HamsandwicH on the road forward

“Sorry to interrupt, guys, but I think you’ll want to see these.
HamsandwicH manager Steve Berube marches into the Central Hotel’s Library Bar, bearing a bag containing finished promo copies of their third album, Stories from the Surface. The album won’t be released until mid-April, and so this is the first time the band’s 31-year-old platinum blonde singer Niamh Farrell, and bearded 34-year-old guitarist and co-vocalist Podge McNamee, have laid eyes on a printed CD sleeve.

As we all examine the striking Alan Clark painting on the cover (of a black-haired female pushing her head and hand through some kind of pink coloured matrix), I note that they’re obviously no longer calling themselves ‘Ham Sandwich’. Rather it’s HamsandwicH – that is, ‘amsandwic’ sandwiched between two capital Hs. It’s an interesting twist on the original.
“Yeah, it is,” Niamh admits, laughing. “Actually, we did that for the last album. We wanted a logo and we were looking at different options and someone just came up with a big H at either end and bringing the words together and we were like, ‘That looks pretty cool!’ Just taking that space out of the middle, changes everything!”
What’s in a name? Sometimes more than you’d think, actually. Berube makes the observation that, in the not unlikely event that HamsandwicH start to make real inroads in America, their name could still prove problematic. “Why’s that?” Podge asks, scratching his beard. “Well, in the States ‘ham sandwich’ is slang for…em… the female genitalia,” Berube explains, before he quickly makes his exit.
Niamh and Podge look aghast. “Jesus! You never mentioned that before,” Podge calls after their departing manager.
It’s time to get properly down to business…

First formed in Kells, Co. Meath, over a decade ago, and several hundred gigs and (almost) three albums into their career, the truth is that HamsandwicH are far too well established to change their name now. When they self-released their 2008 debut album, Carry the Meek, Bono famously advised them to call themselves something else.
“We didn’t listen to him,” Niamh sighs. “Damn! We didn’t listen.”
Podge laughs. “But to be honest, we were half thinking about it. We should have called ourselves Feedback!”
“There really was a point where we thought about changing the name,” Niamh recalls. “It goes so far, though, that you’re going to have to be called ‘the band formerly known as Ham Sandwich’, and we were like, no, nobody wants that. And it got to the stage where even people who didn’t like the name in the beginning, when we released [2010 sophomore album] White Fox it kind of turned around a little bit, and people were going, ‘Actually, you know what? It’s just a name’. Literally. It doesn’t matter so much.”
Well, you’re never going to be asked to support a Morrissey tour with a meaty moniker like that…
Podge pulls a face and shrugs. “Meh…not a big fan anyway.”

They’re a very friendly, easygoing and down to earth pair. The last time I interviewed Podge and Niamh, along with their bandmates Brian Darcy, David McEnroe and Ollie Murphy, was in the Hot Press Chatroom at last year’s Electric Picnic. HamsandwicH had just played a storming show to 3,500 screaming fans in the Electric Arena. There were rivers of sweat pouring down the tent’s blue sides by the close of their second encore.
“That was a huge gig for us,” Niamh reflects. “The tent was full, and it was funny because the year previously we had played a little acoustic gig at Body and Soul, and my dad had brought down my brother and sister. At the end, my sister got on stage and sang ‘Ants’, and people were crying in the audience. I was crying, my dad was on the verge of tears.
“Then when we were at the end of that gig – which was in front of 3,500 people – I saw my little sister sitting up on my dad’s shoulders and I said, ‘This song is for my little brother and sister, they’re here,’ and everyone’s like ‘Yay!’ and Podge is like, ‘Does anybody want to come up?’ I didn’t say it because I thought, ‘She won’t come up, it’s a huge crowd’, and I just saw her head nodding so I was like, ‘Okay then! Come on up!’ She’s only nine, and she got up on the stage.”
“She pretty much crowd-surfed to get to the front, didn’t she?” Podge reminds her.
