Meryl Streek, the solo project of long-time touring musician Dave Mulvaney, are an atypical but notably modern act. With a distinctly boisterous, political bent to his spoken (/ shouting)-word lyrics, Mulvaney forcefully delivers his points over a backdrop of a laptop. Nonetheless, he’s more powerful in style than many more involved musicians, heavily echoing punk roots in the way his stage-front and audience-inhabiting performances punch pointedly through the static.
With second album ‘Songs For The Deceased’ out now, he’s still performing for a relative pittance (his upcoming Whelan’s shows are priced at just €15, and even his vinyl release is on the affordable end of the spectrum), a nod to Mulvaney’s ‘punching up’ identity, a ready-made man of the protesting people.
“I didn’t expect this reaction,” he tells us of the much-hyped record. “I came to this from 15 years playing drums touring, and I kind of lost faith in it. There’s no money in touring bands anymore. I was looking at Sleaford Mods on the stage dancing to a laptop, and I thought if these lads can get away with it… that’s where it comes from.”
“I don’t necessarily understand or trust people who don’t have things to say in these modern times,” he says of his punchy lyrical content. “I think the album gets the attention it does because a lot of people are struggling across the board. I think a lot of bands are afraid to have a voice, as the music industry can forget you very quickly if you don’t say the right things. I don’t really care about this stuff. It’s not my intent to impress people like the BBC. I want to hit with a younger generation in a certain way.”
“Eight years ago Kneecap were banned on RTE,” he says by way of example. “It took them eight years to care. Now I’m going to see them on the fifth night of a Vicar Street sold out run. That support is needed at the start, though, not now. That’s Ireland in a nutshell for me. We could have been here 3 or 4 years ago.”
His own progress has been a learning curve. “I went from being that drummer to teaching myself to use all this electronic equipment and record online, at the start of lockdown. For the second album I was more comfortable getting other people involved. It just naturally happened that way. All these people have been so nice to me since the start, so I wanted to use that opportunity. Bands like Benefits who do their own thing, follow their own purpose. They have a similar stance to me.”
For all the pointed politics – and we’ll let you discover that yourself – it’s Mulvaney’s uncle Paddy who is perhaps the star of the record. “He was my ma’s brother, one of those people who I swear was so smart it was insane. He spent his whole life reading, loved his wine… he was one of those supersmart characters who did it on his own terms, but he was disconnected from society. He shouldn’t have been, he could have accomplished a lot. He was like those old society writers.”
“Paddy’s father, my grandad, brought me up. I’ve always had this love for movies, so I have this horror movie ambience now in my stage show. You’re going to get an experience, your money’s worth. Something a little bit different. I’m not 100% sure what it is yet, but it’s definitely an experience.”
“I’m not angry all the time, not at all,” he says of the moody angles. “I go out of my way to help people. It’s just one of those things, I strongly disagree with the rock n’ roll lifestyle of acting like a prick. But I have to be angry on stage, it’s what the music is.”
Scenes, I find, have their natural genres. In Ireland that currently means Fontaines DC style dingy rock, the ‘always there’ acoustic guitar stuff, and some nice inventive pop. It’s never really meant electro-rock.
That said, you can create scenes, or you can simply ride against them. When I first heard YARD, it was clear to me that they were going to have to do just that: they feel like an electro-guitar band destined to play raucous late-night clubs, and let’s face it, Ireland isn’t great at raucous late night clubs. Still, it’s really nice to hear something that’s genuinely different. It’s also inventive, well-produced, and in-your-face. Only right, then, to shine a little bit of a light on the Dublin lads as they release their self-titled debut EP. Oh, and those visualiser videos are beautiful.
Thankfully, in gutiarist Dan Malone, I found a man with plenty to say about what it’s all about…
First of all, can you tell me a bit about your backgrounds and where the band grew from?
