General Fiasco are a feisty Northern Irish trio comprising of Owen Strathern on Llead vocals and bass, his brother Enda Strathern on Lead guitar and vocals and their friend Stephen Leacock on ddrums.
Their debut album ‘Buildings’ due to be released in March 2010 reflects the frustration felt watching friends succumb to alcohol and doing nothing to better their lives.
“It’s all quite upbeat, poppy and rocky but the contents are all pretty bleak,” says Owen, “It was being aware of everybody wrecking themselves and not realising it. I’m sure everyone has something they really want to strive for, something they really want to achieve and it’s the frustration of not being fit to achieve it yourself and watching people not even try.”
By the age of eighteen Owen had been playing bass with another act for a few years, occasionally gigging at their home town Magherafelt’s sole rock bar with his younger brother Enda on guitar. The local scene was big on talk, small on walk; everyone dreamed of getting out of Northern Ireland, but nobody knew how. Owen put off university in 2006 and dedicated a year to becoming a rock star, writing songs with enough weight and velocity to power their way out of Magherafelt’s cultural black hole.
He emerged with a bunch of firebrand pop rock tunes with their feet in both indie and sheen rock camps but their minds somewhere altogether darker. The song Rebel Get By broaches the issue of teen suicide. Aged just seventeen, several of Owen’s friends told him they were going to end it all, “It really struck me, it was a really fucked up thing to hear. When you looked at the problems they appeared to have you were like ‘Jesus Christ, life is bigger than him or her’. That was one of the first tracks that started General Fiasco.”
A basic canon built, Owen roped in his brother and schoolmate Stephen and in 2007 General Fiasco moved to Belfast. Their first gig as a three-piece was at Glasgowbury 2007, Northern Ireland’s biggest unsigned music festival. A demo in the summer of 2008 lan