Kingfishr: "Ireland is the only country in the developed world where, hand on heart, we can be unambiguously proud of our culture"

Hot Press predicted back in August that Kingfishr would get one of the biggest and most raucous crowds of the Electric Picnic weekend and so it proved to be with Eddie Keogh, Eoghan ‘McGoo’ McGrath and Eoin ‘Fitz’ Fitzgibbon looking genuinely gobsmacked as every word to every song was roared back to them on the Main Stage.

As my poor stomped upon feet will attest, the trio have also inspired a new form of dancing/assault which we’ve decided to call ‘céilí moshing’ and was at its most frenzied during ‘Killeagh’, their celebration of the parish which has been at No.1 here for eight consecutive weeks.

It’s just the latest stop-off on a journey that in a few short years has taken them from Limerick pub backrooms to some of the biggest stages in Ireland – and beyond.

Which reminds us, have you got your tickets yet for Kingfishr’s June 2026 visits to St. Anne’s Park and Malahide Castle?

The mood was altogether calmer when we had a pre-Picnic catch up in a Dublin hostelry, where nothing stronger than fizzy water was consumed. Honest!

Kingfishr at Electric Picnic. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

Top of the agenda was Halcyon, Kingfishr’s debut studio album which, by deposing Oasis, has also claimed its place at the top of the Irish chart.

If you trust AI (we don’t), the last homegrown artist to simultaneously have a No.1 single and album here was Dermot Kennedy in December 2020 with ‘Giants’ and Without Fear.

Which is good company to be keeping.

“Jack Antonoff said in an interview recently that, ‘One of the greatest myths of modern music is that the album is dead. Bullshit, it’s still god’ and I 100% agree with him,” Eddie Keogh says before quickly adding, “Not that it really felt like we were making one. For the first year or so, it was all about releasing individual songs on Spotify and trying to get radio to play them. We were growing up in public – y’know, working out our musical strengths and what people were and weren’t reacting to. It wasn’t until we were ten or twelve tunes in that it struck us, ‘Oh, we’ve a body of work…’ That’s when a picture started forming.”

With that realisation they wrote a few more songs, went into former Otherkin man Dave Anthony Curley’s Clinic Studios and totally knocked it out of the park.

“It’s both an intro to the band and the closing chapter of our first three-and-a-half years,” Eddie continues. “Dave took us under his wing and showed us the ropes – which we needed showing! He’s had some amazing people in there (Kneecap, Pillow Queens, Denise Chaila, Gavin Friday, Jafaris, Dónal Lunny) so he’s top of his game. Cian Synnott, who works for Dave, then recorded Amble in the same studio.”

More about those Amble boys later. Are Kingfishr happy/sad/drunk/sober writers – or a bit of all four?

“We tried the drunken part,” McGoo admits. “There were a couple of 3am-after-a-few-beers songs, which we thought were the best thing of all time… until we woke up the next day and were like, ‘What the hell?! These are crap.’”

“I’d say we’re fairly square, straight and narrow, cups of tea!” Eddie laughs.

Is there a ‘Teenage Kicks’/‘Wild Thing’/‘Seven Nation Army’-style track on the album which they dashed out in half-an-hour?

“Yeah, ‘21’,” Fitz shoots back. “We were in an Airbnb near the studio at around the time of the Los Angeles fires. We have some connections in America, so whilst not directly inspired by it, it was rattling round our heads.”

When ‘Killeagh’ was played at the Picnic – it was the “When my time’s at an ending/ When my days are no more/ Bury me with my hurley by the river Dissour” part that got ‘em –  a group of women near me started bawling crying. Are they aware of how invested some of their fans are in the band?
“Certainly when people come up and tell us stories,” McGoo nods. “We won’t go into detail but some of them are so incredibly deep. They tell you all about it, things I probably wouldn’t share with anyone. I guess they have an emotional connection with us, because the song brings them to that place. Such is the power of music.”

How did they celebrate ‘Killeagh’ getting to No.1 on the Irish singles chart?

“We were on tour in the States,” Fitz recalls. “We thought it was going to No.1 before but we missed out by three units so Eddie got a -3 tattooed on himself as a reminder of how close we’d come. The next week it skyrocketed but too late for Eddie!”

Did he subsequently get a +185 tat?

“I’ve been meaning to go get that done!” he laughs. “I’ve another one that was done pissed drunk by a friend of mine. It’s a // which looks like something from an Ed Sheeran record sleeve, but is actually ‘the sky’s the limit’ in the graffiti shorthand hobos left for each other when they were hopping trains. I got that the night we heard we were supporting George Ezra, which was our first major tour.”

