C86 Show - Indie Pop

Philip Hogarth & D'Arcy Walsh in conversation with David Eastaugh

https://royalottawa.bandcamp.com/album/here-comes-everybody

https://www.royalottawa.ca/

It all began in 1981 when Philip Hogarth moved to Dublin to study Irish theater for his fourth year of university. “I ended up getting sidetracked because there was such an incredible music scene going on at that time that looked way more attractive than classes.” Hogarth would soon meet Michael Griffin and Aidan McGovern, and feeling like ‘like-minded lost souls watching this amazing music world go by too quickly’, the three got instruments – guitar, bass, and keyboards respectively - and started learning to play them and write songs. When, at the end of the year, Hogarth needed to return to Canada, Griffin and McGovern decided to join him to keep the band going. Back in Ottawa they teamed up with drummer D’Arcy Walsh, who’d cut his teeth playing with The Bureaucrats and The Action. And thus Bugs Harvey Oswald was born. They got a band house, played eight hours a day, and would go on to open for The Ramones, The Fall, and Mission Of Burma. Bugs’ 1982 7”, Bye-Bye, got a lot of airplay, bringing the band to the New York City for gigs at Danceteria,  CBGB’s, and across the river at Maxwell’s. Yet a record deal remained elusive. By 1985 guitarist J.P. Vaucrosson had left the band, and marriage and kids were calling, so Bugs Harvey Oswald called it a day. 

Come 1993 the members decided to reform as Royal Ottawa, with The Night Twisters’ Alan Pollock now on guitar, releasing the Heaven mini-album in 1996. Writing prolifically as ever, they also began to construct their own studio and rehearsal room to focus even more on their craft, the space evolving over three iterations in the decades since. The ripest fruit from these years was released on the full-length The World We Know in 2015, mastered at Abbey Road Studios, and the much-lauded Carcosa double album in 2023. The Here Comes Everybody EP was released earlier this year to glowing reviews across the globe.