The three of us have been friends for the better part of two decades. Myself and Emmet met through a mutual friend in secondary school when we were about 12. We then met George when we were about 15 I’d say. We were originally in a Dublin based band called The Dyatonics for a few years between 2012-2016. It was myself and George on guitar, Emmet on bass, Daniel Hoff (now of Gurriers) on vocals and Ethan Hegarthy on drums. We also had Bryan Gleeson and Brendan Bolger as drummers at different stages.
Emmet was in secondary school with Hoff and then later met Ethan in college. When Emmet moved to Australia for a year, that spelled the end for The Dyatonics. But myself and George wanted to continue writing music, so in 2017 we started a new project with Ben O’Neill (also now of Gurriers), who George met through college, as well as Daniel Hoff and, for a short period, George’s friend Steven Whearity on drums. When Emmet returned from Australia he also joined back in. Steven stopped coming to rehearsal at one stage or another and instead of finding a new drummer, we decided to play over programmed beats which gave birth to the electronic direction that the band would ultimately take.
Hoff was the one who originally came up with the band name ‘YARD’. We were very used to people getting our band name wrong in The Dyatonics (entirely our own fault) and so we wanted to have something that was very simple for this project. I believe the first meaning of the name YARD was in reference to one billion units of a currency i.e. a ‘yard’ of yen would be one billion yen. But we’ve since taken it to mean the unit of measurement and the space that it provides the listener.
Hoff was busy with another band called The Innocent Bystander which, at the time, was doing quite well and couldn’t commit enough time to YARD. So we ultimately parted ways, but YARD would later have their first show supporting The Innocent Bystander upstairs in Whelan’s. So the first iteration of YARD ended up being myself on guitar, Emmet on bass synth and vocals, Ben on guitar, synth and vocals and George on beats and synth. We spent the guts of 5 years, from 2018-2022, just writing music and figuring out what we wanted YARD to be.
We landed on a fusion of post-punk and electronica fairly early on, but it took us a long time to refine it into what it is now. We did have one headline show in Yamamori Tengu back in February 2020, right before the world collapsed. That’s actually when we started working with Cian Finlay on lighting and visuals who remains our lighting operator to this day. After that, we went back into hibernation and writing mode. I consider the first ‘official’ YARD show to be the secret show that we did with PANIKATAX in The Meadow back in June 2022, which is when the project started to make most sense in our heads.
We then got the opportunity to support Shame in The Button Factory in 2023 which snowballed into a number of different shows for YARD, not least of which was Ireland Music Week 2023. That show resulted in us getting a booking agent which, in turn, led to 44 live shows across 11 countries in 2024! Ben ultimately ended up leaving YARD in April 2024 to focus more on Gurriers which he and Hoff had been in since 2021. So the current iteration of YARD is myself, Emmet and George.
Your style fits neatly in with acts like Pendulum, The Prodigy and Death Grips, but of course those are just my best guesses. Where do you draw your inspiration from?
Yea you’ve definitely picked out some notable ones there, specifically The Prodigy and Death Grips. At the beginning when we were trying to figure out what we wanted YARD to be, the first band that we all collectively agreed on as a point of reference was SUUNS. We were just totally enamoured with their fusion of synths, guitars, drums and vocals and how it created this exceptionally large and distinct sound. So that was definitely one. But we were listening to lots of different stuff at the time: Gilla Band, Metz, Shame, Nicolas Jaar, Mogwai, Death In Vegas, Daft Punk and Boy Harsher. Lots of electronic music too from Daniel Avery, Paula Temple, Kelly Lee Owns and Chris Leibing.
There isn’t really a great deal in your stylistic realm in Ireland. Do you think that’s a positive or a negative when getting your music out there?
It has its pros and cons for sure. Whenever you have an act that’s creating music outside the status quo they usually have to work that extra bit harder to get early buy-in from listeners. I’ve found that to be true, not only in Ireland, but in the UK as well. Post-punk is still very much the flavour of the month and so, as an electropunk act, you’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle at times to get punters, radio DJs or magazines to take a chance on you. But the upside of that is that you’re very much in your own lane in terms of what you’re creating. We’re just trying to carve out our own path.