“I think so,” Niamh replies, “because people were lifting her and she got up and she sang and she danced and the whole crowd went nuts, and it was just perfect.”
“She stole the show!” Podge laughs.
“She did! She totally stole the whole show,” Niamh remembers. “But there were people saying, like big tough men after the gig, saying, ‘I cried at the end of that. Thanks a million. I cried, but it was great’. Brilliant!”
Podge sounds a little cynical. “I always find that people are bizarrely emotional on Sundays at the festivals. Sure, after all the drink and the excesses of everything, you’d cry at anything!”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Niamh laughs. She pretends to sob. “Oh no! I just dropped my cigarette on the ground!”
The band have been flexing their live muscles in a hugely impressive way. “Electric Picnic was pretty memorable, but it wasn’t technically our own show,” Podge says. “But we’ve played to some other crazy audiences.”
Within the last two years, HamsadwicH have sold out their own headliner at The Olympia, played with Mumford & Sons at the Phoenix Park, and also provided the entertainment at one of President Higgins’ famous garden parties in the Áras. Last summer they supported Arcade Fire and The Pixies at Marley Park.
“Gigs like Marley Park with Arcade Fire and Pixies, and Mumford & Sons in Phoenix Park, were huge,” says Niamh. “We did Slane Castle as well. But, in terms of our own gigs, the crowd really depends on where you go in the country. We could go to one place and play a pub, and the next night we could be coming back to Dublin to play in The Olympia or something. But those kind of festival-type gigs are the biggest things we’ve done.”
Did you meet the Pixies?
“Yeah, Frank Black was so nice. He seemed really tired so you don’t want to bother people that much so I literally went over, had Stevo introduce me to him, and we had a chat. I got a picture and that was it. I was like, ‘Right I’m going to leave you alone now’ – because you don’t want to piss people off. I just said, ‘You’re tired, you want to go back on your tour bus, but I just literally want to talk to you for two seconds’. Which I did.”
They also got to hang out with Arcade Fire’s Win Butler that day.
“He came over to us when we were finishing up,” says Podge. “We were walking offstage and planning to head over to Marley House. It was mad. Win Butler was just standing talking to most of the girlfriends of the band. He’s a giant! He really is crazy tall, but it was weird because he was actually genuinely friendly. It wasn’t like he was doing this big celeb kind of being patronising: he was actually the leader of the chat, just like came over and went, ‘Yeah, how’s it going?’”
Niamh still seems a touch starstruck. “He wasn’t just being nice for the sake of it, he was really genuine,” she recalls. “Because we had literally just come off the stage and I was walking back towards the house with some of the girlfriends and things and he came over to us, like, ‘You were in the band that were just up there? We were listening in the dressing room! We opened the windows and could hear your whole set and it was really good!’
“I was standing there going, (doubtful voice) ‘Okay … are you sure about that?’ You know, ‘You came over to me but …’ and he started talking to everybody, and he was just really, really nice.”
They actually managed to procure photographic evidence that Butler had indeed been paying attention! “We had this photographer onstage with us and he heard the story,” Podge explains. “And it’s so funny. He was able to go through all his pictures and zoom in on the windows that Win was talking about!”
“Yeah, they were open, so he wasn’t lying!” Niamh laughs. “It was great to know that he had really been listening.”

Speaking of photographs, immediately after this interview Niamh will be trotting over to Trinity St, stripping off for Kathrin Baumbach’s lens, and posing more or less naked, in a pastiche of the iconic American Beauty image, for the Hot Press 900th issue cover.
“I’m nervous,” she admits, taking a sip of vodka. “I had a little bit of a moment last night where I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ – but it’s one of those things where I’m like, ‘You know what? You only get to experience these things once and even if it scares the absolute shite out of you, you have to do it’. You have to do stuff that scares you, and you have to do stuff that pushes your boundaries, so I’m looking forward to it!
