Reviews
JazzFM Interview
Kennedy's Pub, Dublin - 2003
S: How long have you all been together?
G: About 18 months, we did our first gig last August, after playing together every week in The City of Dublin Workingmen's Club from the start of that 2002.
S: And is that where the name came from?
C: Yeah, and we wanted to get Dublin in the name as well, just so when we were travelling people would know where we come from.
S: How did you get together? Who decided "come on, let's make a band"?
G: Well, we've played together in different situations for ten years, just sessions.
C: Ger approached me over a game of pool and said ‘do you fancy getting a ballad band together with me and Bob'. I said "are you on drugs"!
S: You've a couple more members now, what line up changes have you had?
G: Yeah, a few different musicians have floated in and out, but when Jay arrived, he settled.
C: Jay is actually my brother Brian's mate, and my bro just said you know Jay's pretty handy on the banjo and bingo!
S: Was it difficult to get gigs at first?
C: We just got out there, knocking on doors, handing out CDs spot a venue, if it says Live music seven days a week , in you go, speak to the manager, turn on the charm and then always obviously chase them then.
S: And is it building up a bit more now?
G: We're gigging 2 - 4 nights per week.
B: we're at the point now where we're turning down some gigs, we can pick and choose a little bit, which we wouldn't have done a year ago.
S: What sort of reactions have you been getting?
G: It's been very positive, anywhere that we play they always want us back, we can work up a crowd into a frenzy and have them dancing on the tables. A lot of people would be familiar with the tunes, but we do them a little different, and I think they pick up on our energy. We're putting it out there, they get it. It can be infectious.
S: About the age range of your audiences, I've noticed a fair few younger heads at the gigs.
B: it's folk music at the end of the day, and everyone loves it across the spectrum. Some of the gigs we were doing in the hotels would have an age range of 4 to 96, quite literally, and they were all loving it and then other gigs in pubs with a more rumpus crowd probably more 20 to 40 year olds.
S: Does your sound appeal to a younger audience than trad trad?
G: Yeah, I think normally younger people have their particular impression of ballads, and then when they see it, it works, cos it does have this image of beer-bellied middle-aged men singing rebel songs and I think it's just how we do them.
C: it's all about attitude isn't it really, delivery.
S: How would you describe your sound then?
C: Raucous.
G: The sound is traditional, in that it's all acoustic instruments, traditional instruments, you could call it traditional but I d call it traditional with a little injection of rock energy thrown into it cos we all grew up listening to ACDC and Led Zepelin.
B: And I think the reaction from the crowd is that it's a very powerful sound, that s often the term used, cos of the three boys up front, the three voices giving it'socks and then with all that intense music behind then and sometimes it takes it's own form, it comes together like a Frankenstein monster sometimes.
S: Punk trad?
B: I'd say one of our strong influences would be The Pogues, who are a punk trad band, but equally The Dubliners, who are not punk at all.
C: But in their day they were rock n roll as well, they were the Irish Rolling Stones, it's an attitude thing.
S: The whole raucous sound that you have, was that intentional?
C: We set off with the intention of being loyal and faithful to the original material, the material that inspired us, and I can remember one evening going home and for some reason thinking that we were doing all these tunes so much more lively and fast and with much more energy so maybe we were aiming for one thing and then in the process overleapt it and found our own thing.
S: Taking that a bit deeper, have you ever thought that you might actually be preserving these songs for the future, as you said a lot of people that are doing these songs are in your own words getting on a bit and mightn't be able to appeal to such a young audience. Do you think that in a way you are actually preserving these songs and then in a way preserving part of the culture?
G: I think it is. The word revival has been mentioned a few times. There hasn't been an Irish ballad band that has appealed to a young audience since the heydays of the big ballad bands of the 60's and 70's, so I think we are part of the tradition. The tradition is a thread that goes on hundreds of years and we've kind of taken it up at this particular point and we're doing it our own particular way, but I do see it as part of the tradition and of extending the tradition.
S: You mentioned the big ballad bands of the 60's and 70's, did they influence you at all?
G: Well, I first picked up on the songs from my grandfather, the songs that he was into. There are some songs that we do that he would have been listening to on his long plays.
B: But some of the songs are four and five hundred years old, and older, up to a thousand years old. Then there s bands like The Pogues that came out a while ago and their songs need to be preserved now and delivered to a young generation so that they can hear how great they were, just like they grabbed some songs of The Dubliners and shook them up a bit and they delivered it during the 80's.
C: I mean Shane McGowan has never made any secret of the fact that one of his biggest role models was Luke Kelly and The Dubliners, and he said when he first heard songs like The Rocky Road to Dublin and McAlpines Fusiliers he said that's fuckin' rock n roll, this is amazing.
S: How many tracks are on the play-list at the minute?
C: In the canon we have more that 60 and are constantly finding new stuff as well. It's like Bob got a CD recently,
B: From Yugoslavia actually, it was given to me as a present from deepest Yugoslavia, Irish Festival Folk or something like that, and we found some fantastic stuff on that.
C: Yeah, amazing, bands we'd never heard of, tunes we d never heard of.
G: It is so vast, we often have people coming up to us going, can you play this, can you play that , and we go no, we haven't got to it yet . You can go out there and buy a book of Irish songs and there could be a thousand songs in it. So we keep on building the repertoire as we go.
S: What are your own personal favourites?
C: McAlpine's Fusiliers, it just always gets the hairs standing on the back of my neck, again cos it was me grandfather s favourite song so it goes way back.
B: Some of the Horselips numbers I think are fantastic, the likes of Trouble.
G: One of the advantages we have is that there's such a vast pool of songs that we can take from, we can pick the songs we like, we can take that song and work with it and put the Workingman's Band stamp on it.
C: I like some of the really trad trad songs like Rocky Road to Dublin, some of the old kind of classics from the tradition. I like The Button Pusher cos we've given it a nice little contemporary spin, and it's probably as significant now as it was in the sixties when it was out there originally.
S: Any plans to pen some tunes?
C: The songs we do are not so much covers but versions, renditions. And in a sense that's what The Dubliners did as well in their day, to my knowledge they didn't pen a lot of tunes they just dipped, they went back into the archives.
G: Christy Moore as well wouldn't have written a lot of songs in his career, but he was a great man at locating songs, at finding songs that people wouldn't necessarily know.
B: The songs are brilliant that are there, they belong to everybody, they're folk songs at the end of the day.
G: I think we will probably, if just for some kind of creative satisfaction, put a couple of songs in there but at the moment it is what it is, in that we're plucking folk songs that are there
C: (The people's music) and we're just kind of breathing a bit of life back into them, and we can continue doing that forever and ever, but I think it will happen, to satisfy our own creative impulse.
S: And are you still frequenting The City of Dublin Working Men's Club?
B: Well it's being moved into by Bono and U2, The Clarence Hotel.
C: So they're just gonna knock a hole in the wall and make the WMC part of the hotel.
S: And are you all happy with the way things are going for the band at the minute?
C: we're getting better at what we're doing, as musicians and singers and it's not getting stale, it's getting better and better and better and better.
G: One of the things that really inspires me is the reaction you get from an audience when you play, and even times when we've got a tough audience, you always get them in the end.
S: And do you have any plans to record or are you gonna concentrate on the live end of things for now?
G: We're going to keep the pace going with live shows and 2005 will definitely see an album.
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