Gaelic Storm – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.
If you saw Titanic, (and let’s face it, you did. We all did,) you’ll remember the Irish band playing in third class in a rowdy party scene. Well, it got noticed, and the band, Gaelic Storm, plays an incredible number of shows every year, and over the course of their lives. We catch up with Gaelic Storm’s Patrick Murphy.
RRX: I read that the band had come into your own after 20 years. Is this about success, or are we talking about something more personal or more musical, or is it both in the sense that one causes the other?
PM: It started in ’93, so you’re looking at 33 years. And then we went full time in ’98. So what’s that? 26 years. Yeah, over 20 years. It started off just as a bit of fun. That was the whole concept. It was just something to do on a Friday and a Saturday. And then you got the whole Titanic thing. And I’m sure you asked me about that later on, but when we went full time in ’98 and my dad said to me, ‘look, give it a shot.’ I don’t know if you get six months out of it, you’ve done well, and if you get a year out of it, you’ve beaten all the odds. And I was like ‘alright, I’ll give it a shot and we’ll see what happens.’ It’s a big leap to say it, I guess. It’s strategy is not only a career. But even based on last name sure. We’re a bunch of people singing your songs back to you. It’s fumbling, I guess. I never expected this. It’s not something I ever actually wanted to do. It just happened. I think that’s one of the reasons why it is a bit of a success. It’s because we actually do enjoy playing music and being on stage and the audience. She’s just having fun and it’s kind of infectious for want of a better word, and I just think people enjoy themselves at our shows. I think they get a reprieve from daily life, you get a reprieve from what’s going on in the world, and it’s just two hours of enjoyment and it does bring a lot of people together. I wouldn’t say success; I’d just say that the band actually has fun on stage. We’re not just putting it in. And I think one of the reasons why the band is successful in quotation marks is because people see us having fun if that makes any sense at all.
RRX: That kind of dovetails into another question I had. Gaelic Storm has a diverse fan base, and I’ve noticed this in local Irish music. I always thought that everybody is an Irish music fan on Saint Patrick’s Day. Do you think that’s what leads to you having a generally diverse audience when it’s not Saint Patrick’s Day?
PM: When I first moved to America, I couldn’t believe how America was embraced Saint Patrick’s Day. I couldn’t believe it, because when we were growing up, it was just, you know, you went to mass and you came home and you had your leg of lamb or a turkey or something. A couple of chickens, and you sit nicely. Small parades; it wasn’t a big deal. You just went to mass and you had your dinner. There’s no shamrocks and shenanigans that came to America and they’re like, what the hell is going on over here?’ I know millions of Irish people moved to America, but it’s amazing how America has embraced that culture and that day. And we’re usually in Chicago for when they make the river green. And it’s insane. Chicago goes absolutely bonkers. I’ve never seen anything like that. I mean, it goes crazy. Does it bring people together? Yeah, it does. And the ironic thing, Liam, is that Saint Patrick wasn’t even Irish, he was from Wales. Maybe that’s the reason why we don’t celebrate it in Ireland as much,
If you think about like, Mexicans don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo, though they might have a little party. It’s nothing to do with their independence. It’s just being completely misconstrued, you know what I mean? And you see people dressed up as leprechauns and drinking green beer. I mean, what an abomination. Who the hell drinks green beer?
RRX: Right.
PM: Cinco de Mayo is great and whatever else you have. It’s just taking a national identity and going ‘you know what, let’s party.’
RRX: Yeah, we do that a lot. Now you guys have played a lot of shows, like thousands of shows, and it makes you pretty much experts at playing shows because they always say if you do anything for 10,000 hours you have mastery. If you have five hours on a show and thousands of shows like that that’s mastery at some point. How does the schedule that you guys have to kee; how does it compare to the schedule you kept when you really started having a schedule aside from just it being big or smaller.
PM: I think the most we ever did was like 200 shows in a year. You’re just trying to get your foot in the door. But with the travelling and the driving, we cut it down to about. 80 or 90 a year. I think we’re doing 84 shows this year, which is still a lot. But yeah, I think we’re coming in close on 4000 shows now. And the shows are at least two hours, and that’s just the show. That’s not the rehearsals, So the studios, the songwriting and stuff. Like my daughter, she was playing the fiddle, and she quit. She said it’s too hard. But there are the people in the band, there’s 10,000 hours already just in lessons. Do you know what I mean? And there’s the dedication of the parents, like my son plays the piano. And he plays the bassoon. He’s in the local orchestra and my daughter picked up the flute and we’d bring them over to the local youth orchestra. Twenty-three times a week and he’s in the school band and if my son did want to get into music, he already has 10,000 hours before he turns 18. Do you know what I’m trying to say?
RRX: He’s already there, yeah.
PM: If you become a professional musician, you already have those 10,000 hours under your belt. And you have all the money behind it and the parents dropping you off and picking you up, and then you have the practicing at home and you practice the fiddle, practice the flute. Then you have the guys in the band here. There’s, you know, ‘practice the bagpipes.’Where the hell do you practice the bagpipes, in the basement? No, he was in his parents’ back garden. Cause it was so noisy, it was decades of experience, and that’s before you even get on the stage. And then you have 26 years full time travelling so you do become an expert. It’s like, ‘look, I’m just so stupid.’ You’re either a good plumber or you’re a bad plumber. There’s nothing worse than a bad plumber. And when you find a good plumber, you hang on to the good plumber. Because that plumber knows what he’s doing. I got on the phone and they fix it in 5 10 minutes because they know what they’re doing, And to compare two rules together, I think we know what we’re doing. And then we just said, ‘You know, we’re a mid-scale size band and when we went on tour with Zach Broan last year, that’s a whole different level altogether.’ There’s just different levels. Like Zach Broome; we were playing arenas and football stadiums and like ‘what the hell’s going on here?’ and the sheer magnitude of what they were doing and that’s Zach Brom, and then you see Taylor Swift, you’re like ‘what in the worm is going on here?’ Decades of experience and decades of practice and it put it all together and you just do it. We are literally road warriors.
RRX: So for people who’ve seen the Titanic, Gaelic Storm was the Irish band that kept playing as the ship went down. So how did that come about for you?
PM: Somebody recommended us and we were doing a show in the Los Angeles Irish Festival. And some guy saw us, I guess it was his secretary that said, ‘you got to check out this band Gaelic Storm. They might do it for you’ because he was looking for an Irish band. He had been to Boston and Philly and New York and Chicago. And then his secretary said, ‘there’s an Irish band down the street, Gaelic Storm. You should check them out. They’re pretty good. So he saw us and that was the guy that brought the camera. And then he brought that back to James Cameron and James Cameron’s like, ‘that’s it, that’s what we’re looking for.’ So he had auditioned all the bands. But I don’t know, it was just the carefree attitude of us like. Like James Cameron, who was so nice. So is Kate Winslett. So is DiCaprio. The supervising. You know, you treat them with a bit of respect and they were just so easy to work with. Oh, we didn’t care. We had no idea what the hell we were getting into,