“In fact, I’m really looking forward to it now. I’m really excited,” she smiles. “It’s an honor to be on the cover of Hot Press anyway. I rang my dad up like ‘I’m going to be on the cover of Hot Press!’ ‘What’re you doing?’ ‘I’m sort of going to be a little bit naked!’ He was like ‘really?’ I was like ‘yeah!’ He was like ‘Ah, cool!’ The first thing Podge said was, ‘It’ll be Playboy next!’”
The band first got mentioned in these hallowed pages around ten years ago, when Jackie Hayden reviewed their debut EP.
“Yeah Jackie Hayden gave us a really, really nice review of our first EP,” Podge recalls. “We did a cover of an old punk track, and we only did it pretty much because of the name (laughs)! We googled the name – it was something silly like ‘Pints of Guinness’ – but it was a song that we liked at the time. I think we wouldn’t be into it anymore, but he loved our cover of that, because it was energetic and it just jumped out at the end of the EP. So our first experience with Hot Press was very positive, very nice.”
What did you make of the Irish indie musical landscape back when you started off?
“It was pretty shit, to be honest,” Podge says, shrugging his shoulders. “One of the reasons I started wanting to be in a band was that I was disappointed by most of the up-and-coming bands in Ireland. Most of them are gone, and rightfully so!”
Can you name any names?
“I actually couldn’t even remember, but it was just Oasis wannabes absolutely everywhere,” he seethes. “The lack of creativity and originality was annoying… and I’m still fucking going on about it! But it’s the truth. I wouldn’t mind if there were some Blur wannabes, but it was just Oasis wannabes. Every band had that ‘if we have a tambourine and a moody frontman, we’ll go places shite attitude. We entered the world of music to take the piss out of those kinds of bands.”
Niamh nods her agreement. “We just wanted to have a laugh. We were young. We called ourselves ‘Ham Sandwich’, you know? We messed about on stage and just wanted to have a laugh. And we did: we had great fun and, as we went on we started seeing the same bands playing gigs with us, like Delorentos and The Blizzards. We were always supporting them, or them supporting us, and it was always kind of like everyone was moving at different rates. But it was lovely to have that.”
“The Blizzards would have been big news back around then,” Podge adds. “We liked them. But I’d say when you compare the music scene in Ireland now to ten years ago, I’d say a lot of it comes down to the homemade aspect. Bands can record themselves, and they know they can do it on a cheap budget, and so creativity is thriving in Ireland.”
Times have most certainly changed since the internet’s decimation of the traditional music industry. “When we started out, it was all about the record deal,” says Niamh. “You were in a band to get signed, get a record deal, and that was it. There was no other option: you gig and you get an A&R man to go to your gig, and you get signed… and that never happened for us.”
Well, it happened to some bands…
“It happened to a couple of people, but it was a bit of a pipe dream because it got to the stage that people were getting dropped, and people were losing recordings because they were being dropped from labels, and it was just horrible. I think out of that people just started going, ‘What’s the point in looking for that anymore because it’s not there?’ And then people start getting really creative and doing it themselves, and starting their own record labels. We have our own record label, Route 109A. It’s the bus to Kells, route 109.”
Podge laughs. “It’s a bit of a loner record label because we’re the only act on it. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…”
“Yeah, it’s just us!” Niamh smiles. “It just got to a stage where people were just like ‘We’re not going to get signed, so how do we do this?’”
“Having that attitude is much better,” Podge insists. “My advice to young bands would be: worry about writing good songs. Don’t worry about money or who’s going to like it. Worry about liking your own music and writing good songs. Anyone who’s in the music game should have at least an amount of creativity behind it, you know? But there are so many good bands now, bands emerging on a daily basis.”
Such as?
