The year of the Wolfe

They are certainly divisive – some decry them as apologists, others salute their patriotism – but their music is uniting a younger generation of fans who flock to their gigs. Barry Egan tags along to three gigs in Ireland and the UK to report on their res

Like sheep filtering into a pen, a vast crowd of millennials drained from the other arenas at Electric Picnic last September and flocked into a single tent. About to take the stage was a band whose members were perhaps three times the age of the average festivalgoer – the Wolfe Tones. The tent was full. But still they kept coming, gathering in large numbers outside the tent when there was no space left inside.

For weeks afterwards, the airwaves and op-ed pages buzzed and spluttered, trying to make sense of the phenomenon. How had a band, long viewed in some circles as uncomfortably adjacent to militant Republicanism, become cool? Was it symbolic of a political, and nationalistic change in the young, or was it something more like nostalgia? Or, even more simply, was just about the music?

I set about trying to find out, starting in a Border town on a November night amid driving rain.

The 1,500 fans crammed into the ballroom of the Ballymascanlon Hotel in Dundalk were mostly young women singing along to Come Out Ye Black and

Tans, A Nation Once Again and, of course, Celtic Symphony at the top of their lungs.

In the three gigs I attended (the others were in Dublin and London) there were scenes just like this. And at all three venues, most of those in attendance were too young to have any real memory of the Troubles.

Brian Warfield and his brother Derek, Noel Nagle and Liam Courtney started playing music together at the Fleadh Cheoil in Roscommon in 1964. Later that year Tommy Byrne replaced Courtney.

They released The Spanish Lady, James Connolly and A Nation Once Again in quick succession from 1965 to 1972 – but their first number one came in late 1973 with Up And Away: The Helicopter Song which is still Ireland’s fastest-selling single of all time.

The song refers to an infamous jailbreak from Mountjoy’s D Wing which broke out senior Provisional IRA men Seamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon and JB O’Hagan.

The helicopter had been hired for “filming” in Laois. When it landed in Stradbally, however, it was surrounded by armed men, two of whom boarded and forced the pilot to fly to Mountjoy. It landed in the prison yard and the guards were threatened with guns. The event was the catalyst for the moving of paramilitaries to the secure wing at Portlaoise.

In 2017 Twomey was named in Belfast Coroner’s Court as one of the two IRA men behind the notorious Kingsmill Massacre in 1976 (the other was Brian Keenan) in which 10 Protestant workmen on their way home from work at a textile factory were murdered in a sectarian machine gun attack.

On July 8, 1981, the morning after Joe McDonnell died on hunger strike in Long Kesh, Brian Warfield wrote a ballad called Joe McDonnell. Warfield asked his widow Goretti for her permission to release the song. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t put it out,” she told him, jokingly, according to Dwyer McClorey, the band’s manager, who adds: “They held its release until 1983 because they felt it was too close to Joe’s death.”

Warfield also wrote Celtic Symphony, written in 1987 celebration of the Glasgow football club’s centenary. It is still contentious, not least for its chorus of “Ooh ah, up the Ra.”

Controversy erupted last year when the Irish women’s soccer team sang it after qualifying for their first Fifa World Cup.

Earlier this year, Warfield told a crowd in New York: “The girls were made to apologise by the English media. Let me tell you, boys and girls, the English reporter from Sky News has some neck to say to the girls: ‘Do you know anything about history’ when they don’t even teach Irish history in English schools.”

Come Out Ye Black and Tans, written by Dominic Behan, was released by the band in January 2020. The Guardian noted that their “version of a 1920s Irish rebel song briefly knocked Stormzy and Dua Lipa off their familiar iTunes perches”.

Perhaps that was the first sign of the Wolfe Tones’s resurgence.

At 2am in the residents’ bar of the Ballymascanlon Hotel, a flood threatens and mops are being put to work by the stillchirpy bar staff.

I ask the Wolfe Tones about people’s biggest misconception of the band.