To get a feel for the boys individually, what are their first albums bought and gig attended?

And no lying and saying Nick Drake…

“The first record I ever bought was Simple Math by Manchester Orchestra who are a great band,” says Eddie, going first. “The main guy Andy Hull’s style of singing is very similar cadence-wise to Phoebe Bridgers, which is probably why she covered their song ‘The Gold’. It wasn’t something mad like Iron Maiden, but my first gig was The Original Rudeboys at the Strawberry Fair in Wexford where I’m from.”

Over to Fitz.

“My first album was probably Christy Moore’s Live In Dublin,” he reveals. “My dad’s a massive Christy fan and sneaked backstage once to meet him. Christy wasn’t very happy about it and he got booted out! Do trad sessions count as gigs?”

They do.

“Cool, I went to watch Comhaltas performances in Youghal before I was old enough to play in them, which I started doing when I was fourteen.”

Is it just me or is there always some mad eighty year-old bloke playing the spoons at sessions?

“There’s always some mad eighty year-old bloke playing the spoons at sessions,” McGoo confirms with a laugh. “Trad is massive where I’m from in Tipp, so the banjo was put in my lap quite early. Of a Sunday evening we’d go to the pub and dad would put me into the session, which I think was just an excuse for him to get a bit of peace and quiet and drink a pint of Guinness. The way that musical community works is that the old teach the young and sustain the tradition.”

When I ask what his first non-trad gig was, McGoo laughs nervously before confessing: “Westlife in the Marquee in Cork when I was like nine or ten. And I hated it! I only got to go because someone else was sick and they didn’t want to waste the ticket. ”

“You were more of a Mickey Joe Harte man,” Fitz deadpans.

A COMPLETE ACCIDENT

The McGrath family farm in Ballina on Lough Derg is where Kingfishr wrote a good chunk of Halcyon.

“I grew up there with my grandparents and it was a bit of a haven for us in that there’s no nearby neighbours to complain about the racket,” McGoo says. “We were able to make as much noise as we wanted without the Guards turning up.”

Prior to that, the band had come together in 2022 when the lads found themselves on the same engineering course at the University of Limerick where, of course, The Cranberries played some of their earliest gigs in The Stables.

“We slowly but surely gravitated towards each other at college,” Fitz recalls. “There are always going to be people you get on with and we’ve similar personalities. Eddie and myself bonded over him forgetting my name three times in a row. He brought me for pints and I preceded to get on very badly and lock myself in the toilet for two-and-a-half hours.”

“He was projectile vomiting everywhere,” Eddie roars laughing.

“It was not a fun time,” Fitz resumes. “I questioned my mortality, but we’ve been best friends ever since.”

“You went in there a boy and came out a man!” Eddie roars laughing.

“I did, I did,” Fitz agrees.

We look forward to that being depicted in twenty years’ time in the Kingfishr early days biopic.

“I only learned guitar aged eighteen when I came to Limerick for college,” Mr. Keogh continues. “I met a gang of lads, played at house parties and then started a cover band with the worst name there ever was – ELM 094. One of the other guys in it, Colm, is a phenomenally talented musician and went out teaching just before Kingfishr started. I rang him there a while back, he said he wasn’t a big fan of the job and was going to try and find something else to do. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re looking for a keys player, do you play keys?’ He said, ‘No!’ I went, ‘Will you learn to play keys?’ and he said, ‘Grand!’ He just did his first gig with us at Mad Cool in Madrid, so it’s a big full circle moment.”

I’m delighted to report that we’ve managed to track down the old ELM 094 Facebook, which includes a none too shabby version of the Mumfords’ ‘Little Lion Man’.

Eddie and McGoo already knew each other from attending the Willie Clancy Week in Miltown Malbay.

“A bunch of us were on the beach one night, a guitar was produced and as an dorchadas – out of the darkness – came this figure (who turned out to be McGoo). Pitch black, he sits down and we play music until seven in the morning. I then fell asleep wearing my wet suit and got sunstroke.”

Is he a bit of a surfer?

“I sink like a stone, Stuart. I’ve tried it once or twice, but my balance and ability to swim are two of my weaker points.”

“I’d go nearly every year to Willie Clancy ‘cause it’s such great craic,” McGoo resumes.

Does he have a favourite festival moment?

“There was a band who don’t exist anymore, Arum, who were playing the Spanish Point Trisco, which is short for trad disco. It started at about three in the morning and was just insane. They’ll have to put that in the Knigfishr film as well!”

At what point did Eddie, McGoo and Fitz realise that making music together offered better career prospects than engineering?

