Once touted by NME, in the midst of the Brit Pop era, as the next big thing, you could be forgiven for thinking the return of SACK in 2024 – 30 years after their storming debut album ‘You Are What You Eat’ – is a bit of a nostalgia fest. You’d be wrong. The Dubliners are back not to relive, but instead rejuvenated, with fourth album ‘Wake Up People’ earning glittering reviews across the board.
Guitarist John Brereton hasn’t strayed far from his roots. Now a well established music and culture journalist, alongside his band, he edits Dubliner magazine and music-focused freesheet The Goo. SACK are squeezed in the middle of the day job, but by no means an afterthought.
“For a while we were doing the odd gig here and there, but I got a job managing the Grand Social venue as a booker, which was very all encompassing, and then my wife and I had kids,” Brereton says. “The other lads were similar. Things happened, it was busy personally, and we kind of put the band aside. It was only during the pandemic, when no one could do anything, that I started picking up the guitar again and writing songs.”
“We recorded the first new track because our guitarist at the time was teaching recording work online in Windmill Lane, so we got three days free and they practised on us. I recorded a song I’d just written, after we jammed it in the studio while they were setting up. That was ‘What A Way To Live’, and it came out so well we released it as a single. It did well, and so we made an album. And here we are.” Not so much a plan, as a series of outcomes, then.
“Our songs are always melodic, big choruses, that kind of classic songwriting thing, but there are a few things that are very percussion heavy, with keyboards, that took us in slightly different directions,” Brereton says of the new album. “When you have a writer like me and a singer like Martin [McCann], you’re never going to end up sounding like a techno band. We have a vibe, and we kept with that vibe, mainly.”
“Our earlier stuff from the early 90s has a bit of a Fontaines DC feel, and people have joked with us that they’ve heard it. But things are very different now, the music industry has changed so much. Now it’s straining with social media. I was at Ireland Music Week the other day, and there’s way more support now, but when we were young, it was easier to get your head out of the water.”
“Nowadays people make music in their attics and garden sheds, so the traditional routes to releasing music are not as important. We lived in Camden back then and found ourselves in that NME scene. We shared an office with Blur’s management. One Tuesday in particular, Top of the Pops was recording, and Pulp, Elastica and Suede, were all in the local pub. It was good craic. Though we never made Top of the Pops, unfortunately.”
“The cool Britannia thing made it tough, the English press were very much promoting the Brit pop thing and of course we were Irish, but it was great times. Today, we know we’ve made a really good album and that’s all that matters. The reviews have started to come in and they’re excellent.”
“It’s different now, we’re not young. We’re not looking for A&R guys at gigs or anything like that. We’re just enjoying being in a band, playing together and releasing stuff. Who knows, we might even do another one.”
Hard Fi’s rise was of the cliched, meteoric variety. From playing pubs to supporting Green Day and appearing live on Channel 4 on the same day, a few months in 2005 changed their lives forever. Frontman Richard Archer, no longer ‘Living For The Weekend’, is currently building up to revisiting the ‘Stars of CCTV’ record around its 20 years anniversary, and remembers a particularly wild experience.
“The album cost £300 to make. We’d been playing to 200 people in the back of pubs when we got the Green Day gig [in Milton Keynes Bowl], and suddenly we were in front of 60,000 people. It was terrifying, a completely different experience. There were no walls, and we were used to the sound bouncing off a back wall. But so many people have come up to us since and talked about that show, it was such a big deal to us.”
“We were backstage going ‘they’ve got three tour buses, and one’s got a smart car that comes out of the back’, it was incredible. But then we were booked to do T4 on the Beach. The only way we could do both – and you had to keep Channel 4 sweet – was to blow the entire fee on a helicopter. So we had these tiny helicopters, and got choppered in. People thought it was Green Day coming in. Good times.”
Things would explode and then fade from there, and eventually Archer focused mainly on his alternative project, Offworld. Until recently.
“When lockdown started, the singer with Offworld, Krysten Cummings, got stuck here for a month longer than planned, so we did some bits and pieces together. It was daunting at first, but good fun, it’s not like we had anything else to do. The reaction really surprised me, there was a lot of love. People did care. So we explored Hard Fi, too, and decided to take that further.”
