By Sean O' Driscoll

Cormac Neeson, no relation to Liam, was struggling in New York. He was working pizza stores at day and playing in small blues clubs at night.

He was drifting between bands, wondering how to make it in a city so grounded with wannabe rock stars.

Then he got a letter from Belfast. A guy named Paul Mahon wrote to him with an idea to form the best Northern Ireland band of their generation.

Mahon’s family was already well known on the music scene. His father was a jazz trumpeter whose group, the Freshmen, had released three albums with CBS and had toured with the Beach Boys.

“Basically, I was in New York as a blues singer. I got a letter from Paul — the band was looking for me to come back and sing with them. So I thought, ‘Sounds good!’ and came home,” recalls Neeson, who met Mahon by bizarre coincidence at a study hall in Queens University.

“I enrolled at Queens in Belfast and started a course in ethnomusicology, and the first day we were all sitting round in the lecture hall and they were handing out all these weird and wonder instruments. I turned round and gave this guy a tambourine and said ‘You take that.’

“We got talking and he ended up asking me, ‘You Cormac Neeson?’ And it was your man there, Paul! It was a bit of a chance encounter!”

The band also recruited James Heatley, who had stood in for Ash drummer Rick, when Rick was doing his A-levels.

Mahon has obsessed about getting the right people, even waiting for Heatley to finish his psychology degree before asking him to join.

Five years later, the Answer have signed a record deal and are being heralded in the Irish and British press as the next ‘70s-inspired band to follow on from the enormous success of the Darkness, who have inhabited the top reaches of the British and Irish charts for the last two years with their high-pitched, explosive performance and hot, sweaty, 1970s rock delivery.

The Answer have played Ireland’s Witness Festival after they were spotted by promoters MCD and have won wide approval from the London Independent, the metal magazine Kerrang, and the Irish music magazine Hot Press.

On the back of their new single, “Never Too Late” the band are touring Ireland, hoping to make it to New York in the New Year, when Cormac hopes to show band mates the pizza parlours when he could have been employee of the month before rock intervened.

They are also celebrating winning the Best New Band award at the Classic Rock Awards 2005 in London, where they were warmly welcomed by former Led Zeppelin lead singer Jimmy Paige.

The band also won a strong backing from Phil Lynott’s mother, who saw much of her son in their self confident strut, impassioned singing and ‘70s influence. She booked them for a Phil Lynott memorial benefit gig in Dublin and allowed bassist Mick Waters (his real name, not a joke play on Muddy Waters) to be the first since Lynott’s black bass guitar, even allowing him to play it on the video for their single, “Keep Believin.”

So much lined up for them, the band is hoping to make an impact in the States sometime in the early new year. They have a slight fear, admits Neeson, that audiences will think their name is a little pompous, as if they’re saying they are the answer to everything wrong with music.

“I honestly think people read a bit too much into the name to be honest with you. Initially it began along the line that we’d been through something like 15 names in 12 gigs.

“And we were like, ‘Right boys, what’s the answer? We need a name - what’s the answer?’ Then, ‘Actually we might have something, good one — we’ll do it, The Answer’ It’s a name to build yourself up to.”