“Just new, cool bands in Ireland every week now. There’s one called Bitch Falcon. There’s Girl Band. They’re great. I was talking to this really timid young lad up in Bow Lane Studio. This really, really polite, little timid chap, and he was admiring all my guitar pedals, going like, ‘Wow! Christmas stocking right there!’ and he was really inquisitive and stuff, and then two months later I see him and he’s the bass player in Girl Band!”
What’s it like being the only girl amongst four guys in the band, Niamh?
“It’s not really any different for me, I think. People have this idea that you’re the complete opposite of everybody else because they’re male and you’re female, but I’m probably a bigger bloke than them! You just fit in; it’s your personalities that count.”
As you became more successful, did you experience much begrudgery?
“Oh yeah!” Podge chuckles. “It wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t!”
Niamh: “Definitely. People are going to bitch and people are going to moan about you and you just have to take it with a pinch of salt because not everyone’s going to like your music and that’s okay. Not everyone’s going to like you as a person and that’s alright too.”
Podge: “If you were to worry too much about public perception, you’d live in a cupboard. You’d never come out. I actually genuinely seriously laugh at some of the online comments. I find them hilarious. I love them! I rarely get comments but, when I do, I think they’re funny.”

Their begrudgers will most likely be fuming come April. It’s still about six weeks away, but the release of Stories from the Surface – an exquisitely crafted, multi-layered collection of ten pop/rock gems which sees them making some giant musical strides – could well be a serious game-changer for HamsandwicH. It’s been a whole five years since the release of White Fox. Why the long delay?
“The first two-and-a-half years of that was all promoting White Fox, really,” Niamh explains.
“White Fox was a bit of a slow burner and then, when we brought out ‘Ants’ as a single, it took off.
"We were doing a lot of tours, a lot of gigs, and we weren’t writing then because we were gigging all the time. And then ‘Models’ was used in the Discovery Ireland ad, which kicked the album off again, and it kind of just kept going! Until that died down, and the gigs came to a stop, we didn’t have time to be writing.”
The sudden death from a heart attack of their original manager Derek Nally in 2010 didn’t slow down their productivity, but it was a serious psychological blow.
“Derek actually died just before we recorded White Fox,” Niamh explains. “Our first day in the studio was the day of his funeral. We had that booked in already before he passed away, and we sat there and had a chat like, (shocked voice) ‘What do we do? What the fuck do we do?’ And we kind of thought: we have to think about it as if Derek is here. He’d be like, ‘Get your fucking asses in the studio and get the album recorded!’ But it was hard. It was really fucking hard.”
“We went straight from the funeral,” Podge recalls. “Literally, the funeral was over at like 1:30pm, we were in the studio at 3pm. Ollie was laying down drum tracks that day, and he was actually grieving more than any of us. You know the way some people take it later? It sank in with him immediately. He would have been the one that pretty much spoke to Derek every single day. Without fail, he would have spoken to Derek every single day.”
Fortunately, Stevo Berube stepped up to the managerial mark. “Stevo was already around, he was onboard doing PR and stuff,” Niamh explains. “And they were close friends, Stevo and Derek. They worked at the offices in the old Whelan’s, like the way it used to be. There used to be offices up the stairs so Stevo and Derek used to work in there and, yeah, when Derek passed away Stevo started helping us out a little bit more and then he just came onboard with us totally, you know? It’s great that we had somebody there that had been through all of that with us.”
Podge: “He was familiar with us. He knows our pros and cons. He knows what ‘ham sandwich’ means in America!”

Given the prolonged success of White Fox, expectations are high for their third album. Produced once again by the renowned Karl Odlum (Gemma Hayes, Damien Rice, The Frames), mastered by Greg Calbi (Bruce Springsteen, The War On Drugs, Talking Heads) and mixed by Danny Kalb (Beck, Ben Harper, Karen O), Stories from the Surface took them two years to write and record in various different Dublin studios.
