The Young Folk: Kidding In The Name Of

It’s all coming up roses for The Young Folk. Second album First Sign Of Morning has garnered rave reviews and extensive airplay, not to mention a prestigious RTÉ Radio One “Album of the Week” accolade. A Late Late Show appearance beckons; there’s even talk of an upcoming Jools Holland slot, if all goes to plan.

Five years on the road, the Dublin-based outfit now have extensive touring experience under their belt, including numerous treks across the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, the USA and Canada.  Support slots to date have included Midlake, Imelda May and Clannad, while they’ve appeared at festivals such as Cambridge Folk, Electric Picnic, Cornbury and the Kansas City Folk Festival, among others.
The core of the band, Anthony Furey, Paul Butler and Tony McLoughlin find time between photo shoots, radio sessions and sundry other promo duties to have a quick chat in a city centre hotel. “Yeah, it’s looking good for us all right, in the medium term at least,” beams McLoughlin, who plays bass, mandolin and banjo in the multi-instrumental line-up. “In the next six months or so we’ll really know where things stand. Jools Holland came to see us in London recently and we heard that he liked what he saw, so fingers crossed. We see this album as being a bit of a slow-burner for some people, which is a good thing.”
Vocalist/frontman/guitarist Furey underlines the need for the band to take some more risks in the studio this time around. “It’s easy to do the same thing over and over,” he says. “We were at the Lumineers last night and while they’re a really good band they’ve taken a bit of a turn away from the radio-friendly stuff. There were far less “oohs and ahhs” in their set and we preferred the newer songs. The crowd didn’t seem to react to them at all.
“We’ve hit that level where audiences are now requesting songs from the first album [The Little Battle],” he adds “In Holland recently we had people singing the words along to songs from the new album, which was a nice surprise.”
The album, recorded at Dublin’s Orphan Studios with Gavin Glass at the console, certainly finds the Dublin-based collective expanding their sonic horizons and pushing out barriers. The result is well beyond “folk” in the narrower sense, though it still has a strong organic, human quality, thanks to some deft musicianship and strong vocal harmonies.
“Our influences are all over the place,” offers Butler, who plays keyboards, organ and synths as well as contributing vocals. “I’d write completely differently to Anthony and Tony but the influences are so different that when I’d hand over a song to the lads, it would change again.”
McLoughlin says: “The last couple of records I’ve been listening to would have included Sleaford Mods while Radiohead would have been an influence all along. We all like The National and Elbow I think those two in particular would be among favourites – the way they write songs and their arrangements. I was telling the lads recently that we should do a Cheap Trick cover. I heard their latest song and it’s right up my alley. It’s like New Order or something but then I went on YouTube looking up all their other songs which are like ’70s
glam rock.”
If some of the textures sprinkled throughout First Time Of Morning conjure up a somewhat “cinematic” feel, there is good reason for it as, Butler explains.
“Believe it or not we took a lot of influences from movie soundtracks. Gavin Glass has everything a musician would want in his studio so we used a lot of those sounds and a lot of the reference points for some of those sounds on the album are from movies.
Furey adds: “It’s true. We’d say to him ‘could you make it sound more Blade Runner?’ or ‘could you make it sound like that James Bond movie where he’s going down into the volcano in Japan?’ It’s the soundtracks of our lives basically. The sounds of us growing up.”