The Scratch: "When we leaned into seriously heavy stuff, or  wacky, gnarlier stuff, that’s when Spud’s eyes would light up"

The association between Hot Press & The Scratch goes way back. Back in 2020, in these pages, I wrote, “Look around you. Much of the familiar Dublin we thought we knew is disappearing. And what remains, the creeping monster of gentrification is metamorphosing. It is interesting to listen to the response of a new generation of Irish artists across hip-hop, rock, trad, folk, punk, and electronic music to a city in major transition.

“This new movement for a fresh decade stretches beyond folk: Fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Mango x Mathman, A Lazarus Soul, Versatile, Tebi Rex, Super Silly, Jafaris and The Scratch (to name just a few) are all writing and singing about Dublin and have a relationship to the capital that is different to that of their predecessors.”

A couple of months before writing that piece, by chance I caught a Scratch gig. Ambling into The Harbour Bar on a stormy Bray night, I witnessed a rare fusion of Morris dancing, moshing and the Siege of Ennis played out to a bizarrely wonderful metal/trad/folk sonic fusion.

Today, meeting with the band to talk everything Pull Like A Dog – their swashbuckling new album – Conor ‘Dock’ Doherty vaguely recalls, “We nearly didn’t make it on that stage, that was Paddy’s Day or Halloween or something. We did a gig in the Patriots Inn earlier that day, and then we went straight to the Harbour Bar. We had about a thousand pints!”

Looking mightily relieved, he firmly adds, “Those days are behind us.”

Six years later – doesn’t it go by in a blink? – The Scratch are due for their biggest headline gig thus far when they touch down in Iveagh Gardens in July. The good ship Scratch is in fine fettle, and they continue to surprise. New man, guitarist and vocalist Gary Regan, gets our conversation started by nonchalantly mentioning that he was chatting with Paul McCartney the previous week in Soho.

“We were at Fender headquarters,” he grins, “to look at guitars and all. And nearby, there’s a music store called Hobgoblin that sells folk instruments – bodhráns, acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins – so they asked us to come in. We had a look around, and then we played a song or two.

“After that, I was buying a present for my girlfriend – she’s learning to play the bodhrán. Anyway there’s a lad beside me, and he had a cough mask on, and a beanie hat and a scarf. He was chatting away to another guy, and then he turns around to me and says, ‘Sorry, did I skip you?’”

And there he was, Macca – a Beatle in the living flesh. The Scratch lads are a beyond amiable bunch, so obviously a chat with the great man ensued. The band were in London to meet with their label (they signed with Sony in 2023), do a bunch of promo and squeeze in a pop-up pub tour across several taverns. Among them was Irish boozer The Faltering Fullback in good old Finsbury Park, where just the 400 Scratch fans rocked up.

The last time I spoke with the band was over a few pints in The Piper’s Corner on Marlborough Street in D1, for the release of their sophomore record Mind Yourself, in 2023. Later that week, they were due to play two sold-out gigs in Vicar St. Safe to say, much water has passed under the bridge since then.

Mind Yourself had impressive polymath James Vincent McMorrow in the producer’s chair; for their third album Pull Like A Dog, master craftsman John ‘Spud’ Murphy is in the box seat.

“With James,” Dock explains, “we grew a lot during that period. I think we were in the midst of overcoming a lot of our own demons and insecurities around that time. That made it quite a difficult time, but equally a very important one. And James, to be fair to him, stuck by us through all of that. He was definitely a good sounding board for a lot of what was going on, and other things we weren’t sure of.

“He gave us a bit of confidence in ourselves. I always remember him and James Eager, who engineered for us at the time, really trying to push us down the heavier route.”

McMorrow adored Red Enemy, the metal band in which future Scratch members – Dock, Daniel Lang and the now-departed Jordan O’Leary – played.

“I guess,” Dock continues, “the heavier side of the band was more interesting for them, and I think we didn’t know that about ourselves then. So, coming into this album with Spud, we were in a totally different place. We just knew what we wanted to get out of this album. And Spud himself likes his heavy music, and his tech and his mad guitar tones. He loves the energy; you know what I mean?

“When we leaned into seriously heavy stuff, or  wacky, gnarlier stuff, that’s when his eyes would light up. At the end of ‘Mother Of God’, there is a key change, a drop. It’s not nice and that was his suggestion – ‘Let’s just make this as nasty as we can.’”

Credit: Evan Doherty

And of course, major new transfer signing Gary Regan brings some added heft.

