When they played their first UK gig, as support to Morrissey at the Albert Hall, no-one knew very much about The Thrills. I remember being halfway through a conversation about going to the bar and suddenly turning to look at the stage and saying 'hey, these sound quite good. Maybe we should stay and watch them.' The three songs we saw were fantastic. This small interview with singer Connor covers the band's relationship with Moz.

Is Morrissey an important person to you?
"Yeah, we're all big fans of Morrissey. I wouldn't know every solo album, I know Smiths stuff which is brilliant. But he's really nice. He first came to see us in a practice room in Dublin before we even had a deal or anything. It was weird because we were talking about California and two weeks later he offered us this tour of the west coast of America and ending in San Diego in an open air ampitheatre, and you can imagine, we were over the moon, to put it mildly. The problem was, we hadn't signed the deal yet so we couldn't afford it, because we didn't have any tour support or anything. So we had to turn it down and then we were all pretty pissed about that. Then two weeks later we got the call for the Royal Albert Hall gig. Yeah, he's been really good to us. Because we didn't have a deal or anything. He was just mad for us. The cool thing was, we didn't really know that much of the solo stuff he played, but the new songs really were the stand outs of the gig. Those songs I think are brilliant. Hopefully he can make a bit of a comeback now.
How did he find you?
"Our manager knew someone who could get the demo to him and he just passed it along to him, not really expecting much, and then he got the call back. Morrissey has a house down in Cork and apparently he just got back and said he actually really liked it and he was wondering if he could come along and see one of your gigs because he was on holiday in Ireland for two weeks. At this stage, we'd just played a gig a few days before for someone, so we just said why don't you come to rehearsal because we knew he was only around for a few days and we couldn't get something organised in time. So he just came along to rehearsal and it was really weird, because it was just Morrissey, our manager, a friend of theirs, sitting there on the couch watching us play about five feet away from us. So it was pretty surreal and then just about a week later he offered the American tour.
Were you doing your best not to look at him in the rehearsal room?
"Yeah, it was really weird. You're trying to find the spot in the room that you could look at, as if there was a hundred people out there. You couldn't look him in the eye. I remember Paul was saying he just caught his eye and he'd kind of forgotten that Morrissey was sitting there and he just realised it and of course he fluffed his next riff. He just became very aware. It was very weird. It was a bit of a surreal moment."