Eire Apparent
The mulleted twentysomethings setting Irish folk ablaze for the 21st century. By Andrew Perry. The Mary Wallopers The Mary Wallopers BC. CD/DL
WITH THE unner ving look of an Amyl & The Sniffers tribute act, Dundalk, County Louth’s The Mary Wallopers ended 2022 as the year’s most exciting musical arrivistes, revitalising Irish folk music for a new generation. Their sharply upward career trajectory resulted from brothers Charles (vocals, guitar) and Andrew Hendy (vocals, banjo), plus pal Seán McKenna (vocals, guitar), putting on rowdy gigs in the Hendys’ living room circa 2016, then touring pubs throughout Ireland, and finally going viral with further lounge engagements livestreamed to the world.
Equally homespun, they’ve been chipping away at this debut for years, constantly needing to re-record tracks as they improved, not least after expanding their line-up for the pub-roving phase, to include bassist Roisín Barrett, drummer David Noonan, Kevin Shields (not that one, tin whistle) and Radie Peat on concertina. The self-titled 11-tracker now stands as a Walloping greatest hits, containing their frequently booze-fuelled and staunchly anti-English self-compositions and traditionals – the substance behind their whirlwind success.
Ever y track has a lurid backstor y: third up, Cod Liver Oil + The Orange Juice is more accurately described as Celtic, having been adapted from gospel standard Virgin Mar y
Had A Little Baby by ’60s
Glaswegian folkie Hamish Imlach. Imlach set its bawdy assignation between a Foreign Legionnaire and “Hairy Mary” in Glasgow neighbourhood the Gorbals, whence the “hard man… buggered off sharpish” after impregnating her.
Where artists such as King Creosote have subsequently rendered Imlach’s vernacular poetry with reverence, Charles Hendy attacks it with leering relish, his rabble chorale chiming in lustily on its 11 “ooh-ho, glory hallelujah” refrains, and brother Andrew picking a mean tenor banjo in the break.
Much like The Pogues in the mid-’80s, these youngsters are all about presenting vibrancy, saltiness and ‘edge’ via roots music from a bygone age, at a moment when such qualities are all but absent from contemporar y pop. With their abusive band name and horror-show haircuts, The Mary Wallopers are doubtless happy to offend, but their music is anything but childishly transgressive or facile, with skilfully swinging arrangements occasionally further embellished with cello, fiddle and brass.
Many are rebel songs, like Dominic Behan’s Building Up And Tearing England Down, where would-be navvies are warned of non-existent safety conditions on exploitative London building sites, with men frying on power cables and falling into cement mixers. The Wallopers’ own Love Will Never Conquer Me, sung by McKenna, avowedly espouses the single life, while Charles Hendy’s The Night The Gards Raided Owenys stirringly dramatises the closing of a local shebeen.
As the Dubliners-popularised All For Me Grog closes proceedings on a ramshackle beer-andtobacco high, it would take a self-defeatingly puritan soul not to sign up for this particular craic.