For example, I knew very early on that Ireland was not going to be the starting market for YARD. So it became my goal to get us into mainland Europe as soon as possible. With the help of our phenomenal booking agent Jule Konrad, we’ve seen a big interest in what YARD are doing from festivals and venues across the Netherlands, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland, and Slovakia. We’re adding festival appearances in Portugal, Italy and Belgium to the list this year too. The United States is a big one for us too, ever since our KEXP session went live in February this year. Our Irish listeners are now starting to catch up as a result. So I suppose the message is that you don’t always have to rely on breaking your home market first in order to set yourself up on the right path.
I’ve always had a bit of a thing for music that you could describe as “raw”. Obviously a lot of music is deeply personal, but less music feels like it’s written so firmly about an author’s life, and that it grabs at elements of their soul and bares them for all to see. Truthfully, I was unfamiliar with J Smith when his music landed amongst my PR emails, but it quickly became clear that his music sits exactly in that realm. So much so that what he asked for was help sharing his stories, not his music. They amount to the same thing in this case, of course, but it feels like a very different ask; and a very different lens.
So I asked about the personal things, and I uncovered a man writing about life and family, writing through heart and emotion, somewhat against the odds. His albums are, he says, representations of life before and after his daughter. Life experience tells me parenthood is hard, especially the early years. There’s beauty in hearing the lightness his daughter clearly instills in him. ‘I Stood Their Naked’ is a telling title, and the album as a whole that bears that title is not yet for public consumption, but the singles, ‘Bassinet’, ‘Corner Shop’, and ‘Laburnum’ give light to Smith’s stories. Here’s what he told me about it all.
Your new song, Bassinet, is about impending fatherhood. Was it difficult to translate into music?
When I sit down to write a song, it tends to bring everything up. It exposes every facet of a situation, so I usually know exactly how I want it to feel. With Bassinet, I wanted to express optimism and a sense of elation, and I think that comes through in the music. Having great players around me helped a lot.
You describe your songs as meditations. What do you mean by that, and how does it work in practice?
I mean that I try to allow every thought in—dark and light—and aim to be as true to a situation as I can. One thing that’s changed since having my child is that my thoughts now tend to lean more toward the light. I’m not as anxious as I used to be, despite life being far more complicated.
You’re pointedly personal in your music. Does that ever get hard? Does it come with any consequences?
It absolutely gets hard. I’m often uncomfortable with things I’ve shared lyrically—and with things I will share. But I can’t seem to write any other way. Some of it feels like a protest against the ultra-composed nature of persona on social media.
The consequences are mostly positive. People reach out, ask questions, empathize, share. They come away feeling like they know a big part of me, and that makes conversations so much richer.
How does ‘I Stood There Naked’ compare to your earlier work?
It’s a sister album to my first. I never doubted that I would meet my daughter—it felt like destiny. So the two albums sit beside each other: life before Connie, and life after.
This new album is lighter. It’s full of moments of joy and whimsy, reflecting the time I’ve spent watching my daughter grow—and myself change.
Is the title a metaphor for all that personal stuff? To what extent is this whole thing a kind of therapy for you?
I can’t afford therapy. I could just about afford to make this record. My creative practice gives me that outlet. It creates a dialogue between me and my wife, sparks conversations, and allows me to connect with something bigger than myself.
It also helps me be more present and balanced with my family. I’m forever grateful for it.
How have you found the Irish music scene? What are its strengths and issues?
There’s a beautiful network of people here—some of the greatest players, deeply committed songwriters, and a level of inclusiveness that rivals any scene.
The issues don’t lie within the community itself but with everything around it. People can’t afford to go to gigs or buy merch because so much of their income is going toward essentials. Musician fees haven’t increased, support slots often don’t pay, and ticket prices are kept low just to get people in the door. It’s hard to say this without sounding bitter, but if we want to keep music alive, we need solutions—maybe universal pay for artists, or getting people to invest directly rather than rely on streaming.
