Watching from afar as Dublin descended into a cauldron of hatred and violence during the riots of November 2023 was like “getting a call that your house was on fire”, says James McGovern of The Murder Capital.
McGovern, who is the indie band’s lead singer, lives in England but, like Irish people everywhere, was shocked by the outbreak of anarchy in Dublin – a collapse into dystopia instigated by the far right. He was also motivated to put his feelings down on the page, which he did several weeks after the riots.
As has been his working method since When I Have Fears, the Irish group’s 2019 debut, the lyrics started as a poem that his bandmates then helped fashion into a song. It became Love of Country, a cathartic meditation on toxic nationalism that is a standout from their third album, Blindness, warning that patriotism can too easily become a doorway to racism. Or, as McGovern sings in the final line, “Could you blame me for mistaking / Your love of country for hate of man?”
The focus of Love of Country is both local – McGovern is from Cork but went to college in Dublin – and international. Not every city has experienced the equivalent of a burning Luas or terrified tourists taking refuge in hotels, as happened in Dublin. Yet turn on the news and the cancer of racism and extreme nationalism seems to be metastasising everywhere.
“These things are rising globally,” McGovern says from his home in London, where he is joined by Diarmuid Brennan, the band’s drummer. “It’s a deeply worrying thing.”
The Murder Capital are part of a generation credited with revitalising Irish music and attracting attention from across the world. In Britain, in particular, their reception has often been rapturous. “The most exciting band I have seen for years and years,” the Spectator said. “Rich, emotional and huge in scope”, the NME agreed.
They don’t quite have the spotlight to themselves, of course. Perhaps the most prominent act in this movement are their friends in Fontaines DC, with whom they are often compared. But The Murder Capital are no Fontaines 2.0. They bring a unique intensity that at full tilt can verge on claustrophobic and even a little unsettling.
That was certainly the case at Vicar Street in Dublin in 2020, one of the last great gigs before Covid. There, framed by still lighting, McGovern was a Nick Cave-like avatar of fire-and-brimstone energy, a prince of darkness come to rock the indie disco, while around him his bandmates whipped up a feverish din that suggested Interpol channelling Dante’s Inferno.
They aren’t just about kicking the doors down, however. Their songs are thoughtful and introspective: Love of Country is also about how, in Ireland, nationalism can bleed into what McGovern regards as anglophobia.
“It is expressing something from childhood where there was something intertwined with patriotism and a pride to be Irish that carried a negative connotation, where there was an undertone of a hatred of others,” he says. “Or an anti-British sentiment ... Branding entire nations as anything – especially anything negative – feels completely reductive.”
How does he square that opinion with the view, popular on the left of Irish social media, that it is healthy for young people to sing “Up the ’Ra” at Wolfe Tones concerts? When is nationalism good and when is it bad? Are the Wolfe Tones Schrödinger’s patriots?
“Not to go too broad, but we are creatures of contradiction in many ways.” Those old rebel songs stand for something good, he says. “They embolden our culture. They embolden our history of rebellion – a rebellion that had to happen as an occupied nation. But there is definitely a tone to how those things can be sung or those words can be used … The tone is important; the context is important in which they are sung.”
A graduate of Presentation Brothers College, the prestigious Cork school that is also Cillian Murphy’s alma mater, McGovern founded The Murder Capital in Dublin with classmates from Bimm Music Institute, in the Liberties. A way to channel his pain at the death of his friend Paul Curran, the poet and musician, it wasn’t even supposed to be a band: it began as a solo undertaking and grew organically into a collaboration.
“I’d never lost a friend before,” says McGovern, who is as chatty and easy-going in person as he is glowering and explosive on stage. “Never mind someone who meant so much to me in every sort of way – as a friend but also as someone who inspired me so much. And I’d never lost someone through suicide, either.
“I suppose the mixture of those things, and then grieving it in this way on tour, night after night, getting as close to that pain as possible, it was a unique experience, even though I’d trade it all to have Paul back.”
Where their first album was a grand gesture of grief, its follow-up, Gigi’s Recovery, from 2023, found the band processing the challenges of lockdown, which had pulled the rug from under them just as they were gaining momentum.
Blindness is something else entirely, a record that draws on all aspects of their life and experience and that, McGovern says, is partly influenced by their all having girlfriends now. Sharing your daily existence with someone encourages you to engage more with the world outside your head – which they do on songs such as Words Lost Meaning, with its menacing early-Pixies chug, and The Fall, an ominous onslaught orbiting a cathartic descending riff.
There are moments of pathos and poignancy too. Amid a brooding weather front of guitars, Death of a Giant is a tribute to the late Shane MacGowan that starts with his funeral moving through Dublin (“black horse in the centre of the street”) as he proceeded to his final resting place, in Co Tipperary.
“It was amazing to see,” says Brennan, who was among the crowds paying their respects. “I’d never seen anything like it – people bursting into song. It was wild, really beautiful.”
“I only started digging into his work around the beginning of our band,” McGovern says. “It goes without saying that he was a part of the fabric of our culture all the way through our lives. The thing that affected us most, that we talk about the most, is how vulnerable he remained through all of his personal struggles with alcoholism. Such an incredible romantic and who also had his finger on the pulse of humanity more accurately than most artists.”
Nick Cave, MacGowan’s friend and collaborator, was one of the most conspicuous mourners at the funeral, performing Rainy Night in Soho from the church altar in Nenagh. He later invited The Murder Capital to open for him on his recent European tour – and even asked McGovern and company to dinner after one of their early shows together.
“Irishness was the opening topic at the dinner,” McGovern says. “The first time we met him was in catering, where he was having his lunch – it started with lunch and finished with dinner. We’d sent an email the day before. ‘Thank you for having us – looking forward to warming up the stage for you blah-blah-blah. Here’s Blindness if you happen to get a chance to listen to it.’ He’d listened to the whole thing and was sitting there telling us about his favourite tunes off it.”
Bimm plays a pivotal role in shaping the band’s outlook as musicians and as people. Lecturers at the Dublin college, which is part of Bimm University, intend to strike over what they say are plans to cut jobs, restructure teaching roles and introduce insecure freelance contracts. The Murder Capital, along with Fontaines DC, have expressed their solidarity.
The band couldn’t have met without the college, McGovern says. “For myself specifically, I was doing a cover one day of, like, Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. I was playing rhythm guitar and singing in the one of the live rooms in there.
“And Joe Wall” – artistic development tutor at Bimm and a member of The Stunning – “was teaching the class. After I finished – I don’t remember if he thought it was s**t or if he thought it was great – he was, like, ‘There’s something about the way you’re performing. I think you should try putting the guitar down and just be a frontman.‘
“It was huge turning point in my life. I owe a lot to that place. Every kid deserves the opportunity to have those experiences and gain a sense of direction in their songwriting and in their performance.”
Bimm is also where Fontaines DC met and became a band. McGovern understands why the groups are compared with one another.
“We were and are connected to them through friendship and proximity and historical timing,” he says. “Musically, there were maybe some threads that felt a little bit closer in the beginning. We very quickly separated away from that, even on When I Have Fears – the kind of album we made, the tonal and textural places we go to. We’re very different bands. But there is undoubtedly a connection.”
A year of heavy touring awaits, including a summer date at Iveagh Gardens, around the corner from the flat where McGovern lived in Dublin. “We’re honestly buzzing for it,” he says. “It is taking our show to the next level. The fact you get to do it in July on a Saturday night ... It’s going to be a proper weekender for us.”
Blindness is released on Human Season Records on Friday, February 21st. The Murder Capital play Iveagh Gardens, Dublin, on July 19th
