Rebel Yell

Most Irish bands en route to Stradbally are looking forward to their Electric Picnic show. Not Cork punk outfit Los Langeros. You can’t blame the Leesiders for being a little apprehensive about the festival, given their track record.

Vocalist Phil Langeros remembers: “A matter of weeks before our first Picnic, our drummer was in a car accident, which basically put him out of action for playing drums. We had to get someone to fill in last minute. Then we played two years ago and (guitarist) the Nodge actually slept through the gig and never turned up! But this time we’re gonna get it right! We’re all gonna be on stage, we’re all gonna be conscious! But we’ve always had a really good time there. The first time we played, Nick Cave was on the line-up and it was really chilled out. We were walking around with a suitcase of tinnies, hanging out with Nick Cave, Shane McGowan and Conway Savage.”
Did that motley crew have any rock star tips for the five opportunists?
“Don’t steal Nick Cave’s hummus.”
Oh dear. I’ve been warned. It’s clear before I even open my copy of Los Langeros’ new album This Is Normal, that the LP is nothing of the sort.
“We’re kind of all coming from different places,” Langeros notes. “Pedro (mandolin) listens to a lot of soul music, he grew up on that whole Northern Soul buzz. The Nodge would have been into ska and The Clash.”
They call it “crazy, mandolin-fuelled gypsy goat punk”. I call it a demented mix of disco, ska, Asian fusion and glam rock.
“It makes for an energetic show,” Langeros laughs, “We definitely makes idiots of ourselves live and people love it, it gets people dancing.”
With lyrics like ‘Granny’s eyebrows – shooting up speedballs’, humour clearly rates high in camp Langeros.
“It used to be a lot more important.” he muses. “On our first album we have a tune called ‘You’ll Never Get To Heaven With An Arse Like That’ and a love song called ‘Wank Wank’. But yeah, there’s always going to be that irreverent humour.”
In an innovative approach to public relations, Los Langeros earned themselves the title of the Highest Band In Ireland in 2007, along with instrumental trio Ten Past when they played the very first Irish gig to be performed at 3,000 ft. The two bands scaled Mount Carrantuohill to perform for a bunch of confused-looking German tourists and a lonely goat.
“The goat was quite inspirational for the Nodge especially,” Langeros deadpans. “He walked up with his banjo and had a moment of spiritual unity with the goat. There’s a song about it on the new album called ‘Hairy Goat Guy.’”
Elsewhere on This Is Normal, you’ll hear a spoken word interlude by John B. Keane (“it just seemed to fit perfectly, especially the bit about drinking in moderation being the most ridiculous statement ever made!”) and Jinx Lennon, who offers vocals on ‘Night Of The Living Langers’.
“We did the Galway Arts festival together and he’s all about energy so we worked well together live. We had this instrumental track and we didn’t think it needed a conventional vocal, but we thought some kind of ranting on it would be quite good, so Jinx came down and just went for it!”
As if to imply that the Kerry mountains wasn’t an exotic enough location for the feisty fivesome (perish the thought!) Los Langeros headed to Russia in early 2010.
“It was a long and eventful tour with a lot of vodka and a lot of overnight trains and not enough sleep! Then we got stuck over there for another week because of the volcano! But it wasn’t too bad, there were really nice galleries, cheap beer, beautiful women and James Hetfield from Metallica. We bumped into him on the street!”
I have to ask how these five characters came across each another. Langeros recalls; “I was travelling in Australia and busking with a friend of mine in the streets of Melbourne and we were doing some pretty extreme busking. It was really loud and shouty and totally improvised; some people crossed the street to appreciate it, others drove by and threw bottles at us. We even had someone set a bin on fire behind us to try to smoke us out! We bumped into a Scottish guy called Jason, a.k.a. The Nodge and he started hanging out and busking with us. Then I moved back to Cork and I wanted to get a band together and this Jason guy turns up...”
Hold on a minute. He turned up?
“He literally did just turn up! Turns out he knew the bass-player too. In a bizarre coincidence, he’d met him in Dublin years before, so he turned up in his big camper van, ready for a new life.”
Nine years on, can I presume the five musicians are more like a family than a band?
“I guess we kind of are,” the frontman laughs. “We’ve got that kind of messed up marriage going on – a marriage of five people! It’s hard, especially when you’re touring, sitting around on trains and buses and trying to create this magic all the time. It’s kind of like having sex with four other people on a regular basis!”