It’s not often you see crowd surfing during folk songs, let alone songs about murderers-for-hire who targeted priests in the early 1700s. But so it is at a Mary Wallopers show, the Irish trad group with a passionate following for their rowdy folk ragers. Legs and pints go flying as the six-piece, playing banjo and tin whistle, set about Seán na Sagart, a new track which turns a grisly old story into a knees-up.
By its breathless conclusion, the hitman is dead and his victims and clients alike get it in the neck from the band. Singer Charles Hendy grins, savouring the punchline: “You can’t trust the clergy with their holy little bits / And ya won’t be thanked by any god for workin’ with the Brits.” The Dundalk band are kicking off their biggest tour yet, in honour of third album Paddywhackery – a record that finds the group in rude health and confronting criticism that they are “too Irish, or whatever”, according to founding members Charles and Andrew Hendy. The new material is often furiously fast, with politics and humour both sharply deployed.
Frenzied single The Big Mixer has the room bouncing to cutting lyrics about greasing the machinery of capitalism, while the hedonistic Kit Kat Club sounds like a hangover before the night’s even over, with sour vocal harmonies and Catriona Gribben’s wonderful, wheezing accordion. But the band can also hold the room in silence. It’s a pain in the hole,” Andrew deadpans, before a sparse, serious version of folk tune Smuggling the Tin, sung over a buzzing drone from Finnian O’Connor’s uilleann pipes.
Original song Landlord’s Demise is just as transfixing; a slow, strange march performed by Andrew while drumming the bodhrán, as the crowd claps and stamps. The Wallopers make an urgent case for folk’s continued relevance with their spiky, spit-and-sawdust takes on tradition – whether that tradition likes it or not.
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