How do you measure the success of a release?
It’s hard. I try to limit my idea of success to the experience of making the work. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of this album—recording at Hellfire Studios with incredible players (Dylan Lynch, Neil Dorrington, Aidan Gray, Conor Wallace, Hannah Miller, Paul Kiernan, Krists Liepa, Ora Quartet).
Learning how to score for strings and brass, implementing those parts, mixing it, and creating the artwork myself—I learned so much. I see real success in that.
Do you find it easy to convert a track from recording to live performance?
A big step is letting go of the idea that it has to sound like the record. I don’t want to go to a gig and feel like I could’ve just stayed home and listened.
As a solo musician, I have to hire players. They change every gig, which means each performance has its own limitations and advantages. That’s exciting to me. Live music is where I feel most connected. It’s where I think AI can’t go—it’s human and real. That’s what people want again.
What’s been your favourite experience through music so far?
I’ve played big shows—close to 3,000 people—shared stages with amazing musicians, played intimate rooms… but I just love having my daughter in the audience. Seeing her mouth along to songs and dance with my wife—that fills my soul.
What are your hopes for the future?
I hope I can keep making music. I hope I can make a living from it. And I hope I can pass on a reverence and awe for live music to my daughter, so she can experience it the way I do.
Damian McGinty knows nothing but music. Google the Derry native’s name, and one of the first things to pop up is a video of McGinty as a young-looking 14 year old, performing ‘Puppy Love’ to a televised audience on Dancing With The Stars. He would go on to form Celtic Thunder, a distinctly Irish-tinged act that have seen him relocate to the States and play to thousands across the continent as part of a theatrical four-piece.
In amongst it all, though, McGinty also squeezes in his solo offerings, most recently ‘Lean Into Love’, an EP that goes deeply personal as he grapples with a new baby, and a lifestyle that involves extended periods away from his wife and home.
“I was moving to California, married my wife, who’s from rural Tennessee, and soon found myself in Nashville, where her family are from,” he says. “The Nashville influence is definitely in the music. My style of music has always been sort of left of centre pop, family friendly. But there are slight Nashville, slight country elements in tracks like ‘Wind At My Back’.”
There are musicians and music… you name it… everywhere,” he says. “I’ve lived a life of mixing my solo stuff and the band, and I know what my schedule looks like a year in advance. For the solo stuff, it’s about finding a pocket of time to make music, record and create. I made this EP in the first half of this year and the last quarter of last year, and I knew I’d be on the road for three months, which is a good time to release music.”
“Unfortunately musicians have to be full time social media influencers, so I had to get the social media stuff together, but it doesn’t affect me going on stage with Celtic Thunder every day. Obviously my solo stuff is very different, but what’s similar is both are very real, very organic and very honest.”
“This is the only thing I know at this point, and I’ve been doing it since I was 14. On reflection, it’s pretty cool having stuff that is kind of pre who I am right now. Needless to say I’m not that 14 year old anymore, but it’s cool to reflect on. What any child star faces is the idea that getting older is a negative. I try to view it differently. In every other walk of life, experience is a positive thing. I have 17 years of experience in my early 30s.”
Those life experiences are starting to play into McGinty’s music. “This EP in particular is probably one of the more personal releases I’ve ever done, one of the more loaded ones,” he says. “A lot of it is about being inspired by my daughter. I started writing this when I found out we were going to have Daisy, who is now 7 months old. It’s essentially my diary.”
“That song becomes the memory, the moment. I always come out of the studio feeling better. It’s a very positive, very personal EP that I hope a lot of people will be able to relate to. The only way I can do this is by being honest, which makes it work for me.”
“It’s only in recent years that I’ve started realising that I’ve been writing for 7 or 8 years, and the stuff I released and wrote in 2018 means something very different to me. The whole thing is like capturing a time, and what those times looked like for me. That photograph of a typical period of time in my life.”
