Green Party: An Interview With Hermitage Green

The next time your contract is up for negotiation, here’s a tip: don’t ask for more flexi-hours, stock options, or even a raise. Ask for what Dan Murphy calls ‘the standard Hermitage Green’.

“That,” he says, stifling a giggle, “is where you gig for two nights, and stay for about three weeks."

“Or just go skiing.” proffers his older brother, Barry. “We went to Canada last year, and went up in Whistler for about five days. We had two gigs, but spent ten days over there, coming back absolutely broke. The five of us just sliding down a mountain, thinking ‘Jaysus, this is a tough life’. Dermy would be like, ‘Stop calling it a holiday! It’s a tour.”

With that, the brothers Murphy break into howling laughter. As their first studio album Save Your Soul hits the shelves, the Limerick-based quintet appear to be living the dream - and, when they recall just how the Hermitage Green story started, it’s not hard to see why the journey of the past five years or so might have been deemed improbable.

“Sometimes,” Barry muses, shaking his head, “I wonder why the fuck anyone came to listen to us play at the start. It must have been a complete shambles.”

How bad? Well, when they had to leave their spiritual home of their brother’s bar, The Curragower, there was a problem. “If you look at the photos,” Dan 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.”

To be fair, at that point the band was little more than a hobby for the group. Barry was still a Munster rugby player – the scorer of a mesmeric try against Sale in 2006 that sent this writer utterly apeshit on the terrace of Thomond Park – and teammate Felix Jones was on the bodhrán. But Barry’s enforced retirement through injury proved a catalyst. The quiet Monday night trad session quickly became a Sunday night showstopper; locals crammed into the tiny bar, clambering on tables and creating chaos.

“It was a cool way to begin,” Barry reflects. “It ignited a fire under us, because in ways we never expected to be a ‘proper band’; it was nice to have that energy behind us. We put videos on YouTube – minus the carnage of the crowd – that started to spread the word, and we began touring off the back of that.”

By then, of course, the line-up was settled; guitarist Darragh Griffin, drummer Dermot Sheedy, and percussionist Darragh Graham alongside the brothers as they took aim not at Ireland, but the world. Earning your stripes on the domestic scene is typically part-and-parcel of making your way as a band, but as soon as Hermitage Green were on their feet, they were seeing just how far those feet could take them. Was there a reason for making Australia and Canada early stomping grounds?

“Boozehounds!” Barry cackles. “Loving the craic! It really was for a bit of fun. Darragh had just finished a PhD, Dan had finished college, Griff was on a career break from teaching, and obviously I’d just finished with rugby. Mainly because of sport (Graham was a national sprint champion, and Dan an Irish kickboxing title-holder), we’d missed out on J1s and the like; when the recession led to all these people going to Australia, we thought there might be some demand there.”

As it turns out, there certainly was, and the sold-out signs flew up from Steep Point to Byron Bay – though the band didn’t always travel as well as their reputation did.

“I missed a few flights,” Dan admits, with nary a hint of embarrassment. “One was when we played in Sydney for Australia Day, and I was partying on the other side of town from the rest. I’m a pretty punctual guy, so I rang Barry to grab my bags, and headed to the airport two hours early – the ultimate professional… And then I fell asleep by the check-in desk, sat against the wall. I woke up an hour after the flight had left, and the boys had checked in and gone without me. They’d called me about 40 times; thing is, if they’d been quiet for a second they’d probably have heard my phone ringing about 30 feet away!”

The missed flight, just like a late-night tumble that resulted in 32 stitches to the face, was all part of the fun for Dan and the boys. Tearing up stages, sleeping on floors, and doing more than their share for the local beer industry, the Antipodean adventure was an unmitigated success – though tempered with a tinge of sadness.

“As much as everyone at the shows would be having a great time, it wasn’t home,” Barry says. “These guys were all our age group, and we knew the story well; in the years before, Limerick had been decimated. At our first gig in Perth, I said ‘How many Irish people are here?’, and the place went fucking mental. About a week later, we played another gig and asked how many from Limerick were there – the place went mad again. By the end, I’d ask how many people were from Corbally – where we’re from, which is little more than a housing estate – and I swear there were 12 or 15 people roaring.”

“There was a resentment that they’d had to leave,” he continues. “It felt like we were bringing a bit of home to them.” At that point, the Hermitage Green fare was as Irish as it gets, traditional roots running through their tunes like the writing in a stick of rock. Listening to Save Your Soul, that influence is less to the fore, with elements of anthemic indie, swooning balladry and good old fashioned pop equally apparent.

“For the past few years, it’s been writing by committee, so to speak,” explains Dan, a self-professed metalhead. “A lot of the time, you’re debating something that’s subjective. But the output in the end is something that everyone is more invested in, and that’s better all round.”

While it’s not unusual to hear a band cite a difference in influences, Hot Press isn’t sure we’ve ever heard of a group who went to the same lengths to find a viable middle ground.

“I brought in the former Munster sports psychologist, Declan Aherne, to work with us last year,” Barry reveals. “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.”

“He gave us this Cluedo sort of thing,” he grins. “Where you’re given clues and have to find the murderer? Well, he sat back and watched us run around like monkeys, all reverting to type.”

Dan explains: “Barry is the extroverted, teamwork guy, running around to see what everyone else has. Griff is sat in the corner doing his own thing before talking to anyone, while Dermy is in another corner crying. The other Darragh is talking, but nobody’s listening, and I’m outside listening to Metallica.”

That things came together on their debut LP isn’t solely down to psychological expertise; Save Your Soul was recorded with Phil Magee, known for sprinkling his brand of golddust on Kodaline and The Script. Though the group did release a live collection in 2013, their debut album proper has been a while in coming.

“The live album was released because we needed something out there to let people hear us and keep gigging,” Dan says. “I suppose it was a snapshot of where we were then. But Save Your Soul is more where we’ve been in the five years together; it feels like a perfect amalgamation.”

“We knew we needed to put a good bit of time in,” Barry proffers. “We have a different array of instruments and ideas from a lot of bands, so we couldn’t just rock in and record. We needed a bit of direction. I spoke to Phil last June and thought ‘Bingo’. This was the guy. With some producers you get a headmasterly vibe, but Phil is more like a mate, always encouraging an open and creative atmosphere. It’s just what we needed.”

The collection might have been five years in the making, but it wasn’t even finalised until shortly before Christmas, when ‘Not Your Lover’, a song co-written with Walking On Cars’ Patrick Sheehy, was quickly recorded and managed to sneak in as a last-minute addition. Now, though, the nerves of sharing the signed, sealed and delivered version of the album are starting to show.

“It feels like we’ve finally built up the courage to text that girl we like, putting it out there,” Dan confesses. “Now, we’re just waiting to see what they say back!”

“We were reluctant to send the live album anywhere,” Barry adds. “A few months after that was done, we already felt like we’d moved on. But this, we can send to anyone. We’ll see how it goes in Ireland, and then look at hitting somewhere else, be it the UK, America, or Australia. We really want to play all over the world.”

Which might take a while, if there’s a week’s holiday between each show.