“They think we were members of the IRA,” says Byrne (79).

“We were slammed as being the singing wing of the IRA over the years,” adds Warfield (77). “It was totally untrue. I was never in the IRA in me life. I did support the people of the North of Ireland. We all did.”

Have they met Gerry Adams?

“Of course,” says Byrne. “He’s not a fan.” “That’s not true,” counters Warfield.

“He’s never come to our gigs,” says Byrne. Adams, were he to attend, might look pretty out of place these days.

“There’s no hiding the fact that we have a young audience attending the shows now,” says Nagle (78).

“They grew up with our music through their parents. But also I think young people have more of an interest in what is going on in the country today.”

“Young people love our music,” agrees Byrne. “My grandkids and their friends sing our songs. It’s not because they’re my grandkids. They love the music.”

“My grandkid goes to Terenure College,” says Warfield, “and all his friends wanted tickets to our 3Arena gigs. The promoters have asked us to play a third night.”

“Down at the Electric Picnic there couldn’t have been anyone in the tent over 24 years of age,” says Warfield. “It was unbelievable. I couldn’t hear myself for everybody singing The Helicopter Song and Celtic Symphony.”

A week earlier, in a different venue, it was the same story. Five minutes before

they’re due on stage at the Olympia in Dublin, they get off their bar stools in a nearby pub, walk the 200ft to the venue, up to the backstage door and into the wings at the side of the stage. From behind a curtain they can see the capacity crowd going wild in expectation.

They go on stage to a huge roar. The crowd is predominantly people in their 20s and 30s. The majority of the front row are young women who know every word.

Again, they sing Come Out Ye Black and Tans and A Nation Once Again, The Ballad of Joe McDonnell and Sean South of Garryowen. There is near-pandemonium when they burst into Celtic Symphony.

I watch all this unfold from the side of the stage. Standing beside me is Siobhán Warfield who will later join her father onstage for a duet on Margaret Skinnider.

Apropos of the chorus of her father’s most controversial song, she says: “You’re not going to ask James Joyce to change Ulysses. You’re not going to ask an artist to change what they’ve done. That’s what he wrote.

“Ballad singers are dirty and gritty, and they are there to sometimes say the stuff that other people don’t want to talk about – and that’s why ballad singers over the centuries have been put in prison and lashed on the boat going over to Australia for singing ballad songs. There’s nothing different happening now.”

In London, on a Saturday evening a month later, the traffic is so heavy in King’s Cross that Warfield, McClorey and I take the tube the two stops to Camden where the band is playing the second of three sold-out shows.

McClorey has told Warfield that a show in Galway many months hence has sold

Ballad singers are dirty and gritty – they’re there to say the stuff other people don’t want to talk about . And that’s why singers over the centuries have been put in prison for ballad singing...

out. Warfield smiles and says, “There’s something going on.”

“There is something happening,” agrees McClorey.

At the pub in Camden Town, Byrne and Nagle are already at the bar, being mobbed by well-wishers. At 9pm, the Wolfe Tones made the short walk across to the Electric Ballroom, where 2,000 fans await.

In their dressing room I meet Stephen Hepburn, a Labour Party politician and a former MP for the Tyneside constituency of Jarrow for over 20 years, until 2019. He is a fan, he tells me.

“He brought me to the House of Parliament lots of times,” says Warfield.

“A lot of politicians said they grew up with his music,” says Hepburn. “They shook his hand.”

“Including Jeffrey Donaldson and young Ian Paisley,” says Warfield.

Five minutes later, they take to the stage. Another young crowd – men and women from all over, a heaving, swaying sea of humanity dotted with GAA jerseys.

The band has a powerful stage presence and a considerable commercial force – but its success sickens many who view the IRA not as freedom fighters but as terrorists. But an argument forged in song makes an impossible debating partner.

Isn’t it time, I’d told Warfield in Dundalk, to retire the “Up the Ra” chorus, since it plainly salutes murderous paramilitaries?