Danny Groenland is one of those Irish artists who, when you spend a lot of the time on the Irish music scene, feels a bit underappreciated because he’s simply always there. The man is a massive talent; a soulful vocalist capable of performing in numerous guises, ruminating on numerous diverse topics, and of taking on all kinds of different stylistic approaches.
On his latest, ‘Burning Rome’, he goes into something of an exploration of the world as he sees it, which it’s fair to say is on the dark side. With lots of hefty political elements and ample depth of meaning, he also maintains imaginative musical angles and a great turn of phrase. It’s effortlessly memorable. He’s very good at that thing where a track is superficially upbeat, but hides layers of moody depth.
A small aside while I’m here: I put effort into the questions I ask musicians. I think it’s the least I can do when I’m asking for their time. Sometimes that effort is reciprocated, and sometimes it isn’t. This very definitely falls quite firmly into the first category. Thanks for the effort, Danny, it made this a great read.
First of all, can you tell me the story behind ‘Burning Rome’ and how it developed for you?
For a while now, I’ve been concerned with social issues. Anxiety about the environment particularly, but also inequality, war, homelessness, police brutality, mental health etc. And the realisation that all of these things are connected. I didn’t realise at the time that it would be an album of songs with a connected theme. I kept recording the songs one by one until the picture became complete. The album title was the last piece of the puzzle, realised after all of the songs were mixed. It comes from the story about the emperor Nero playing music while Rome burned. Doing something trivial in the face of a catastrophic event, which is what humanity is doing right now.
You’re doing a ‘waterfall’ release of the record on streaming. What prompted that, and how has it worked out so far?
The waterfall release strategy for streaming platforms is prompted by social media. I figured if I released the full album at once, I’d get tired of promoting it week after week. Whereas this way, releasing a song a month, I have something ‘new’ to share and there’s a sense of momentum. It also gives me time to get music videos together, plan gigs around certain releases and generally just get more out of the album. If people want to hear the full album, it’s on Bandcamp already. But if you use streaming services, you’ll get one song a month. I don’t know if this is a good idea but I’ve come to realise that no one in the music industry really has a clue what they’re doing and everyone’s just making it up as they go along, so why not try something different?
Do you think there’s an issue with albums being less respected these days next to individual songs, compared to in the past?
Albums are definitely not being listened to as much. We’ve had the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips now for about 10 years. This has changed how we value music, our listening habits, and even how artists approach songwriting. I grew up listening to albums so that’s how I process music. I appreciate the craft that goes into the planning, production, sequencing and mood of a body of work as much as the individual songs themselves. I feel like there are still dedicated groups of music lovers that share this appreciation, particularly those who have the physical records. You listen to the songs in the order the artist intended, with a natural break in the middle to flip to the B side. If this sounds familiar, then my album is for you!
A ten-piece is a sizable band. How do you write for that many people, and what does it involve?
I find that 90% of it is playing with great musicians. And not just great at their instruments, but sound people and sensitive players who understand what the songs need, knowing when to sit back and when to rock out. My instructions are minimal, I just show the lads the chords and the general groove and they make it sound sophisticated. I struggle with writing horn parts though. I studied music in college so I really should be better at theory. In terms of backing vocals I try to keep it as simple as possible. It’s better to have people singing something simple confidently than something complicated and hesitant. My main role apart from singing the songs is to cue when the changes happen, I just stick my hand up in the air and shout like a crazy person.
Let’s talk about the economic system that is at the root of your record. It’s obviously a huge subject for you. What made you decide to make it the subject of a record?