“On the new EP, there’s a line ‘too broke to eat, nowhere to dance’. When Hard Fi started, there were clubs where I live, and you could have a good night out with the wind behind you. Those places are all gone now. They’re flats. Those were cultural assets, people came together. The Stars of CCTV album was bleak, but it feels bleaker now, so perhaps those songs still resonate. It’s sad, but there we are.”
“We came back in 2022 and did the London Forum. Off the back of that, we decided to do some shows around the country, but there was still that thing of ‘what are we doing here’? We felt we couldn’t just keep going out playing the same songs, we wanted something different and new. I had never stopped writing, so it made sense to do an EP approaching the 20 year anniversary. It let us be freer, instead of just sitting there looking at an old album. We had some fun with it.”
The result was ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’, which is very much designed for the live realm. “Getting back in the room with the Hard Fi boys with none of the feeling that we can’t screw up, which is what we had back in the day… that dynamic… it’s nice. We should have just enjoyed the ride. I had been in previous bands that were signed and nothing happened. It’s a lot about timing, and we really had that pressure, it felt like we wouldn’t have another chance.”
“Now we don’t need this, but we’re doing it because it feels good, just to be in a room with your mates again. My best memories of it all are before we were signed and just doing it ourselves.”
Tickets: €20 for adults and €8 for kids under 12 in the West Stand.
Attendance: 6,073
Game/ Experience Rating: ☆
The Game: I’m a big, consistent defender of the League of Ireland. I think it’s a vastly underrated league and I’d love to see it supported more widely in Ireland (though things are getting notably better). I feel the need to say that first because this was just awful, up there with the worst games I’ve ever attended in person.
Two red cards in the first half, both arguable to some degree, probably didn’t help, but all in I felt like I was watching two teams that were unable to create. Given these are probably the two most expensively assmebled squads in the league, it was incredible how little attacking intent there was in the game, with a handful of weak shots the entire sum total of the game. Two of the favourites for the league by all accounts. If this is the best they can do, they’ll be a long, long way short. I’m sure they’ll both improve.
The ground: I like Tallaght, in that it feels like a modern lower-league football ground in the UK, in a lot of ways, now it’s fully rounded off with the fourth side added. It has a decent atmosphere (though perhaps not today) and feels positively and friendly. The new shop is cool, too. Shame about the game.
Extras: Plenty on offer, I tend to avoid the programmes etc these days. Right call this time.
Assorted asides: I want to see more of Michael Noonan before he inevitably disappeared for the big leagues. The young striker sat on the bench for much of today while Rovers created essentially nothing. Ah well.
My totals for the year so far:
Games: 4. Home wins: 1 Draws: 1 Away wins: 2
Goals: 8. Home goals: 3. Away goals: 5. Goals per game: 2.00
John Sheahan, noted fiddle and tin whistle player is, sadly, the last surviving member of iconic trad band The Dubliners. Now in his mid-80s, the man with a reputation as the calm amongst a quite substantive storm shows no signs of slowing down. As well as recent collaborations with the likes of Declan O’Rourke and Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Sheahan has been right at the heart of recreating The Dubliners’ tale, delivered through a stage show entitled ‘The Dubliners Encore’, a show celebrating the lives of one of our cities finest music stories.
In this interview, the Gazette take a step away from our usual interview format to offer an extended chat with Sheahan, on his musical life, past and present, and the production of the new stage show. In it, Sheahan happily jaunts from past to present, showing a knowledge of the contemporary Irish music scene we suspect would surprise nobody who knows of his reputation.
“I was seen as the quietest of an unruly mob sometimes,” Sheahan laughs, looking back at his Dubliners days. “I used to refer to myself as the mortar between the bricks, keeping the building steady. They also said I was steering the ship past dangerous watering holes.”
That was then, and this is now. “I released my first solo album at the age of 80,” he says of his recent output. “It wasn’t all that different from what I’ve done before. I became known for writing a song called ‘The Marino Waltz’ that was used on a Bord Na Mona ad maybe 15 years ago. When a tune like that becomes popular you’re almost typecast, like an actor.”
