At home with... Niamh Farrell, Ham Sandwich

Though most of the band hails from Kells, County Meath, singer Niamh Farrell is currently domiciled in Tallaght, Dublin, where she occupies the attic conversion of her boyfriend’s parents’ house. “I love it here, it’s like having our own little apartment within the house,” she says. “We have our own posters and photographs on the wall, a couple of amps and plenty of music and DVDs to keep us occupied. If we’re not gigging or rehearsing, we’ll be hanging around the house, especially coming into the good weather.”
Nicely positioned on the outer fringes of the city, she says she takes full advantage of the semi-rural location. “We’re just in front of the Dublin mountains and last week we walked all the way up to the Hellfire club, which took us two and a half hours,” she says. “I also love taking the bus into town and getting the DART out to places like Bray and Howth.”
Originally from Rialto in the south inner city, Niamh spent her teenage years in Scotland, just outside Glasgow, her mum having moved when she was much younger. “I was there for about 12 years altogether, but I kind of didn’t start going out until the last two years. I went to a lot of gigs, mainly at King Tuts and Barrowlands where I saw bands like Ash and Muse. I did a year at a performing arts college and I was in a band for a while.”
Having kept in close touch with friends and family back home, she decided to move back to Dublin permanently a few years back, hooking up with her future bandmates soon after returning. “I worked at the St Patrick’s Day festival in a van at the end of Grafton Street handing out leaflets. John the bass player worked there too and we’d a lot of time to talk about stuff. I found out he used to be in a band. One day Podge [McNamee] came down to the van. He was so drunk he had a leprechaun hat on and was hanging out the window shouting at everybody. I thought ‘I really don’t like this guy’ but eventually I warmed to him and we started talking about getting a band together.”
The band had its official birth at what she describes as a “crucifixion party” in bass player John’s house. Precisely what is a crucifixion party? “For some reason, he had a picture on the wall of the crucifixion that his sister had painted. It was Good Friday so we decided to have a party. Podge was there too and we decided, there and then, to form the band.”
Though she’s probably sick to the teeth of the endless jibes about the band’s terminally uncool handle (which has, not surprisingly, garnered comments along the lines of “fuckin broadly” and “butterly brilliant”) she staunchly defends the decision.
“One of the hardest things a band will have to do is come up with a name,” she says. “We were coming up with stupid names and Ham Sandwich just happened to be one of them and we went for it. We got a lot of stick at the beginning and it got to the point where it went too far. But eventually, people started coming around to it.”
So Ham Sandwich it is then – and not even the influence of the mighty Bono will change their minds at this point. “Yeah, it’s true,” she laughs. “Ollie [Murphy, drummer] met Bono at the Chilli Peppers gig and he told him he was in a band called Ham Sandwich. Bono laughed, and said we should change the name. But we’re not going to change it now. You get to the stage where you don’t want to be a band where you have to have ‘formerly known as…’ on the posters.”
Meanwhile, back in the attic conversion, she looks through the collection of DVDs which take pride of place in her not so humble abode. “We watched Garden State the other night and I loved it,” she says. “What else is here? We’ve got Monty Python, a bit of Family Guy, Close Encounters, Ghostbusters, Dazed & Confused which is a big favourite of mine at the moment. We tend to listen to music on the Apple Mac. I love vinyl even though I don’t have a player at the moment. We actually had a Thin Lizzy day recently, which was great, but we have a pretty good collection of all sorts of stuff.”
The immediate future for Ham Sandwich looks bright, with a busy summer beckoning. “We’re releasing our album in England at the end of May and we’ll be touring over there. We were play-listed on BBC6 and the reaction was great, so we’re really looking forward to it.”

Ham Sandwich play The Village, Dublin on May 24