. I think we do enough of that on the stage, you know.”

During its half-hour warm-up for AC/DC the Answer balances material from Rise, Never Too Late, and its upcoming second full-length album, scheduled for release in February. Neeson expects the group to come into its own a bit more on the next CD, and shrug off some of the comparisons to ’70s icons that have littered descriptions of the band’s rowdy, Les Paul-driven blues-rock.

“We did get pigeonholed to a certain degree on the first album,” he states, “but I’m very confident that the second album will shatter any preordained ideas that anybody might have about us being too retro.”

Retro or not, the Answer is proud as hell to carry on the venerable tradition of Irish guitar-rock. Before every show on the current tour the band’s members listen to “Walk on Hot Coals” by Rory Gallagher, “to get the blood boiling”. And when it played a Phil Lynott memorial gig in Dublin in 2006, bassist Micky Waters was given the honour of being the first person since the Thin Lizzy front man’s death in ’86 to play his famous black bass.

Unfortunately for Neeson, none of Lynott’s old microphones were available for him to sing through.

“We all got to have a bit of a rattle on the bass guitar,” he relates, “so we were happy enough.”

To hear the full audio of my 2008 interview with the Answer’s Cormac Neeson subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 650 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.