Review: The Mary Wallopers, Thekla – ‘Full of bile and righteous fury’

There’s something stirring in Folk World. Away from the grey hairs and the comfy jumpers, away from the beautifully played fiddles, and the endless Child ballads, something is going on.

Whether it’s the weird electronic scratches and scritches of Stick in the Wheel (amazing at Rough Trade last week), the stripped back savagery of Lankum (back in Bristol at Trinity in May) or the chaotic howl of independence that is The Mary Wallopers, something is definitely happening.

It’s radical, political and seriously annoyed. It’s also massive fun.

Dundalk seven piece, The Mary Wallopers, are taking traditional Irish music and giving it a damn good shake. Not for the first time, of course, because The Pogues and The Dubliners have been here before – both of whom are lurking in the corners of Thekla tonight – but it hasn’t been done with this power, passion and good humour for a good long while.

You might be forgiven, after the first two songs, for thinking that Charles Hendy, his brother Andrew and guitarist Sean McKenna are just ramshackle chancers, flogging their version of Irishness to drunkards.

They swear like navvies, swig from cans of Guinness, joke amongst themselves and play traditional instruments at a thousand miles an hour. So far, so cliched.

If that’s what you thought, though, you’d be horribly, stupifyingly wrong. Bold O’Donaghue might be a royalist baiting clatter but Love Will Never Conquer Me is a ballad that floats across a tin whistle pursued by a thunderous drum.

Holy Ground sees the first of an outbreak of massed dancing – there will be so much more to come – and Lots of Little Soldiers is a proper rebel song. The drum is almost military in its relentlessness, thumping at chests, pounding through hearts.

At the heart of their set sits a clutch of songs popularised by The Dubliners. Building Up and Tearing England Down is a tale of Irish migrant workers, exploited and thrown aside. It is full of bile and a righteous fury, Charles Hendry wringing every last drop of melancholy from his acoustic guitar.

All For Me Grog, on the order hand, is a drinking song, possibly even a drunk song, that is as life affirming a thing as you’ll ever hear. By the time the band get here the audience is a sea of movement, lost in a celebration of the good things in life.

The juxtaposition of melancholy and total abandon is one that works beautifully all night. When Andrew Hendy takes up the bodhran for John O’Halloran he creates magic. A song of a working man, beautifully sung in a wracked treble as the drum pounds out its rhythm.

Even that, though, is no match for the triple, crazed assault that is Eileen Og, Cod Liver Oil and Orange Juice and The Frost is All Over. Both The Dubliners and The Chieftans raise their heads but neither of them ever sounded like this. This is booze fuelled party music at its very finest; tin whistles, pipes, banjos and guitars stirring up the bodies on the dancefloor.

In The Night the Gards Raided Owenys, Hendy swears that his drink has been “brewed by the gods in the air”. It would be pretty fair to wonder whether the music that The Mary Wallopers play comes from the same place.

Main photo: Gavin McNamra

Read next:

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• Review: Skinny Lister, Thekla – ‘They have maximum pop sass’
• Review: Faye Webster, Thekla – ‘Her melancholy jangle and Southern charm is memerising’

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