Year of the Dragon

I've never formed a band, but if I did, before recruiting members or writing any actual songs, I’d need a killer collective term for my soon-to-be massive fan base. Given the reaction from the Wicklow trio joining me in Dublin’s Library Bar when I suggest they only picked their name so they could call their fans Wyvern Linguists  – a penny-dropping “ooooh that’s amazing!” in unison – it’s not something to which they’d given much thought. Probably a good sign. Enter Hot Press.

“The Rihanna Navy... The Wyvern Linguists...” ponders percussionist Caoimhe Barry, who also handles vocals with bandmates Karen Cowley and Saoirse Duane. “I like that, there’s something a bit intellectual about it.”
They can have it. Though why they really decided on the name Wyvern Lingo is set to remain a mystery (maybe even to the band). “We just make up a story every time. Like: ‘it appeared to me in a dream!”
“’My mum was a wyvern’ is another!” says Saoirse. Disclaimer: we’re sure Mrs. Duane is not a jive talkin’ two-legged dragon.
Mystical imagery and folklore often seep into Wyvern Lingo’s harmonious sound – which has its roots in folk and borrows enthusiastically from a host of genres – though they’re not overly keen on self-mythologising. Forget what you’ve heard about the band’s formation; it basically comes down to a shrewd childhood investment.
“I bought a drum-kit with my confirmation money,” explains Caoimhe. “Saoirse already played guitar and Karen played piano. So it was like ‘okay, this kinda sounds like a band!”
Bonding over their new-found love of music (Karen calls it an “obsession”) as they entered their teens, they started off as an altogether noisier proposition to get people’s attention at
underage gigs.
“I was playing bass when we all first met,” says Karen, currently in love with her Moog bass synth. “The natural thing to do was play Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy. Anything we could play, we’d just rock out.”
What followed was a number of transformations and a slide to the quiet end of the spectrum as their ace card – those beautiful dovetailing vocals – revealed itself.
“We listen to bands where there are shared lead singers,” says Caoimhe. “Like Fleetwood Mac, Simon & Garfunkel or The Beatles. Destiny’s Child do that as well, TLC...”
“All the classic girl bands,” Saoirse nods.
Even today, they are evolving. Embracing technology with the introduction of the Moog and Saoirse discovering the electric guitar and pedals, they say, “the songwriting has definitely changed.”
It’s telling that when asked about their most important, game-changing song to date, Karen picks an as-yet-unreleased number. “It certainly feels like ‘this is the direction we want to go’. At gigs, people have been picking it out, asking what it is and saying that it’s very different. That’s good, we like that.”
They confess they have enough new songs to completely scrap their upcoming Letters EP, but they won’t “because it’s really good!”
It will be the follow-up to last year’s The Widow Knows, which earned rave reviews and gained them valuable exposure. Playing support on a sold-out Hozier tour certainly helped as well. Friends with Andrew Hozier-Byrne from the Wicklow scene (“he’s from Newcastle, not Bray!” Karen, who was in the band Zaska with him, points out), Caoimhe and Karen have acted as his backing vocalists. They finished that job on a high – his January appearance on The Graham Norton Show – to focus on Wyvern Lingo.
“It all came about by accident when Andrew started out,” says Karen. “He was getting big but not huge yet and he told me he really needed a backing singer. So I was like ‘for God’s sake... go on!’ I did a few months of it on and off because I was still in college. Caoimhe started covering what gigs I wasn’t doing for another few months. We went back last summer to do another ‘couple of gigs’ but that escalated!”
“It was very surreal,” Caoimhe says of being in the eye of that particular hurricane. “Being in America with him in March, it was really all taking off and he was getting highbrow gigs with all these fancy writers backstage. It was like: ‘this is great, I can carry on doing this and it’d be a pretty cushy job’ but all that it really made me do was want to quit college. Even if I’m just sleeping on the floor of someone’s house I found on a website to gig, I don’t mind. This is what I want to do. I’d love to make it as sustainable as it now is for Hozier. It definitely opened our eyes to the possibilities. Cos he’s just our mate Andrew.”
How is he coping with life in the spotlight?
“He copes better with it than I would imagine. He’s a good man for the video games! He walks offstage and he’s like: ‘okay back to real life.’”
“He’s so humble, he wouldn’t let it go to his head,” says Karen. “He’s quite sensible and takes it all in his stride. He’s got such great family, I don’t think they’d let him be pushed too far in any direction.”
“And his crew wouldn’t let him,” notes Caoimhe. “I imagine when we go off on tour, our crew is going to be his crew!”
Caoimhe say she was more nervous about impressing their new friends backstage than the Hozier crowds, though the scale of the shows was initially daunting.
“You’ve this big crowd of people who are very excited to see... a different act! We were nervous before The Olympia but by the time we got to Belfast we were like: ‘what’s up?!’”
“Hello Belfast!” laughs Karen.
An act with the ambition to take on the world, it could be “Hello Cleveland!” for Wyvern Lingo very soon indeed.