There’s a vibrant intensity to Kíla in person that you quickly get the sense reflects their extreme passion for what they do. It’s best summed up in the closing seconds of our interview.
“One more thing for this, before you go,” frontman Ronan O’Snodaigh says as we finish up our chat in Dublin’s Library Bar on a quiet Thursday afternoon. “If you’re going to write about us, write about what we are now. If we’re not good enough for that, we don’t deserve to be written about at all.”
Let’s touch on that particular message first. Alive Beo – Kíla’s latest release, recorded during the band’s 2016 tour – is breathless, seamlessly diverse, fresh, freewheeling, spontaneous and a great advert for their show. It’s the album of a band at the peak of their powers. They didn’t tell me to say that.
It’s hard to tell if O’Snodaigh is particularly proud of the Dublin world music act’s newest output, or simply sick of features on Kíla that largely harp back to their roots in the early 90s. The band are happy to reference their huge body of work – they’ll be doing so in their 30 year celebratory mini-festival, Féile Kíla, at the end of the year – but also feel they’ve come a long way since the days of hit 90s release Tóg É Go Bog É.
“We’ve had to relearn some of the music for touring that album, actually, because there are some people in the band who weren’t around when we wrote it,” bandmate Brian Hogan explains. “We had a time, back then, when the rehearsal studios were just full of crap. Some of it great crap, and some of it useless crap.”
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