- Music
- 03 Mar 16
With their debut album hitting shelves tomorrow, our man Colm O'Regan sat down with Barry and Dan Murphy, discussing the band's ramshackle start, touring the globe, and getting professional help to get along
Save Your Soul, hitting shelves tomorrow, might be Hermitage Green's debut album, but they've covered a lot of ground since getting together in 2010.
As familiar a sight in Australia as their native Limerick, the quintet have forged a reputation as a live band par excellence, but as Dan Murphy tells Colm O'Regan in a riproaring interview, their early days were a little less refined.
"If you look at the photos," he grins, "you'll see we had to play Dolan's on stools. We'd only ever played sitting in the corner of the bar; we couldn't play our instruments standing up. Yeah... we were clowns."
His brother Barry adds: "Sometimes I wonder why the fuck anyone came to listen to us play at the start. It must have been a complete shambles."
But come they did, and in their droves. The ensuing years saw the band learning their craft, touring solidly, and - of course - writing the tunes that make up their debut studio effort. There was, however, the occasional bust-up along the way - for which former Munster Rugby star Barry had a unique solution.
"I brought in the former Munster sports psychologist, Declan Aherne, to work with us last year. At the end of the day, you're five individuals striving for a strange goal; no boss, no one person to make decisions. We've had some dark days as a band - where we're all thinking of walking out, where we've had serious arguments, fights, and it's not easy to combine five completely different influences - cos we genuinely couldn't be more fucking different."
To read how they got on, as well as why increased success might mean their tours get a lot less interesting, check out the full interview in the new issue of Hot Press, on sale now!
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