Podge: “It was kind of like going to different hotels. We were like ‘Ah, we like this hotel!’ and we’d two weeks there. In total, we were in four! The only thing we really learned from White Fox was: don’t go to a run-down cottage in the middle of nowhere and lock yourself in, especially when there’s no heating and the control room is smaller than this desk. That drove us a bit mental!”
Niamh: “It drove everybody crazy, because if it’s a cottage in the middle of nowhere. you can’t go anywhere. We were literally going there in the morning and staying till late in the night and everybody just drove everybody else mental! So it was like ‘Let’s never do that again!’
“So this time, it was all studios in Dublin, which was nice. Plus, we got to see Windmill Lane. That was a really nice studio so we went back and did quite a lot of stuff in there, actually.”
Needless to say, all of this moving between studios somewhat slowed things down. “We assumed it’d take one year, which we planned for, but lots of things happened,” says Podge. “Karl, our producer, had a baby. That wasn’t really a setback, but we were kind of getting the rest of this album ready before the baby. There were other tedious things. The first chunk of the album was done, but we were really kind of fussy – and rightly so. We wanted to be 100 percent happy: there are bands that have released albums that have been like 90% there – but that can be the difference between a savage album and just an okay album.”
They credit much of the studio inventiveness to Odlum, who has produced them from the very beginning. “The main thing with this album was that we wanted to expand and become way more diverse and definitely didn’t want to fall into the trap of writing a slightly more evolved version of White Fox,” says Podge. “We deliberately pushed away our comfort zone stuff and went for it. One thing I particularly love about Karl is – it sounds weird to say this, but it is true – with White Fox Karl was faced with this band that was grieving. I imagine that it must have been hard for him – but that he must have been easy on us.
“I’d say he was wanting to try loads of things, but didn’t want to mess with us because we were already a bit of a mess. With this album he was like ‘You’re going a while, you’ve been around the block, you know what you’re doing now’. I could sense that he was thinking: ‘You must be willing to open doors a lot more’, and we were, of course, and that was the best part.”
Explain the album title?
“Stories From the Surface: it’s kind of like stories from here,” Niamh says, touching her face. “It’s like: these lyrics are things that have happened to us, so it’s almost like from the surface of your skin. It’s like all this has come to the top.”
“Yeah, all the emotions bubbling up,” Podge interjects. “And there’s a cheeky reference in there because there’s a couple of space references in the song titles [‘Apollo’, ‘To Replicate’, ‘Satellite’]. We like it because it has that ‘is it?’ quality – but it’s not really.”
Having said that, featuring a couple of androids dancing on a Martian landcsape, the superbly spooky video for second cut ‘Apollo’ is about as sci-fi as it gets.
“‘Apollo’ is about the beginning of a new relationship,” Niamh says. “Yeah, a relationship between two androids!” Podge quips.
Why did you decide not to appear in the video yourselves?
“We have a guy who plays trumpet called BQ – Brian Quinn – and his friend Bobby Chrome,” Niamh explains. “And he works with The Rubberbandits and the two of them run a video-making company. We just went to them and said, ‘Look, we’d love a video for this song, it’s called ‘Apollo’ so you can keep a kind of spacy theme if you want’, and they went off and that’s what they came back with! And everybody in the band was just, ‘This is incredible!’ We loved it. It was so different for us.”
Are you all sci-fi fans?
“I don’t mind a bit of sci-fi,” she shrugs. “Living with a six-year-old boy, you can’t help but be inundated with Star Wars and stuff like that. The amount of light-sabers lying around my house is ridiculous.”
Third single ‘Fandango’ will be released in a fortnight (“Set my sights, hold my doubts/ Is someone better than you/ Have I missed out?”). “It’s meant to be cryptic, but it’s not,” Podge explains with a self-deprecating smile. “It’s basically a risqué kind of a statement about your current relationship that you’re content with and happy in, but it’s like, ‘Is the grass greener on the other side? Am I in the safe zone here?’ It’s about a new relationship, and it’s a bit about overthinking things and reminiscing on past relationships that probably are finished for good reason – but you’re thinking again about the good sides of that relationship and not remembering the bad.”
