Kodaline lead Stephen Garrigan on band's comparisons with Coldplay and upcoming India debut

Kodaline – vocalist and guitarist Stephen Garrigan, guitarist and keyboardist Mark Prendergast, drummer Vinny May Jr and bassist Jason Boland – are a band you’ve probably heard even if you’ve never heard of them. The Irish group’s soaring pop-rock music has been used to soundtrack countless television shows to help ramp up the emotional quotient. Their breakthrough single ‘All I Want’, which includes the line “Our love was meant for movie screens”, was featured in the film The Fault In Our Stars as well as TV programmes as diverse as Grey’s Anatomy, Catfish and The Vampire Diaries. Other tracks have been heard in various seasons of American Idol and World of Dance.

As a result, the quartet has not only become huge starts in their home country, where each of their three albums — In A Perfect World (2013), Coming Up For Air (2015) and Politics of Living (2018) — have topped the charts, but also garnered a considerable following around the globe including in India. They will make their live debut here with a headlining set at the tenth edition of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender music festival in Pune, which will take place from 29 November to 1 December. This writer spoke to Garrigan over the phone to talk about Kodaline’s origins as a teen-pop act, their popularity in Asia, and the mysterious meaning behind the band’s name. Edited excerpts:

You performed in China, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand earlier this year. You will be playing India soon. To what do you attribute your popularity in Asia?

I’m not really sure. I think there is a lot of emotion in our music, songs like ‘Brother’, ‘High Hopes’ and ‘All I Want’. I think that’s probably why people started following, liking, listening to us, based on what I get from talking to fans occasionally. That’s usually what it is. I think it’s the music being emotional and uplifting in a way.

Several of your songs have been used in TV series. Is it weird seeing your music pop up in so many shows?

It never gets old. It still catches me off-guard. I think it was an American show like Catfish [that> I just happened to be watching and our song came on. I didn’t even know it was on it. It completely caught me by surprise. I suppose that’s another reason our music has got out there. It’s really cool. It’s a good feeling to hear our music being used in different ways.

You’ve never had a big hit outside of Ireland yet you’ve toured the world. Would you agree that Kodaline is more of an albums band as opposed to a singles act?

We definitely are an albums band. We’ve never had a hit song. But people still come to our shows and sing along to our songs. Our music has just travelled to people through Spotify and Apple Music and our videos on YouTube. The music industry has changed in a sense. You don’t really need to have a hit song.

Or is it that the definition of hit song has changed?

It has 100 percent because getting played on the radio, constantly hearing a song everywhere you go, being in the top ten or having a No 1 in the charts, that’s a traditional hit. All the streaming services just opened it up and changed the whole industry. Tash Sultana is a really cool girl from Australia. She’s an example of someone who doesn’t really have a hit song, doesn’t write pop music but is playing huge crowds. I think it’s great. For any band or artist, the most important thing nowadays is just playing live and touring and getting out there in front of people and playing a good show.

The band has been compared to Coldplay and Snow Patrol and you guys were tipped to become as massive as those stadium acts. Are you happy in a way that you haven’t and don’t have to deal with the same amount of pressure as they do?

Well, we’re happy where we are at the moment. I think if any band was to tell you that they didn’t want to get to that level, I’d say they’d probably be lying. It’s good to be ambitious. Firstly, for us even to just write songs and play music for a living feels absolutely incredible. We feel very blessed and lucky to do that. In some countries, we do play to very big crowds. In others, it’s slightly smaller. We’d love to play stadiums. Why not? It’d be a lot of fun.

Mark, Vinny and you started out in 2005 as 21 Demands, which emerged runners-up on Irish TV talent hunt You’re a Star and scored a No 1 hit with the song ‘Give Me A Minute’. Then you changed your musical identity to Kodaline in 2012 and have stayed together since. In a way, you’re the diagonal opposite of One Direction, which had a similar backstory. Did your stint as 21 Demands help shape your career?

We were teenagers. It was kind of like a school band and an excuse to get out of school. I suppose it gave us the confidence to realise that we might be able to actually do something in music. The songs [we wrote> were really, really terrible. [The No 1> was off the back of the TV show. To be honest, it’s not very good. Do you know when you look back at some of the things you’ve done when you were a teenager and it makes you cringe? We went away for a couple of years and we were gigging around bars mostly in Dublin, writing songs every day and finding the right kind of music that we wanted to [make> and eventually we did that. We were different people and we were a new band so we became Kodaline.

There are a number of theories on the internet about the meaning of Kodaline so could you state on record what it is?

It didn’t really have a meaning. When we initially came up with it, it was just a cool-sounding word. People have come up to us and told us different things. For me, a coda is the end of song and a coda line is its last line. Actually that’s the only meaning I know of.

Amit Gurbaxani is a Mumbai-based journalist who has been writing about music, specifically the country’s independent scene, for nearly two decades. He tweets @TheGroovebox