“In the background I’d written 50 or 60 tunes over a long period, and used a couple of them on various Dubliners albums. I only worked with the engineer in the studio on the album, I wanted to keep it to myself a bit. A lot of the tunes have this kind of baroque, classical feel to them, so I’ve had a few arranged for string quartet or orchestra.”
“‘Marino Waltz’ was recorded in Marino casino among friends, including Colm Mac Con Iomaire, of The Frames. We did some gigs together. So there were a lot of ideas to bring into the studio, and I was very pleased with the results. I’m still working on notions of maybe doing a few more tracks, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m not in any great hurry to get a second album out but I am working slowly towards it.”
The broader scene, including several of its key protagonists, still inspires Sheahan, who references acts including Cork rock icons Whipping Boy alongside rising trad stars when he talks music. “I think trad is very strong at the moment, with some marvellous players, people like Zoe Conway and Maura Branock,” he says, acknowledging that the progress of women in the scene is a stark and welcome contrast to his earlier days. “They can both play on the trad scene or with an orchestra. I see music as an international language, a universal language, so I don’t really categorise it too much. I think quite often the style in which you play a tune counts for more than anything else.”
“For the craic at parties sometimes, I have played ‘Hey Jude’ with a tin whistle and traditional embellishments. There are some lines in there that are quite similar to a couple of lines in Mná na hÉireann, which I find quite interesting. I’m working on some ideas to combine the two.”
Taking a step back to glance at The Dubliners’ legacy, Sheahan is both modest and proud. “We get portrayed as the godfathers of Irish folk,” he laughs. “The first time we became aware of that kind of compliment was from The Pogues, who cited us as a huge influence on what they did. We never took ourselves that seriously or analysed what we were doing, it just came naturally to us, but it appears a lot of groups took our layout and our instrumentation as the defining way that trad music should be played. It’s nice to hear these accolades come back now from various sources, including the likes of U2, who we played with a couple of times.”
Not that Sheahan is set in the ways he helped to establish. “It’s nice to experiment a bit and try out different takes on tunes, as long as you don’t stray too far from the well. I think trad music has a natural internal rhythm of its own, which some of the old players were great at. There’s no need to force a rhythm on it. Old solo tin whistle players had this natural rhythm in the way in which they played.”
“I’d probably cite Planxty and The Chieftains as the very good groups, they were very tasteful with nice new arrangements that never lost sight of the original flavour of the tunes,” he says. “When I was growing up, some of the old musicians had very narrow viewpoints about what you could and couldn’t do, and shunned other styles of music. I remember I got caught playing a bit of a Beatles song on the fiddle, and told me not to mind that foreign jazz, to stick with my own style of music. Some people back then saw music as traditional Irish music and everything else.”
“I remember being down in Tipperary playing at a parochial home, and the hall had been opened early in the afternoon, just to set up. This guy came over to us afterwards and was obviously impressed with what we were doing, and said ‘do you read music, or are you gifted’. Which was a nice way of looking at things.”
“I’m often asked about my best moments on the road, and people expect you to say ‘I met Mick Jagger’, or something like that, but for me they’re little moments. Nothing to do with the stage production at all. About 60 years ago we were doing a gig in a little hall in Wexford, and after the gig people were coming to the dressing room looking for autographs. This couple came with a little girl, about four, and I went down on my hunkers and had a chat with her. I asked her her name, and where she lived, and she said ‘Sarah’, and that she ‘lived next door to the Murphys’.”
“She defined her world by the people next door, and I found that beautiful. Little memories of things like that just stay with you.”
“I miss them all every day, things like the Barney-isms,” Sheahan says of his bandmates. “Barney [McKenna] was once told on tour in Australia that it would be 100 degrees in the shade, and he said ‘Jesus, I’m not standing in the shade’.”
While The Dubliners have been gone for over a decade, though, Sheahan hasn’t stood still. “I’ve loved playing with the new generation of singers, like Glen Hansard and Imelda May. I did a tour with Damian Dempsey and Declan O’Rourke. We called the tour ‘The New Triangle’. Declan O’Rourke dropped by a couple of months ago and my wife had him cleaning cobwebs from the ceiling and changing light bulbs.”