Who writes the songs?
“Everybody, really,” Niamh shrugs. “It’s pretty much Darcy or Podge coming up with a guitar melody idea; then Ollie works on the drums with Darcy and Podge; then it comes to the melodies and lyrics and everybody chips in ideas. Myself and Podge would work on the majority of the lyrics, but melody-wise there’s no ‘you do this and I do that!’ Everybody has their say, and everybody’s opinions are taken onboard.”
Most of the songs seem to concern romantic relationships gone awry (sample lyric: “It will take time, do you realise, it was all worthwhile/ I loved you then but now we are just friends/ If I let go of this will I grow a bit/ Or will I change my mind?”) . So… who had the messy breakup?
“Everyone!” Niamh laughs. “The songs are kind of about heartbreak and maybe starting over again. I always find it easier to write sad things than happy things. There is one song on the album that I would consider happy, but that’s about it.”
Are sad songs sometimes hard to sing onstage?
“No, it’s actually surprisingly therapeutic because, at the end of the day, it’s stuff that you’ve written and you’re singing it,” Niamh observes. “You know what it’s about and it’s therapeutic as well in the sense that you know that other people in the audience who are singing along, they’re getting something out of this song as well. They’ve been through something and that song is speaking to them. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what I love: people going, ‘I can relate to that song because that happened to me’. That’s brilliant! Not brilliant that it happened to you, though, because it was probably really horrid and really sad (laughs).”

Stories From the Surface is easily the band’s strongest album to date. Musically there’s so much going on that each listen seems to bring a fresh sonic revelation.
“There are a lot of different angles on it,” Niamh observes. “Tight songs. And there are a lot of different layers in the songs as well. There are a couple of tracks where, if you heard the demo version of it compared to what it is on the album now, it’s completely different. Some of the sounds we just ripped apart and then built them up again from scratch.”
Podge: “There was a lot of Frankenstein work, but that was one of the big differences with this album and White Fox. A lot of early demos for White Fox were quite good and the finished product was closer to them. You know sometimes they say the demos are the best, and that would have been White Fox, but this [album] you listen to all the demos compared to the finished pieces, the final songs are massively better. Massively. It’s mad. It’s just the result of that kind of constant toiling in the studio.”
Come the album’s release in April, they’ll find out if all of that hard studio toil is going to pay off. The portents are good. There are already European and American tours in the works – and even a possible jaunt to Japan. Not bad going for an Irish indie band, who were dismissively filed under ‘quirky’ for much of their early career.
According to Niamh, the plan for HamsandwicH is simply to keep going as long as it’s still fun to write, record and tour together. “It’s worth it because, at the end of the day, you don’t get a lot of opportunities like the opportunities we’ve had to play amazing places, to meet amazing people. So you just want to do it till it runs out, and then is the time that you take a step back and go, ‘OK, that’s it, it’s done’. But I’m really excited for people to hear this album.”
So you plan to be around for the 1,000th Issue of Hot Press…
“The most important thing right now is this album. I can’t wait to see what people think about it: we’ll let the future take care of itself! It’s an exciting moment. Like, I’m a fulltime single mother most of the time, that’s a lot of what I’ve been doing these last few years, so it’s almost like you get to begin again a little bit. You start gigging again and getting around the country and playing for people. I can’t wait.”
“It is strange because for the last few years we’ve been kind of in hibernation working on the album. That feels really weird,” adds Podge. “It messes with your head. If you write an album and it takes off, there’s a lot of positives in the success side of it, the celebration and all the rest. So it’s actually a really exciting time for us right now.”
“We’ll see what happens,” says Niamh. “But that’s what you do it for. You do it for these opportunities to do incredible things that you can look back on when you’re an 80-year-old sitting in an old folks home going, ‘I used to be in a band!’”