Musical youth

It's inspiring to see teenagers getting out there and setting up their own bands, playing a few gigs and learning their craft as they go along. One band that are doing exactly that are Jaded from Youghal who, having just completed their Junior Cert spent their summer holidays playing gigs, rehearsing, and becoming something of a YouTube sensation! Kieran O'Mahony talked musical genres with Kevin Kearns, bass player with Jaded

The school holidays may be well and truly over but the members of Jaded aren't complaining. It's been an eventful summer for the band, one of the youngest in East Cork that have been entertaining crowds during the holidays.

Formed less than ten months they have already proved their metal by winning the Youghal Busking Festival this summer and in doing so they won recording time at Claycastle Recording Studio where they will record one of their own original compositions. The band is made up of Tadhg Quirke on vocals and guitar, Kevin Kearns on bass and vocals, Conor Sloane on drums and vocals and Aaron O'Shaughnessy on guitar and vocals. All students at Pobail Scoil Youghal, it seems like a natural progression in the way the band formed.

"Tadhg and myself were in a band before where we played one gig, but the band didn't last long so we decided to form our own and I came up with the name Jaded, when I heard the word used in a Blink 182 song. We began as a three piece with Conor on drums but once we met Aaron and heard him play, we said we have to him in the band as he is an amazing guitar player," said Kevin.

"Over the last few months we have been learning our craft and perfecting our songwriting abilities and we practice regularly in my garage at home. We're putting a lot into it and are very dedicated to the group and we do certainly want to keep it going and see where it will take us."

While ranging in ages from 14 to 16, the group are not content with just playing cover versions and are already writing songs together as a group. They want to have enough original material to cover half a set when they are gigging. They certainly like their music heavy and are heavily influenced by rock music and bands like Foo Fighters, Metallica and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

The four members of the band exude confidence and commitment, spiced with sparkling good humour and a wonderful sense of fun and yet they speak with awareness and sincerity, bringing coherency and a mature perspective to any question. The band have even taken to YouTube to promote themselves and they uploaded a documentary called 'Jaded, The Story So Far' and were delighted to see that already the video has received over 100,000 hits.

"We couldn't believe the amount of hits we received and especially from places like Australia and South Korea, it sort of went viral. The video is just ourselves talking about the band and how we got together. We're already planning to continue the documentary later in the year and we've also put up other videos of us playing over the summer so it's a good tool to use to promote ourselves."

Original songs by the band include 'Dirty Neon' and 'Dear Diary' and the lads recently played their biggest gig so far on the Everyman Palace stage, where the reaction from the audience was very positive according to Kevin.

"It was probably our biggest audience to date and although we weren't the main act, it was still an amazing experience for us to play in such a famous stage, it really gave us the confidence to continue on rehearsing and writing our own songs."

They were also asked to play at a pre-Debs gathering two weeks ago and they were delighted with the response from the audience. Although they are currently back in school and awaiting their Junior Cert results they still plan to write, record, rehearse and play gigs throughout the year.