A couple of years ago I discovered social engineer Jacque Fresco and was then lucky enough to meet him in person before he died. He talked about the monetary system as the root of basically every problem on Earth and how it distorts our values, creates billionaires and makes poverty, scarcity and war an inevitability. It changed my entire perspective. I became more of an activist and started to make this the focus of my music. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) is a huge influence too. The themes on that album – war, addiction, police brutality, pollution etc were way ahead of the curve. He managed to write beautiful music that makes you feel good but also has an important message, and that’s what I’m aspiring to do. I want people to listen to this album and get angry, to question existing systems, to protest, but also to be filled with hope and the possibility of a better future.
Out of curiosity, what would you do to fix these issues?
I don’t claim to have the answers but I do like some of Fresco’s ideas. We have enough food to feed the Earth’s population 3 times over and yet a third of the global population lives in poverty. This is entirely preventable. If the barrier is money, then let’s get rid of it! A resource-based economy would declare the world’s resources as the common heritage of the Earth’s people. It will require cooperation and trust on a global level which we’ve never seen before. But at the moment we’re stuck in a doom-spiral of infinite growth which is literally destroying our habitat; our forests and oceans. Weather patterns will get more extreme and entire social structures will collapse. This is the defining issue of our time. We need to find another way and fast.
How did you balance these big sweeping subjects with the sometimes delicate little details of music and lyrics?
I once heard Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On described not as a protest song, but a love song. And instead of him singing to a woman as he usually would, he’s singing to the world. I tried to come at it from that perspective. Musically I wanted the album to sound warm, like a 70s Stevie Wonder record. So even if you’re not paying attention to the words, you’re still (hopefully) enjoying how it sounds. Lyrically I didn’t want to leave any ambiguity or doubt as to what the songs are about, because I want people to get the message and start thinking about these things. It’s difficult to talk about important issues without coming across as preachy or self-righteous. I don’t know if I overcame this obstacle. I’ll leave it to others to judge.
‘Never Going Home’ particularly jumps out as a bit of high concept work. Do you like to put yourself in others’ shoes in that abstract sense?
I’ve always loved the way The Beatles could just invent complex characters in their songs, like in Eleanor Rigby and countless others. I was never able to do that as the lyrics were always too personal. But for this song it came almost fully formed. I love sci-fi movies set in space. They’re often morality tales, showing us a future where humanity has failed in some way. I imagined the song as one of these stories, narrated by a survivor who had to leave Earth after some man-made disaster. He’s trying to remember details such as what falling rain sounded like. Once I had that concept, the song wrote itself in a couple of minutes. Musically I wanted to pay homage to The Beatles for the inspiration, with a string section and acoustic guitars.
How do you feel the record compares to your previous work in terms of sound?
This feels like my best work. Maybe everyone says that about their latest record. But the songs on this album sound more like the way they sounded in my head than my previous ones, if that makes sense. It features a lot of contrasting sounds. Some tracks have jazzy instrumentation with piano, double bass and horns. Others have layered beats and have a more modern RnB sound. A lot of that is down to Ken McCabe (Wolfhound Sound) who mixed and produced the album, he’s a genius.
Your two daughters are on the record. How involved are your family in your music in general?
This is the first time I’ve asked my daughters to be part of a record. They’re old enough now (6 and 9) that they can do a really good job. They’re both really musical and love singing so it was no bother to them. I’m so proud of them and I’m sure they’ll be making music themselves when they grow up. Having children on the track adds a layer of gravitas and emotion that fits the vibe. It’s a cliché but it’s also true, the children are our future. This is their world and we need to make sure it isn’t broken by the time they grow up.
What are your hopes for the future?
Things will get worse before they get better. Humanity may need some catastrophe or series of catastrophes to jolt us out of this sleepwalking. I dearly hope that isn’t the case, but all the signs point to increased temperatures, higher sea levels, food scarcity and massive movement of climate refugees. There will be instability which could force us to look for alternative systems. I don’t have faith in leaders or politicians whatsoever. They have no long-term interest in fixing anything. We, the people, need to demand change. Right now it’s my job as an artist to spread awareness and force conversations. I know it’s overwhelming to think about, but it’s the most important issue we’ve ever faced as a species and it will soon be unavoidable.
