Photo Credit: Guy Eppel
“You Do You” is the second single by Last Man Back, the new project from Alan O’Keeffe.
A native of Cork, Ireland, who relocated to New York City in 2007, O’Keeffe is a lifer whose decades in the trenches of rock n’ roll have led finally to this new incarnation. “I moved to the US in 2007 with my mate Graham,” he states. “We came here with the plan to write and record an album in a year before our visas expired. I’m still here and that album never got written! NYC was the first stop. I just dove right in head first. Between playing in bands and working in bars in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, I could write books about the stories. Magical stuff, really.” Having lent his talents to a slew of acts across the city – among them, garage rock darlings Des Roar – the time came for O’Keeffe to make his own mark.
O’Keeffe describes his musical roots: “The Stone Roses’ first album is where everything changed for me. And with that came a tidal wave of melodic, psyched-out tunes that would be with me forever. Ride, Teenage Fanclub, Swervedriver – that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s all in there. And that’s where I want to take Last Man Back, taking that moment in time and adding my two cents’ worth.”
Last Man Back bears traces of those UK greats of the late ’80s and early ’90s, as well as some of the world-weary gems that defined the heyday of the college rock scene, a few years prior – the early works of The Cure and R.E.M., among others. To put Last Man Back in a present-day context, O’Keeffe names High Vis as one of his current favorite bands. The new tracks were produced by Jeff Ottenbacher and mixed by Kal Pipal (Gorillaz, Sam Fender).