Of course, those earlier days will never be forgotten. “We finished touring as a group in 2012, and a lot of people were nostalgic about it and bemoaning the end of an era, the soundtrack to their lives kind of thing,” Sheahan says. “Shortly after that my daughter came to me and asked if we couldn’t recreate that excitement and that talent from the original group, a kind of ‘true story’ live event, with songs and stories, and the craic, as well as the history.”
That idea would become ‘The Dubliners Encore’, the new stage show that announced its first dates in recent weeks. “We decided to do it with archival footage and a proper group, so we went talent scouting about the country for singers capable of reproducing the original Dubliners. We came up with five original guys, each quite capable of reproducing the sounds of the original group. Then we got Phil Coulter in to produce it musically, faithful to the original.”
“The guy, James Kelleher, who plays Luke [Kelly] in the show is very close to Luke’s voice,” Sheahan says. “We didn’t want to get an imitation, more a natural similar voice, and he’s the closest I ever heard. Similarly with Kilian O’Flanagan, he has the low pitched voice, and the guy who plays Barnay McKenna, the banjo player, has the same mannerisms and looks as Barney. The fiddle player, like myself, is quiet and gentle, a bit like myself. He’s a school teacher.”
“I sat in the rehearsals and gave them tips I’d picked up, techniques for accompanying songs,” Sheahan says of his involvement in the show. “We spent months on and off rehearsing and getting the shape of the show, and trying to recreate the original arrangement. Phil was a good man for the job as he produced five or six of our albums in the 70s, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. So that worked out very well.”
“We have a definite storyline running through it all. Maurice Sweeney did a documentary, and we got him involved. He’s familiar with the various aspects of the Dubliners from the documentary.”
“We took what we thought were the salient points, starting off as four individuals, then I joined about two years after the group started. There are clips of Luke leaving for England, with people getting on the old boat to Liverpool. He was gone for a couple of years. This was interspersed with songs and stories.”
The result is perhaps the closest thing to The Dubliners we’ll ever see again, and fittingly, shaped by Sheahan’s hand. Having been previewed on the Late Late Show recently, it’s all set to hit the road. Sheahan will be watching on proudly.
Experimental and self-propelled, Skinner is a Dublin DIY musician who explores the world of experimental textures in sculpting a sound that sits far outside what is typical of our city.
Carrying elements of rock, experimental jazz and the New York no-wave scene of the 70s and 80s, Aaron Corcoran intentionally sets aside what is currently succeeding in Dublin, but nonetheless is drawing attention in the build up to this new EP ‘Geek Love’.
“I think my style came out of a need to find music that no one else is listening to and to get reinspired, looking at things differently,” he says. “I don’t think what’s popular or relevant at the time matters. I want to dig out things that nobody else knows about. A couple of records have just blown my mind, they sound like nothing anyone is making today. Stuff like experimental freeform jazz. I find that stuff very inspiring and very refreshing.”
“My music isn’t for everyone. My favourite music is unlistenable, and the weirder and more distinct it is, the more I am drawn to it. I like to deviate from the norm,” he explains.
“I see myself as both a live act and a recording act, as well as a songwriter. I can’t pick one of those over the other. I particularly enjoy the live shows, and I think they represent the true spirit of what music should be. Records are great, but live music is where you separate how good you are on record and what you are really like. If a live show is really bad, it puts me off the band. Some people thrive in the studio and some fall apart.”
“What I do is very DIY. People push that idea now as almost a promotional thing, but realistically it’s born out of necessity, I didn’t know anyone growing up who played music. I had to learn all the instruments myself, and then I wrote all the parts myself, too. Recording is extremely expensive, ridiculous, so it’s about that necessity. I can afford a €100 audio interface and teaching myself, so that’s how it was born.”
“I moved to studios as I got older, and professional studios and engineers showed me a lot of techniques. There was no school for this stuff, so the only way to learn is to do it yourself. The only thing that matters is how it ends up sounding.”
“My new single ‘Tell Me Ma’ is based on an old folk song (‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’). I thought it was funny how badly things like that can age. It’s kind of a song you sing to your kids, and it’s not intentional, but I was finding the humour in the jovial tone and the dark themes. So I wanted to almost shout it, to reiterate the side of it that is quite grim.”
