Richie Egan could feasibly become Ireland’s biggest underground advocate for fruit. After all, Egan under his alias as ‘Jape’ gets pelted with a load of fruit before other weird fruit-related stuff goes down in the ace new video for ‘Floating’. 

On top of all that, the track comes from the new EP ‘Jape Is Grape’.

“Fruit is all around. It comes in many wonderful shapes and colours. If you step back and take a look at an apple and it’s some piece of work,” deadpans Egan.

‘Jape Is Grape’ is the first release on V2 for the Dubliner, and since this interview was conducted it has also become apparent that it will be his last, with Egan now finding a home on the Co-Op Label.

While everything is obviously speculation at the moment, the fact that his former employers were taken over by Universal this summer must have left Egan in limbo.

Ultimately though, the fact that he was snapped up so quickly shows the promise of his forthcoming third album.

While debut ‘Cosmophere’ and follow-up ‘The Monkeys In The Zoo Have More Fun Than Me’ were released by Independent Dublin labels Volta Sounds and ‘Thrust Me I’m A Thief’ respectively, 2008’s release will be more readily available outside of Ireland.

“All the labels and that just give me money and a means to make music for a living…which is hard but fun,” says Egan.

The album, which Richie hopes will see the light of day by February or March, took quite a while to get nailed down.

On his Myspace page, there was even a blog that seemed to be expressing recent frustration and boredom with the whole thing. “Yeah, there was at that stage. But now it’s mixed and ready to go, and I’m about to go off on tour so everything is much more lubricated
”.

“I recorded most of it myself. Matty Bolger plays guitars and on it and Ross Turner plays some drums. Jimmy Eadie recorded some drums. It took me about three years and was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was so f***ing crazy hard; there were times when I felt like smashing my head off a wall”.