“Not at all,” he said, saying it was inspired by graffiti he saw in Glasgow.

“I never complained about any song – ‘Up to your knees in Fenian blood’ and all that,” he says, referring to Billy Boys, a song sometimes sung by Rangers supporters.

“I tell you, I wrote a song called The Protestant Men and it goes: ‘Here’s to those great Protestant men, gave their lives to free our land, all the people they sang their praises then, those proud United Irishmen, Protestants one and all.’

“At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s compassion, isn’t it, for what you see? I don’t think compassion needs a label to fight for it. You don’t need to be IRA to be fighting for compassion for the Irish nationalistic people. We were being hounded.”

Did he have compassion for the Loyalists who were killed as well?

“Well, I didn’t like to see that, because I thought it was a mistake by the IRA at the time to bomb civilian people, because I don’t think it helped the cause in any way. Other targets, military targets, were fine. But not [civilians] for me...”

Did he ever sing about Loyalist civilians being killed?

“No, I never did. I think there was enough people up there singing and telling their story. The other story was more or less blacklisted. You couldn’t do it. The loyalist story was out there every day on the news. But the nationalist story wasn’t. It was held down.”

Back in the residents’ bar after the Camden Town gig, it’s 1am and Warfield is in flying form. He is telling me about Joe Duffy, who he has since announced he is suing for defamation.

I want something clarified while I’m in their company. In the hotel bar in Dundalk, Byrne had said Gerry Adams wasn’t a fan of the band, while Warfield had disagreed. Which is it?

“Maybe he didn’t like Tommy, but he liked me,” says Warfield.

“He doesn’t come to our shows in Belfast,” Byrne counters.

But Warfield will not be beaten.

“I met Gerry Adams in New York. I was down having breakfast with my wife, June. He was in the other side of the restaurant and he called me over. He shook hands and gave me a big hug and then he said, ‘We’re having a do over in the hotel. Will you come across for it?’

“I said, sure. It was a big do. Mary [Lou McDonald] was there. Michelle O’Neill was there. They were all there. He got up and made a speech. He said: ‘I’m handing over to the young generation, who are smarter than me and know more than I’ll ever

We were slammed as being the singing wing of the IRA over the years. Totally untrue. I was never in the IRA in me life. But I did support the people of the North of Ireland. We all did

know.’ We never discussed music, but he was very happy to meet me and talk to me and introduced me to his friends.”

“We met Martin McGuinness that night in the Aviva,” Byrne says referring to the Ireland v Switzerland soccer international in 2016, “and he was very good.”

“To me, he was a completely different character to Adams,” says Byrne.

“He was a big fan,” agrees Warfield.

I ask if they’re really retiring next year. “People retire and they hang up their boots and they f**king die,” says Warfield in the general direction of Byrne, who ignores the comment.

But would he not miss Warfield?

“I’ve been 60 years looking at him!” says Byrne, looking over the top of his pint.

“I want to retire too,” laughs Nagle. “I really enjoy the stage show, but it’s the travelling. Sometimes I think when I’m going through another airport: ‘At my age, do I really f**king need this?’ When we were younger it was great fun, singing our songs for the punters – but I’m 79 in December.”

“I think it’s the right time,” Byrne says. “A lot of bands go past their sell-by date – and we’ve seen them, ending up playing in small pubs. I’m not like Brian – I’m not going to sing until I drop. I want to finish on a high. I’ll be 80 next year.”

“There you have it, now, from the oldest member of the Wolfe Tones,” says Warfield. “I’m the baby of the band at 77. Look, no matter what happens, it’s been a fantastic 60 years.”

“I’m looking forward to finishing,” says Byrne. “I’ll enjoy myself and go on holiday.” And after that?

“I’ll go on another holiday.”

Don’t count him out just yet, though. “The only thing I’d come back for,” says Byrne, “is if we played a gig at Croke Park in 2025.”

And they all drink to that possibility.