“It was a complete accident,” Fitz admits. “Myself and Eddie lived together in 2020/’21 when lockdown hit and were stuck in the house playing music and PlayStation. There might also have been an hour of college work a day. We’d messed around writing stuff before which was never any good. One day I tuned the acoustic guitar into a weird tuning, Eddie picked it up, messed around and ended up with the riff for ‘Eyes Don’t Lie’. So we wrote that, played it to the house and they were like, ‘You didn’t write that!’ We realised it was better than what we’d come up with before.”

“The clincher,” Eddie adds, “was when there was a house party next door and a lad came in at three o’clock in the morning while I was asleep, banged on the door and said, ‘Will ya play that song, will ya?’ At that point I was like, ‘We have something people want to hear.’”

The shit, as they say, then got real.

“The three of us had a plan which was within six months to support Hermitage Green who are heroes in Limerick,” McGoo says. “The morning our first song, ‘Flowers-Fire’, came out Barry from Hermitage texted us: ‘Hey, love the new track, will you come down and play a few songs at the night I’m running?’ which was at Cask in the Kilmurry Hotel. We did that and afterwards he said, ‘We’ve got a show next week in the Docklands, will you play it?’ So, our third ever gig was in front of 4,000 people.”

A JET TAKING OFF

Not long after that Kingfishr were opening for Dermot Kennedy across the river in Thomond Park.

“That was a whole different level again,” Eddie notes. “Dermot was so good taking us on for those shows. He’s ramped it up now with his Misneach festivals in Sydney and Boston, but he’s always supported other Irish artists. We’ve been really lucky – a couple of the Kodaline lads have also reached out, Gavin James, Snow Patrol. Just by being in the same space as them, you’re picking things up all the time.”

There’s also a special place in Kingfishr hearts for James Bay.

“He’s an honest to god saint,” Eddie declares. “We were nervous about releasing our first album and James spent hours talking to us about the anxiety he’d felt in the same situation and the whole mental health side of things. He was like, ‘It’s all part of the game.’ To have the support of people like that means the world to us.”

Many a young band’s career has been derailed by the pressures of excessively long tours, one of which Kingfishr are about to embark on.

Have they learned the key to on the road survival?

“I’ve found coming off tour harder than being on it,” Fitz reveals. “When the touring stops, I feel like I’ve no purpose. I literally don’t know what to do with myself for a couple of weeks. Grian from the Fontaines said that after touring he had to get a job in a pub – ‘You have to be here at twelve o’clock and work till ten’ – to give him structure. We always make sure to book something into the calendar for a few days after we get back.”

“Your underwear disappearing and coming back neatly laundered isn’t good for you,” Eddie adds. “There’s a level of independence that gets stripped away when you’re on tour and you revert to childhood. No one wants to say ‘No’ to you. It’s a fucking weird thing and not good for your brain.

“A friend of ours Carey Willetts, who’s in a band called Athlete and co-wrote a lot of Dermot’s first album, told us that him and his better half made a deal for when he comes off tour. Which is that for a week or ten days, she wasn’t allowed to ask him to do anything and vice versa. That way he could settle back into the real world.”

Are Eddie, Fitz and McGoo all in committed relationships?

“Yes,” they say in unison.

How do they cope with being apart for months at a time?

“Every relationship’s different,” Fitz replies. “It depends what we’re up to, it depends what they’re up to. It’s not always easy but you just find what works.”

“We’re very lucky in that we’ve three really, really fantastic girls around us,” Eddie says. “They’re understanding. As long as you’ve something to aim for – ‘We’re away for a month or whatever but we’ve this coming up together when we get back.’ You have to make sure that things don’t just drift.”

Credit: Rebecca Aston

Did the lads predict the current renaissance in Irish folk/trad/roots which has seen not just themselves, but also the likes of Lisa O’Neill, Junior Brother, Amble, The Mary Wallopers, The Scratch, Lankum and Ye Vagabonds being some of the hippest names you can drop on either side of the Atlantic?

“We’ve talked about what somebody called ‘The Green Wave’ extensively,” Eddie reflects. “The whole Zach Bryan/Noah Kahan effect can’t be understated. Music politically had been super left-wing and now there’s a move towards more conservative thinking, such as being proud of your cultural identity. Which has almost dangerous connotations in certain circumstances and places. It can get out of hand, but Ireland is the only country in the developed world where, hand on heart, we can be unambiguously proud of our culture. We’re literally the only country with no skeletons in the closet. We haven’t done any of the stuff the bold boys did!