Jimmy Crowley has been performing since the 60s, but he’s still evolving, seeing every one of his 15 albums as a chance to do something new and different; to express a new side of himself.
Growing up in Douglas, Co. Cork, Crowley formed his folk orchestra Stokers Lodge in the late sixites. After the demise of Stokers Lodge, he formed The Electric Band, whose reggae version of ‘The Boys of Fairhill’ went straight into the charts. Crowley pursued a solo career from the ’90s onwards. Most recently, Crowley recorded an album of Child ballads with Eve Telford, drawn from the rich heritage of Irish Travellers. I talked up to him around the launch…
Hi Jimmy, first of all, congratulations on a remarkable fifteen albums. Tell me about ‘Life’.
Hello James. John Lennon said ‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.’ ‘Life’ is my life distilled into 11 songs. ‘Full Fathom Five’ is a sister-song to ‘My Love is a Tall Ship’: a lament to the Asgard lying at the bottom of the sea. ‘The Laughing Laptop’ is a music-hall-esque critique of digitalisation. ‘Going Greyhound’ conjures up long bus journeys of heartache and disillusionment; perhaps my first country song. To hear the rest, buy the album!
I understand the record is grounded in your marriage breaking down, at least to some degree. How does that impact on the feel of it?
I hope I insinuated some of the loss, and the macabre atmosphere of the evening I left the family home for the uncertainty of the roads ahead.
Did you find the whole thing cathartic?
No.
You spent some time in Florida a little while ago. Did the move rubbed off on your music at all?
I left Florida fifteen years ago; I’m based in Cobh now. But yeah, the new continent rubbed off in a small way. I got a few lessons on basic bossanova guitar and it did me a power of good, grounded, as I am, in the songs from my rich hinterland.
Do you find the opportunities to perform are different in Florida, or the reactions to your music?
When I took time to preface the songs, gave a bit a’ social context, etc, the people would listen and absorb the songs. There’s a nice folk scene around Tampa and some good heads based there, emigrants like I was. But I would have to go to New York, Boston and sometimes San Francisco to make a few bucks.
Is there a defined way that your music has progressed in your eyes over the course of all your records?
Great question! I’m a great believer in the autonomy and purpose of the LP. It’s got to be different from the preceding and all others before it. It’s a shame to waste the opportunity to follow a new road with an album. In fact, you’d be better not recording it at all. I hate the way the new music scene has scuttled the primacy of the album; consider the loss of art to the world if there was no Sergeant Pepper.
You’ve worked with a huge number of people over the years. Who has really inspired you once you’ve come to making music with them?
I was knocked out by Micheal O Domhnaill’s production ideas when we recorded the first two albums with Stokers Lodge. He called me aside when we were rehearsing in Limerick. ‘You never told me ye were dog-rough!’he said. ‘But I can see there’s great gold there too. Will ye work with me? But I promise I won’t be an easy coach.’
I had a word with the other Stokers and to a man they said; we’ll work with Micheal. He made the band; all those lovely stops, harmonies and chords on The Boys a’ Fairhill and Camp House Ballads’are his and stood us in great stead. Micheal has passed on, God be good to him; but still when I’m unsure of something on a recording, I always ask myself, ‘What would Micheal do here…?
If there’s a single thing that’s kept you connected to music for all these years, what is it?
Having a sharp memory a’ me time on the building line.
You’re coming back to Dublin to launch the record. What should we expect from your live show?
Ye can expect a selection of songs from my new album, Life; from my recent album with Eve Telford, ‘Hello’ (being Irish Travellers ‘versions of the Child Ballads), and perhaps a sprinkling of my back-catalogue.
What are your hopes for the album and for the future?
Eve and I are planning an album of our own songs called Ambrosia. We have an Irish tour in June. The album, Life, on vinyl and CD, is available from www.jimmycrowley.com, and also can be bought at gigs during the tour.
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.”
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.