“I tell you what,” Dock laughs, “he also brought some of the dulcet tones as well! Obviously Gaz coming in was a huge and important moment. He had his fucking work cut out for him, to say the least. He had a million things on his plate, not least trying to get up to speed with this thing that we’re doing, and then to also bring music to the table. It just felt right from the get-go.”

Turns out Regan and The Scratch are old muckers, with Gary’s band Hero In Error and Red Enemy constantly criss-crossing paths over the past two decades. He’s a fully fledged Scratch man now, having already done 70-plus gigs. Indeed, glancing at Setlist.fm, since I last spoke with the band, they’ve done over 160 concerts, including Glastonbury, Download, and tours across Europe, Australia, the UK and the US – The Scratch sure do like to play. The figures even surprise Dock.

“I never tallied the figure,” he laughs. “The only other album we released before that was Couldn’t Give A Rats, during the pandemic, so there was no real push. Mind Yourself was the first album where we had an agent and label. It brought us to America for the first time, Australia, Europe a little bit more, and the UK.

“It feels like we haven’t stopped since we last spoke. With Mind Yourself,  the conversation we had with our team and management was, ‘We have to get in front of people. That’s going to be our best way to do this.’ So, we took everything we could get for the guts of two or three years.”

Included in their constant globetrotting was a US tour with Celtic punk crew Dropkick Murphys, which took The Scratch well into the interior of America. The two bands got on like a house on fire, and Dropkicks’ Kevin Rhenault appears on ‘Pullin’ Teeth’ off Pull Like A Dog.

“Dropkicks hit every town and village in America,” Dock relates. “We played in some mad, mad places with them, so for us to be able to get out in front of people like that over there was class.”

Obviously, our conversation circles back to the band’s boss new album, which was primarily cut by playing together in the one room.

“Spud has a little wardrobe of tricks,” Gary explains. “So he gets something in his head, or the sound that he wants, and you’re in there with about 25 fuzz pedals hooked up to each other. We essentially just got in the room and played the songs. Once Lango (Daniel Lang, cajón/percussion/vocals) and Cathal (McKenna, bass/vocals) were happy with their drum and bass sound, then overdubs and vocals were done separately. But essentially it’s all live, which is a bit terrifying by the way.”

“We wrote most of the album when Gaz came in,” Dock continues. “We had the studio time booked for January, and we had about a half-an-album ready, I’d say, realistically. So, we were under pressure to get stuff done. But I remember when Gaz came in, songs like ‘Pull Like A Dog’, ‘Gladrags’, ‘Horsefly’ and ‘Roses And Poses’ all came together.

“Pretty much the core of the album was written in a room together. During rehearsals for the tour, we’d just get sidetracked and end up writing a tune. So, it was the most prepared we’ve been.”

In true Scratch fashion, Pull Like A Dog careens wonderfully through a glut of genres – metal, folk, punk, trad, prog.

“That’s what I love about The Scratch,” Dock confirms. “I love that you can go from a ‘Blaggard’ to a ‘Shoes’ on Mind Yourself. Then on this record, you can go from ‘Roses And Poses’ into ‘I Hope All Is Forgiven’, or ‘Gladrags’ into ‘Cracks’; to me, that’s really interesting, and it isn’t something that a lot of bands can do, to be honest.”

Exhibit A is ‘Ringsend’, a song like nothing else in The Scratch canon, which is saying something. For a start, it features the rather brilliant Susan O’Neill.

“She is one of my favourite voices,” Gary confirms. “Around that time, I came in with ‘Ringsend’, a poem written by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Myself and Lango actually spoke about that poem for years, well before I was in the band, about The Scratch doing something with it. But it never materialised. When we were recording, I just brought this real simple guitar, simple notes, and thought we could do something with it.

“And the lads loved it. It kind of went from there and the song is about a relationship, so we thought - Susan! We were lucky enough to have her get up and do ‘Ringsend’ with us at Other Voices. She came out to the house for rehearsal one day as well. We didn’t even play ‘Ringsend’, it was just to have a jam.

“She’s such an incredible musician. Between the guitar, the trumpet and all her effects pedals, and her vocals on top of all that, she’s just insanely talented.”

Six years on from that chaotic Harbour Bar night, The Scratch feel less like a curiosity, and more like a band who’ve carved out their own corner of modern Irish music – one that refuses easy categorisation.

They are trad without nostalgia, metal without posturing, folk without filter. They have a willingness to lean into whatever musical instinct strikes, and that evolution is perfectly captured on Pull Like A Dog. It’s going to be one hell of a night in Iveagh Gardens this summer.

• Pull Like A Dog is out now. The Scratch play Iveagh Gardens, Dublin on July 4.