Anyone who saw Belfast’s Makeshift Art Bar open for Chalk on the UK leg of their tour must have been impressed by the 4-piece. In Belfast to see Chalk play their home city The Decibel Decoder arranged to interview Makeshift Art Bar and sat down with Alleyah Boulaich (drums) and Callum McGuigan (guitar, bass) for an engrossing conversation. The band are completed by brothers Joseph (lead vocals, guitar) and Callum (guitar, bass, lap steel guitar) Sweeney, although Callum joined slightly later. They weren’t the support for the Belfast shows however they did open for the last night of Chalk’s Conditions tour which finished in Dublin the following night.
How did Makeshift Art Bar first come together?
Callum: Me and Joseph, the singer, we went to school together. We became friends just as school was ending, because we both loved shoe gaze music. Joseph was mad for shoe gaze! So we started a band, which was very shoe gazey and we played a few shows locally. And then two of the guys went off uni, and we just left it for a bit. Then we were chatting, and we thought we should keep doing this, we liked doing it. I had met Alleyah a couple of times randomly at different parties and at a practice space one time. We needed a drummer, and I went straight to Alleyah and luckily Alleyah wanted to do it. And then maybe a bit more than a year in, Joseph’s younger brother Callum joined. We were a three piece, and we wanted to fill it out and he came in to play bass and guitar. And he showed up to practice the first day with the lap steel guitar! His first gig (with us) was supporting deadletter, he must have been 16! It was a baptism of fire but he instantly fitted in.
And I don’t know if he does this for every gig, but I remember seeing the screwdriver on stage, and thinking maybe that’s just in case something breaks and then he played the lap steel with it!
Callum: With the sound guys at gigs, we sound check everything and that’s just waiting. And they’re like, one more thing, can we sound check this, and he just goes, it’s ok! Its ambient but at the same time, whatever we’re doing, its such a wall behind us that fills it.
Alleyah: He brings so much character to the set as well. I think not only sonically, but physically as well. Watching him play people are always “what IS going on?”.
Callum: People always come straight up to him afterwards!
Your first single was ‘Inertia’ released in October 2023, and then you self-released your debut EP on 3 January 2025. The title is Lackluster Writing Makes Fundamental Reading. Please explain!
Callum: I think it was almost like, taking the piss a bit! Panic at the Disco, all their early stuff which I loved when I was younger, they’d have obscure titles for song. And I’ve always liked that. We couldn’t come up with an idea and I think Joseph suggested it and it’s stupid but it fits. It doesn’t mean anything.
Alleyah: It’s the same when people ask us what the band name means? Absolutely nothing! I don’t think we’ve ever really taken any of that that seriously. Even when we were naming the songs on the EP. One of the songs ‘Sonic Shelf‘, we didn’t have a name for that until a week before we distributed it.
Callum: It’s our oldest song, but we just never had a name for it. I think it’s a lyric in the song so we thought that’ll do! The name ‘Sonic Shelf’ itself doesn’t mean anything.
You’ve four tracks on the EP, including the seven and a half minutes ‘Notice Me’. Did you have a whole bundle of songs to choose from? How did you create the EP?
Alleyah: We had a few, but nothing that we were completely set on. We had a lot of time between the EP and the first single, and we were desperate to put out new music, because we thought, if we don’t do it now, we probably not going to put it out for a very long time. Not that we rushed it, but we went into it thinking this needs to be done. What are the best songs we have? The rest of them we’ll put back, and we’ll go hard on these ones. I think ‘Notice Me’ was one of my favourite songs because it’s the one that’s a live song. We weren’t going into it thinking, this is a studio song, we’re going to make this very crisp song. This is one of the songs that we go crazy for at the end of the set. It’s the rhythm in it, you know, it’s got the tribal drums and a consistent bass line. People have said to us it’s very mesmerising, very hypnotic because, like a lot of our songs, that’s the way we like it. We like it to be hypnotic and entrancing.
Callum: I think the live version of ‘Notice Me’ is always better, because it’s always slightly faster, and maybe Joseph will do a different guitar solo.
Alleyah: And that’s where the personality comes in. In the Village Underground (London) when we played it as our last song, I think Callum or Joseph broke one of their strings. So it was just completely improvised! He was thinking “What string can I play on to make this sound good!”.
Callum: There’s a bassline that’s consistent and, whatever else we want to add to it, if Callum wants to change it, or if Joseph wants to do a different guitar part. We know it so well, we’ve played it a million times so we can have fun with it.
Do you see ‘Bedwetter’ as a breakthrough track?
Alleyah: I think so. By the time we wrote ‘Bedwetter’ we realized where we wanted to be as a band and where we wanted our sound to be. ‘Bedwetter’ is the song we wrote last and I think you can kind of tell it when you look at the rest of the songs.
Callum: Because (the EP) goes from ‘Birthday Party’ and ‘Sonic Shelf’ , which are from early on when it was just three of us, to when Callum joined and ‘Notice Me’ came, and then right before we recorded it ‘Bedwetter’.
Alleyah: Definitely, it does reflect the journey. When you listen to it you can hear the different stages of our personalities blending into the songs.
With the tour supporting Chalk, that must have been a game changer. It put Makeshift Art Bar in front of a lot of people.
Alleyah: The biggest thing we took away from it was just how incredible it’s been to get onto so many amazing platforms in England and in Scotland. And especially with Chalk, because their audience, although different, are so similar to us. And we knew if we can play well in front of these people, then it’s just up from here. There was no better band I think that we could have supported, and our likeness to them, and also we’re from the same city. It just felt so right, you know, for the first proper tour, it felt like it really worked.
