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Ian: “If you listen to Mary Delaney the amount of emotion she’s putting into her singing is… well, for one individual to be doing that is such a cathartic experience at that level. There’s so much in it.”
A motley range of strange experiences have brought them to the point where we now find them.
There was one very odd gig in America – which should remain nameless – in front of an audience zapped out on crystal meth. There was an Irish bar in Louisiana where the drinkers took little notice of them until the owner stomped on stage mid-set to berate them for their rudeness and insisted they listened intently.
There was also a celebrated occasion in San Antonio where they played in front of a rowdy audience of Mexican punks in big mohicans, knocking back malt liquor by the lorryload and looking ready to taste blood. Lynched braced themselves, convinced they were about to be slaughtered, eyeing up possible swift escape routes. They nervously went on stage and…
Daragh: “They all sat on the floor! Most of them were crying when we were singing our songs and appreciated everything we did. It was amazing. We talked about the songs and they said ‘Yeah, that’s like in Mexico, we have this folk tradition too’ and told us all about it.”
Ian: “There was this one lad who real-
ly got into that Irish battalion song, San Patricio [about a group of Irish emigrees who were conscripted into the American Army to fight the Mexicans, but rebelled against their treatment, swapped sides and fought for the Mexicans instead under the San Patricio banner]. “He was going ‘we’re brothers’.”
T
here has been lots of less savoury stuff, of course. Even apart from the usual round of dives and toi- lets, they’ve had more than their fair share of drunk audiences and no audiences, gigs where they’ve literally been paid with a glass of beer, shows on buses, in squats and on streets. They admit there have been times when they’ve simply played badly or misjudged their audience… though bad gigs are always subjective.
Ian: “Back before we were Lynched we used to do a folk day, a thankless gig, at The Globe. It kind of gave us a thick skin because it was just a lot of people talking over you and who just didn’t care. No clapping, no nothing. For me that helped me get my head straight that there is a very big differ- ence between doing a great job and the audience’s perception of you doing a great job. It can’t be dependent on other people’s appreciation or congratulations.”
“When people come up after a gig and say ‘that was great, if I feel it wasn’t great, I find it really hard to take. I want to say ‘No you’re wrong, it was terrible.’ You can’t say that though, you just say thank you.”
A turning point came in 2014 when, financed by the Irish Art Council’s Deis Recording Award, they released the album Cold Old Fire. They put together an intricate hand-made sleeve design, printed 2,000 copies, stuck a few in envelopes and posted them off to a handful of reviewers and fully expected that most of the others would spend the rest of their lives gathering dust under their beds.
They were wrong. People liked it. A lot. They sold out the first pressing. And the next. And the next. It ultimately took them to places they’d never previously remotely
imagined. Celebrated appearances at the Sidmouth, Cambridge and Celtic Connec- tions festivals and, even more significantly, an appearance on the Jools Holland TV show alongside Burt Bacharach and Sleaford Mods. At a stroke this one UK TV appear- ance took them into uncharted territory beyond even the folk world and ensured they needed to press some more CDs.
Radie: “When we put the album we
didn’t know anything about anything. We didn’t have a manager or a label or any- thing, we just put it out. But we got some good reviews and that’s how it started, just posting a few out. We didn’t really know how it worked at all.”
“It’s funny listening back to it now because we’ve been playing those songs for two years now and they’ve changed and morphed and developed in their own way and become a lot tighter. When we first made it we had to listen to it for mixes and stuff and it was excruciating to listen to, but as time has passed you can listen to it more objectively and it feels like a document of the time. We stand by it, warts and all.”
The timing of the Jools Holland TV appearance was fortuitous coming on the eve of their first UK tour, ensuring the gigs were suddenly full and CD sales rocketed.
Ian: “It’s insane that it has happened so
fast really. It’s nice when people listen to you. We’ve played a lot of gigs where it was free to get in or they just give donations but if people pay ten quid to see a band they’re likely to enjoy it a lot more. I still love playing gigs like that sometimes and I love sessions in pubs and all the rest of it, but the fact that people now listen rather than talk over you is the bit about our new-found popularity I like best – that people respect the music.”
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