“I’m a product of my environment, so that means I’m struggling, despite having a full time job. Everything that I make from music goes back into the band, and I do it for the love of the art and the experience. There’s only one good studio space in Dublin, called Yellow Door, and it’s the only place I have 24/7 access. Everywhere else is day rates. The environment has become crazy for bands.”
“An album’s definitely on the way, but I won’t say when. That’s what I’m working towards. I think creating singles and creating successful songs can lead to expectations that you do the same thing over and over again. I don’t like that. I think you should always be doing different things, and exploring different styles. So a body of work, for me, is a snapshot in time.”
Result: Aston Villa 3 – 0 Club Brugge (6-1 on aggregate)
Tickets: The only way I could get in was a hotel package. As a result, the ‘tickets’ plus a hotel cost €230 or so each. The most I’ve ever played to get to a football match, and worth it.
Attendance: 42,461
Game/ Experience Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
The Game: It felt almost unreal to me to watch the team I’ve supported for the whole of my lifetime play in the knock out stages of a competition they’ve not been anywhere near for most of that time. Still more surreal to see them win it comfortably. In truth, the tie was over as a contest when Martinez launched a ball over the top to Rashford, who was brought down on-on-one with Simon Mignolet, resulting in a red card for Brugge’s centre back after half an hour or so.
The first half, aside from that, was quite poor, in all honesty, but with tifo at the front of the Holte, the riotous support from the back of K6 (where my son and I sat), and the knowledge that a quarter final tie was on the horizon was enough.
Enter Marco Asensio, the best play on the pitch consistently since he arrived at Villa, and now heading back to PSG to see what damage he can do to his real employer. Asensio had blasted two and played a bit-part role in a third goal within 16 minutes of his arrival, and the tie was dead, a jubilant Villa Park turning to ‘oles’ by 70 minutes as Brugge couldn’t get a foot on the ball. And this was a good Brugge side, too, well able to turn over Villa on another day even without the gift provided by Tyrone Mings in the group stage.
This was something else. Villa are as good as I’ve ever seen them, and I will treasure having been there. More so with my 11 year old in tow.
The ground: Villa Park has adapted a little recently, not least to the tendency to welcome this heroic team noisily off the coach, and the new facilities around this (we missed it, unfortunately, as we waited at the usual spot near the North Stand; the team arrived up near the Trinity).
The following day we took a tour, heard some little tit bits of history I didn’t already know, and got a new appreciation for just how upmarket parts of the ground we’re not usually anywhere near are. It’s such a stunning spot, and to me a kind of spiritual home.
Extras: A programme was a must this once, though I usually find them bordering on a waste of space. The club also laid on scarves on every seat, which formed a part of the atmosphere. How big was this game? The scarves were going for over €100 in ebay the following day. With the cost of the trip, I was almost tempted!
Assorted asides: We couldn’t go any further… could we?
My totals for the year so far:
Games: 3. Home wins: 1 Draws: 0 Away wins: 2
Goals: 8. Home goals: 3. Away goals: 5. Goals per game: 2.66
Pinhole are an avant garde act from Cork, and the product of a life in music. Taking in an incredible blend of grunge, Georgian folk music and Irish trad, Ciara O’Flynn and Mark McLoughlin blend experiences from their youth with freeform jazz, and cover topics ranging from the war in Gaza to treatment of the elderly. The resulting album is called ‘Sweet Spot’.
“‘Sweet Spot’ is our latest body of work with some slightly older songs,” O’Flynn says. “So really it’s tracking us as artists over the last four years or so. We were due to launch our debut album two weeks after the lockdown was announced, and it was really hard because we had to just sit on it. We continued to write during lockdown and because it was very much limited to Mark and I as a duo the new songs started to take a new direction, so we scrapped the old record and made ‘Sweet Spot’.”
“Personally, I use creativity to understand the world better,” O’Flynn continues. “Mark and I are campaigners at heart, so most of our songs are attempting to understand or express feelings on many contemporary societal issues, rather than just the personal. The songs are about gay rights, the malignancy of social media, treatment of the elderly, societal apathy, parenting… and so forth.”
“I think our art careers and my time in Windmill Lane have been the biggest feeders of what we do now. Then from a more lyrical point of view, our mutual passion for human rights feeds in and out of the lyrics,” McLoughlin adds. “The vocal is also treated as an instrument and like our instruments we push it and find creative ways of using it such as singing through the violin pick up, etc.”