Callum: We’ve supported them before, and they all message and are always so supportive of us. Going into our first tour, you know, it made it so comfortable for us, it felt so safe. Even from King Tuts (Glasgow), there was a lot of people saying, we saw these guys (Chalk) last year supporting Sprints and now they’ve come back as the headliner, and we’re supporting them. They said they’d be back to see us next. You can see the cycle, and it’s so good to have a Belfast band in a similar genre doing well ahead of you. We’re coming through younger and we see what they’re doing, it’s like having a big brother ahead.
Alleyah: It wasn’t daunting at all to us, it was the most positive experience we could have had, and they made it that. Everyone around us during that time made it that, everyone that came up to us were very supportive. It made us gain more confidence in ourselves and what we’re doing as well. I think we needed that kind of boost and confidence.
Having had that exposure, you need to make the most of the opportunity now. What are you thinking for the rest of the year?
Alleyah: We’ve got a bit of a team now, backing us. We’ve got a new booking agent, Sam from ATC, he’s amazing. Even in the past month, what he’s come to us with, it’s really incredible what he wants us to do this year.
Callum: We need that. I think we’re great if you stick us in a room and we’re all in a good mood and we’ll play a bit of music. But we don’t have any industry experience. Everything that happens is the first instance of this to happen. To have a team, they almost give you the trajectory. And they’re like, if you just keep doing the music, we will do this, and we’ll get you into this.
It’s so daunting, because actually, yes, you’re making the music, that is your role. But then there’s all these other elements and, of course, how could you know how the rest of it works.
Alleyah: Even before the Chalk tour we were doing well in relation to Belfast, but it was the odd support here, or a headline slot there but nothing was that linear, you know. And now we’re coming into 2025, and we can see how well it’s going to go now.
Callum: I think it was perfect timing with ‘Bedwetter’ which got picked up on BBC Radio6 Music and literally, a month later, we’re on tour with Chalk. There were so many people who said “We heard you on the radio” which is kind of mad!
Alleyah: We were playing in Leeds and this guy was like we’ve driven all the way from Birmingham just to see you guys. It was amazing.
Callum: We’re the support (on the Chalk) tour, and we’re so aware it’s new eyes on you, but it was the amount of people who said we’ve come to see you and Chalk! We thought it would be that everyone was here to see Chalk, and you happen to be good. But they were – what a great double bill.
And do you have new music you’re planning to release?
Callum: Our manager is cracking the whip! With a band you expect a new album every two years maybe, and we released our EP in January (2025) and you’re aware the industry needs to hear new stuff.
Alleyah: That’s a side of the industry that we’ve never seen before. We didn’t realise how fast everything is. Literally, a few weeks after we put the EP out, we got some record label interest, and the first thing was “where’s the new music?”.
Callum: Since the EP came out, we haven’t played a headline show in Belfast. So we’ve missed the cycle of that EP in that sense, but the Chalk support was of course probably even better. But now it’s like, right, where’s the next thing? But the next thing is coming. We’re planning to record over the summer here.
Alleyah: For us as well, we only really found our feet after the EP came out. I know a lot of people probably say this, but we really did not expect it to go as well as it did. And it literally opened our eyes to so much because it did go so well. And now we’re playing catch up. We’ve had all these amazing things happen, and not that we have to prove to everyone that we’re still good, but we’re here and we’re serious about it.
Can you tell me a little bit about your creative process?
Alleyah: Well, we were writing a song this week, and it’s always very weird. We usually spend about two hours doing not really much, just messing about basically. We were doing shoe gazey stuff, then we went into hard rock stuff. We ended up in the last 40 minutes with a song that we thought “this is good”. But that’s our process. We need to go through the cycle of everything we like and everything we know, to get down to the bones of what we want.
Callum: I think, massive credit to Joseph. From the start it’s always been, he comes in with, to be fair, normally a bass line, and its got a rough melody. Alleyah is always straight on it with the drums. And then its for Callum to make some noise. I think when we have an idea that we all like, the creative process is very quick.
Alleyah: We banged out ‘Bedwetter’ so fast. There was loads of polishing but that song was written very quickly. I don’t know what came in first? I think it was that one note, like a drone.
Callum: I think it was the first time Joseph had come in with lyrics that were not just fillers. He said “I’ve written these lyrics and I’ve got this drone kind of start thing”. And he started doing them, and we were like, okay, this is cool.
Alleyah: With lyrics, even to Joseph, I don’t think they’ve ever meant that much too him, but especially on ‘Bedwetter’, I felt the lyrics spoke to him and I think that’s why it did so well, because it actually spoke to other people, whereas the other songs maybe not so much.
Callum: ‘Bedwetter’ is like a statement. It’s Joseph, but also the band. When you think about the lyrics, it’s almost like it’s setting out our mission statement.
Is Joseph the lyricist?
Alleyah: Yes, and we couldn’t ask for anyone better, that’s not even me bigging him up.
Callum: He’s so chilled about it too. He’s very relaxed and then when he gets on the stage, you see his character come out. We see it a lot more in the practice room as well.
Alleyah: Even when we were writing the new song, I could tell it was going to come of something. He was dancing in the practice room, and I was like, I know this is going to be the one, because he felt it as well, you know? Yeah, we were locked in.
Makeshift Art Bar are a reminder, should you need it, to always try and see the support band.
For more information on Makeshift Art Bar, including details of live dates, please check their instagram and spotify.