“The whole Irish thing taking off is because people from other cultures see that and buy into it.”

I couldn’t make it to Kingfishr’s Fairview Park gig in June but could hear it crystal clear eight miles down the coast in Malahide.

“That was the most insane thing I’ve ever experienced by a country mile,” Eddie continues. “After ‘Killeagh’ finished, the crowd started cheering and just didn’t stop. Someone in the middle of them with a sound meter said it was 127 dB, which is the same as a jet taking off.”

And a gunshot.

“Yeah, it was loud!” nods Fitz. “We literally couldn’t start the next song, so took a step back from the mic and let it sink in.”

HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD

Festival season is great for running into random musicians. Have they formed any unlikely alliances?

“We met Kieran from Circa Waves and were hanging out at the Isle of Wight with one of the Wunderhorse guys, both of whom were dead on,” Eoin reports. “We’ve seen CMAT a couple of times. We’re friends with friends of hers so there’s a bit of a connection. The longer you’re doing the laps, the more you’re going to run into people.”

Nowhere is Irish music’s stock higher right now than in Nashville, which has become Hozier’s second home and can’t get enough of CMAT and her brat take on country matters.

“What a town!” Fitz enthuses. “The level of musicianship in Nashville is like nothing we’ve experienced before. The first four or five days we were there, I was shellshocked by how good they are. I felt very inadequate…”

“We stood on Broadway and could hear five drum-kits going at once,” Eddie takes-over. “Where else would you get that? I was expecting it to be millions and millions of people, but the population’s just 750,000. You can walk across it in half-an-hour.

“The Grand Ole Opry was ridiculous. We went in and chatted to the bookers in a big, mad boardroom with a table that was 48-feet long. It was gas. They want us to come back and play there in September.”

Hearts and minds were also won in New York where, literally ten minutes after touching down, they got a call from some musical pals of theirs inviting them to a jam.

“We landed in and straight away got rung up by the Amble lads who wanted to know where we were,” Fitz explains. “We said, ‘The airport, heading to Brooklyn.’ They were like, ‘Brooklyn? Us too. We’re playing a gig tonight in the Dead Rabbit, why don’t you come down?’ So they pulled us up for an old tune.”

Damn, I was hoping there’d be some sort of Blur vs Oasis-style rivalry I could exaggerate.

“I don’t think we have the animosity in us that the Gallaghers seemed to have,” Eddie laughs. “We do push each other creatively though. We’ll hear an Amble song and think, ‘Fuck, that’s good, let’s write something even more deadly!’ but we’re not going to fall out with them over it. ”

Kingfishr Live at the Docklands on August 22nd, 2025. Copyright Trevor McGrath/ hotpress.com

At around the same time as Amble were opening for Hozier in Fenway Park – “Fair play to them, that was incredible!” Eddie notes – Kingfishr were selling out New York’s fabled Bowery Ballroom, which has long been an indicator of bands taking off in the States.

“The significance of that wasn’t lost on us,” McGoo admits. “Eddie said something a year ago as a bit of a joke, which is that it’s reasonable and rational for us to fill a room in Ireland because we know a lot of people here. But doing it halfway across the world is absolutely crazy. It’s such an incredible position to be in.”

An epiphany was had whilst tour busing from one coast to the other.

“We drove the R70 from Denver to San Francisco,” Eddie reveals. “I’d listened to a lot of Springsteen and read the book and stuff, but it’s only when you’re travelling along those highways yourself that his songs and what he’s saying make total sense. I love the idea that music and art spring from the ground around you. Look at the Fontaines; that’s the sound of Dublin.

“Our whole motto for the band and the album has been: ‘If it doesn’t belong on the farm, it’s not right.’ It starts physically at the kitchen table. A historian came out to McGoo’s place and said there’s been some sort of farm there since 1100. That’s almost a thousand years of people sat around the kitchen playing music together. I find that incredibly powerful.”

Before we let Kingfishr fly off, McGoo has a story which illustrates how far the band have come these past few years.

“It was New Year’s Eve 2022,” he concludes. “We were on the NYF Dublin bill before The Blizzards. There was a free bar which we indulged in near the 3Arena where Westlife were doing the countdown. Off our heads, the three of us walked down there and were like, ‘We’re going to play that!’ It was so far away in the distance at the time – and now we’ve two dates there at Christmas.”

• Halcyon is out now on B-Unique. Kingfishr play 3Arena, Dublin (December 18 & 19); St. Anne’s Park, Dublin (June 5); SSE Arena, Belfast (8 & 9); Musgrave Park, Cork (11 & 12) and Malahide Castle, Dublin (13).