The pair use stream of consciousness as an unusual element of their songwriting, adding unusual quirks in the process. “What I love about that particular process is that the feelings and topics around the songs organically bubble up,” O’Flynn says. “I rarely start to write with an idea of what I want to write about. That brings in a stiffness that just doesn’t work for me. I much prefer to listen to what Mark brings to the table first in terms of a few musical sequences, turn off the left hemisphere of my brain and just see what emerges. Usually it’s something I’m concerned about but not necessarily consciously ruminating on. For me it brings a genuineness and depth of feeling to the process.”
“There’s definitely a low-down, dirty blues aspect to some of the music with influences from Tom Waits through Nick Cave, Beth Gibbons, St. Vincent etc,” McLoughlin adds. “It’s important for us to keep a raw and feral aspect to it.”
‘Sweet Spot’ is partly the product of the Basic Incomes programme that supports some artists, something which has played into the sound. “We are really grateful for the opportunities we have had from that fund, because there was no way we could have afforded to make this album and videos without that support,” they explain. “It made all the difference. Making albums is expensive, so really it made the difference between being able to do it or not. Playing music costs at every turn: rehearsal spaces, renting venues and sound engineers for gigs, travel, accommodation, recording studios, graphic design, etc.”
“We’ve put decades of experience and years of creative wandering into it,” O’Flynn adds. “I’d be so delighted if it catches the ears of people and brings joy. Other folks’ music elevates me when I dig it. And we’re always open to new opportunities, the idea of writing for other art forms like theatre and film interests me, too. Making bags of money we can send to Gaza would be great.”
Result: Shamrock Rovers 0 – 1 Molde FK (1-1 on aggregate, Molde win 5-4 on penalties)
Tickets: €20 (adult), €8 (kid), plus a €1 per ticket transaction fee.
Attendance: 9,533 (close to a sell out)
Game/ Experience Rating: ☆☆☆
The Game: This should have been the one. I say ‘should’ rather than could, as the first modern era proper knock out game for an Irish club in Europe was very, very winnable for Shamrock Rovers having arrived back in Tallaght with a lead. An early mistake gifted Molde what was an equaliser in the context of the tie with a defensive mix up after Shamrock Rovers had somehow come back from Norway with a 1-0 lead, and from then on Shamrock Rovers controlled the game, though with relatively few clear cut chances.
It was the 16 year old wonder kid Michael Noonan who scored away in Molde, and he had a great chance here, too, with a header from about 6 yards out that went just wide. So we went to extra time, and then penalties, all without Molde really offering a whole lot (I felt they were playing for penatlies from about the 50th minute, and especially in extra time when they were a man down).
Perhaps they knew what they were doing, as the shootout was immaculate from Molde, without Rovers getting anywhere near any of their finishes, and one weak one from Rovers being saved ending the tie. Still, the little lad’s first time seeing a live penalty shoot out, and a good night out. It’s just a real shame when we could have had a last 16 European tie in Dublin. I do feel it’ll happen sooner or later, but it’s odds against every individual year, so perhaps we’ve a few more years to wait. Still, for anyone who doubts the value of the Europa Conference League, here it is, this run was fantastic despite the loss.
The ground: Tallaght Stadium is a fairly regular haunt for me, however it’s a slightly different beast for a European game: assigned seating (I stupidly picked a seat with a slightly restricted view from a fairly free choice at the time I booked – watch out for the top left corner of the West Stand, where the near end goal is difficult to see). Nice to see it so close to sold out for the second consecutive time I’ve been there.
Extras: We chose McDonalds over the very long multi-storey car park queue afterwards. A good call. That car park is quite daft – after games queues are so long you have to pay another hour on the ticket as the allowance for getting the car has expired. They really should fix that for game nights.
Assorted asides: I couldn’t find a programme, which is probably a sign of the status of this game (it’s unusual that I wanted one). The new club shop looks good, though, in the bottom of the North Stand.
My totals for the year so far:
Games: 2. Home wins: 0 Draws: 0 Away wins: 2
Goals: 5. Home goals: 0. Away goals: 5. Goals per game: 2.5
