We talk to English rockers Hardwicke Circus ahead of their Dublin dates this weekend

Carlisle seven-piece Hardwicke Circus have already made their mark on the stages of Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds, and they hit Dublin this weekend. The band is comprised of brothers Jonny and Tom Foster, and rounded out with Ben Wilde, Zack McDade, Andy Phillips and Lewis Bewley-Taylor. After finishing their first self-titled EP, the band quickly became a festival favourite, performing on stages that most artists only dream of. Frontman Jonny Foster describes the experience at Glastonbury as one of the highlights of their career so far, though the band doesn’t let the pressure get to them.

“We’ve always watched it on TV,” he enthuses. “Sharing the stage with the likes of Art Garfunkel and Cyndi Lauper, it was all very surreal. But when we got there, we were just dead set on playing the gig as we play any other gig, and putting on a good show.”

Indeed, Foster wasn’t even all that starstruck as he retold the story of an eventful Glastonbury soundcheck.

“Within the first fifteen minutes, Art Garfunkel requested that we get off the stage so he could put his grand piano up there!” he chuckles. “So that was pretty cool. But we’re really just there to write the songs and play music – we’re not there for any other reason, whether it be meeting big names or being socialites or what have you.”

Harwicke Circus’ dramatic rise among a new generation of young UK musicians has garnered them the attention of Stiff Records founder and former President of Island Records, Dave Robinson, and to hear the story from Foster himself, that was mostly luck.

“We were in London at the start of 2015,” recalls Jonny, “and we didn’t actually have a gig on that Friday, but we had a gig on the Thursday and the Saturday. So about four-o-clock in the afternoon, I just went around all the pubs, asking, you know, would you mind letting the band and I put a gig on tonight? I went round about five pubs and everybody turned us away. And then at the sixth pub, the Oxford Arms in Camden, they said yes, okay, you can play. So we rallied the troops up, got all our gear together, and we played a gig in the Oxford Arms. As we were playing, a guy with a camera came by. He was on his way to get some fish and chips, and he heard the noise we were making, so he and came in and took some photos of it. We exchanged emails and said, well, come along to the gig at Dublin Castle on the Saturday.

“So Milo, who we met on the Friday at that impromptu gig, brought his dad along, and we got chatting, unaware of who his dad was. And then we got back to Carlisle and got a call from Milo on that Monday, saying that he and his dad really enjoyed the set, and that his dad was in fact Dave Robinson. And at that moment I understood who he was. We always listened to the bands that were on his label, we’ve always got them on in the van. We couldn’t quite believe our luck. Since then we’ve been working with Milo and Dave as our management, and it’s been a great year-and-a-half so far.”

Foster is also looking forward to the opportunity to support Alabama 3 during their return to Dublin.

“The ethos of being that an in-your-face live band very much suits us. We’re a seven-piece with horns and organ, we’ve got these big songs. It’s gonna be a really good combination with them and us.”

The power of live music is something that Foster clearly believes in, and he stresses the importance of playing live in the modern age.

“We’re really trying to make social music in the sense that we want people to get off their laptops,” notes the singer. “We want them to come to the gig and feel like they’re part of something – that’s something an element that I feel is lost in music at the moment. It’s so accessible online, people feel like there’s no need to go out and watch it. They’re only subscribing to it. Or, they’re not subscribing to it 100% really, they’re just going online and liking what they like and completely forgetting about what they don’t like. They’re not really subscribing to the full experience. And that’s something that we want to encourage through our music, for people to feel like they’re a part of it.”

Hardwicke Circus play the Academy, Dublin on November 12 and Whelan’s on the 15th. They will also be in Galway at Roisin Dubh on November 13 and at Limelight in Belfast on November 11.