Rare

In the early 1990s Sean O’Neill, who had restored the original Irish spelling of his given name following the Undertones’ dissolution, assembled the Londonderry, Northern Ireland band Rare. Having departed That Petrol Emotion—the outfit his brother Damian O’Neill had launched in the aftermath of the Undertones split—because the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle no longer appealed, he nevertheless soon gravitated back toward music. “I was a bit wary after leaving the Petrols. I sat around doing nothing in Derry for a while. This wasn’t difficult because there is really nothing to do there at all.” While employed as a music-technology instructor for the unemployed at the Nerve Centre in Derry, he encountered local musicians Mary Gallagher on vocals and Locky Morris on guitar and keyboards. Their aim was to fuse rock energy with dance textures, an approach O’Neill had already explored with That Petrol Emotion on tracks such as “Groove Check,” though Rare represented a more deliberate synthesis of the two idioms. Drummer David Whiteside completed the lineup, and the group made their first appearances across Northern Ireland in 1992. A solitary 12-inch single appeared on Setanta Records the following year, yet it drew minimal notice. Occasional gigs continued, but the band remained largely unnoticed until Equator Records A&R executive Dave Long caught their set at the Cork Rock Festival. He was struck by their atmospheric, groove-oriented dance-rock, whose textures recalled the trip-hop haze of Portishead. The subsequent debut single “Something Wild” and the album Peoplefreak demonstrated that O’Neill’s songwriting skill could thrive across any stylistic territory he chose to explore.