Well, I’ve certainly picked the wrong night to wear my Union Jack suit. At the 3Olympia, there are Tricolours and Tricolour-patterned bucket hats and headbands, and Celtic jerseys and scarves with the signatories of the Proclamation of Independence on them. Outside a man is selling these. At the merch stall in the Olympia you can buy a tea towel with the Proclamation on it, lest you need a reminder of 1916 while brewing tea.
If you had asked me 20 years ago, my money would not have been on The Wolfe Tones to be the hip new band of 2023, but this year at Electric Picnic they garnered the biggest crowd of the festival. About a third to a half of the audience tonight are under 40. There has been a huge and welcome resurgence in quality traditional music in recent years, and younger fans have also flocked to the slightly winking, postmodern republicanism of bands like Kneecap. The Wolfe Tones have been going 60 years, and they come not with a wink but with sentimental sincerity.
After a very politicised set from Catalpa (including songs about the Spanish Civil War and IRA snipers), the luxuriantly whiskered septuagenarians Brian Warfield, Tommy Byrne and Noel Nagle come out in front of a backdrop featuring a Celtic cross and a round tower while bathed in green, white and orange lights. (Quiz question: “Where are The Wolfe Tones from?”) There’s also a Palestinian flag on the stage, and Warfield dedicates Nana Mouskouri’s Song of Liberty, a plea for peace, to the children of Palestine.
Byrne has the better voice (“Go on Tommy!” people cry), a rich pure baritone, but Warfield is the hype man. He has a tendency to speechify, often mid-song, gesticulating with his hands outstretched in a Christlike plea to the heavens or with one arm aloft as he plays his banjo with the other. Although most folk and trad bands have virtuosic musical interludes, The Wolfe Tones’ main instrument is the soupy, schmaltzy synthesiser and backing track provided by a fourth Wolfe Tone sitting quietly at a keyboard at the back. This is metronomically rigid and drowns out the guitar and banjo played by Byrne and Warfield, though Nagle’s whistle can be heard well enough.
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Actually, the main instrument The Wolfe Tones play is really the crowd. They take to their feet to sing along from the first song (Let the People Sing). They hug and hold phones up. Massed singing is, in fairness, a powerful, moving thing. (I’ve written before about how susceptible I am to this stuff; troublingly, I’ll sing along to anything.) At other times, when the songs are lesser known, or the synthesiser and programmed drums go a bit Rick Wakeman, the audience near me sit down and chat.
The Wolfe Tones present a very particular and familiar vision of Ireland. There are songs about famine (Ships of Shame) and emigration (Light a Penny Candle) and a number of songs about revolutionaries (Patrick Pearse) and hunger strikers (Joe McDonnell) and the malfeasance of the British state (John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Sunday Bloody Sunday). Some are classics. Some have a satirical edge missing from others. Dominic Behan’s Come Out Ye Black and Tans is a pretty funny song about a drunk man calling his neighbour out for a fight. The Teddy Bear’s Head, about how Ireland looks like a Teddy Bear and the British took his head, Northern Ireland, feels like something Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly might sing.
But elsewhere there’s pleading sincerity. There’s a joke on South Park about how to write Christian music: you just have to take a conventional love song and replace the word “baby” with “Jesus”. If you replaced “Jesus” with “Ireland” you’d have the gist of a lot of the lesser songs sung here tonight.
Warfield encourages audience participation. During Joe McDonnell the audience cheers each mention of McDonnell’s fellow hunger strikers. Whenever Byrne sings the line “They’ll take me out at dawn and I will die”, on an otherwise delicate version of Grace, the audience chant “I will die! I will die!” For Light a Penny Candle the audience holds up their phones with their torches on.
Warfield talks a lot about the tribulations of the Irish people, and does so with melancholy triumphalism. After Lennon and Ono’s Sunday Bloody Sunday he mentions that Lennon’s fellow Beatle Paul McCartney wrote a song called Give Ireland Back to the Irish, to which everyone cheers. “No one listened,” he says sadly, as though McCartney usually had legislative powers. Sometimes he’s just wrong. Before We Are the Irish he tells the audience at length that the Irish were the first slaves, a myth debunked by many historians (indentured servitude is nothing like chattel slavery) but one that’s often used in the United States to downplay the trauma experienced by African Americans.
When he starts talking about “those poor girls thrown under the bus” I momentarily think he’s talking about another British atrocity before I realise he’s referring to when the FAI apologised for the Ireland soccer team singing the refrain of Celtic Symphony, his tribute to Celtic football club. Everybody gets to their feet for this, and they join in with particular enthusiasm on the controversial bit: “Ooh ah, up the ’Ra.”
In interviews, Warfield has given himself wiggle room by saying he never stated to which ’Ra the song refers. (The older, original variety is still revered by some who criticise Celtic Symphony.) He has even suggested that it might be a chant for the Egyptian God Ra. (I look around at the people happily shouting “Ooh, ah, up the ’Ra!” and wonder if they’re Egyptologists.)
A gig review is not the place to litigate the rights and wrongs of Irish history. I know that when younger people who grew up far from conflict sing “Up the ’Ra!” it’s a bit like when suburbanites sing F**k Tha Police, and that having middle-aged journalists wagging their fingers at them isn’t going to change any minds. But, personally, I feel troubled hearing people joyously celebrate violent struggle when they’re safely across a Border, a hundred miles and decades away.
It’s a long gig. I like Byrne’s voice. I like the group singing. I don’t like the synthesiser sheen and the grandstanding. Most ballad groups sing songs about the fight for Irish freedom, but they don’t only sing songs about the fight for Irish freedom. In the pantheon of Irish folk veterans, The Wolfe Tones are not the most musically gifted (that’s Planxty), they’re not the most charismatic (that’s The Dubliners), but they’ve staked a claim on being the most patriotic. They love Ireland. They love Ireland so much that they luxuriate in its tortured history. They love Ireland so much that it’s oppressive, and I wonder if they have time for anything else – the Community Games or boxed sets or walks in the park. They love Ireland so much that they’re willing for other people to die for it. They sing Celtic Symphony again at the end, and everyone joins in.
