Home truths on show

Unraveling the expat audience

Owen Sweeney

National bias aside, it’s hard to deny that the Irish audience is king in the realm of live music. Whether its singing along to every word of every song or identifying what hit the band is going to play next in delight just by hearing the sound of a guitar being tuned across the PA system, there’s an undeniable passion in the hearts of Irish concert goers and a genuine respect for musicians. This truth is especially obvious to anyone who has seen a popular music act in both Ireland and a foreign venue, shocked by the silence during songs in the latter before polite, yet loud, applause erupts once a song ends.

If an Irish concert goer was to turn to a fellow punter at a UK club date for a successful Irish band  and explain that “You’d never get this close to the front at home” or “the place would usually go mental for this one”, there was a time when these comments might warrant a polite smile or a passive “oh yeah?”. Now, with a little help from emigration, audiences across the world have their own perceptions of how Irish act at a concert, especially for homegrown acts from Ireland.

Sadly these perceptions are not all positive. In 2007 I was fortunate enough to attend the Coachella Music and Arts Festival in California, the year Rage against the Machine reunited to perform as a headline act. Lower down on the bill were both Damien Rice (and then band) and the Frames. With a lineup clash sadly meaning I missed Damo, I went along to see Glen and Co. at about 3.30pm on the Saturday for the sake of seeing an old favourite. Although a great gig and a professional performance from all involved, Hansard’s frustration at the first two rows of the audience was hard to miss as he tried to ignore repetitive screams of “When are you playing Whelans again?” while green, white and gold paraphernalia  was hoisted in his eye-line.  This example deals with the Irish audience ‘on tour’ and only amounts to a bit of cringing for both the band and fellow Irish concert goers who wish to elect better ‘audience ambassadors’.  In a recent interview with Dave Geraghty from Bell X1 and Join Me in the Pines, however, I gained insight into how full-on expat audiences can have the power to ruin a gig.

Bell X1 have been independent for their last three studio albums and accompanying live outings, a fact that has never slowed the band down, but this means that Geraghty, Noonan and Philips are responsible for reinvesting profits into future promotion, studio time and tours. Understandably, bringing  the show on the road to the US can be a costly endeavour and a mission that needs to succeed in order to help expand the fan base into new territories. Geraghty encountered the hard way that in certain venues around the world bands can end up playing in front of an all-Irish crowd that is not bringing with them a fond familiarity of home.

“Yeah…It was actually the night of the infamous bus fire in Boston. We had done a gig…I think it was a career low point, for me anyway. We did this gig in TT Bears bar, I wouldn’t even go as far as calling it a dive bar, but it was full of drunken paddies,” recalls Geraghty. 

“We had to go through the crowd to get off the stage and there were some real moronic, drunken, people who didn’t know the band, yet were introducing people to people in the band, personally. It was that real drunken ‘hands all over you’, over-familiarised sort of thing and I was just going ‘we’ve come all this way, it’s cost us all this money and we’re playing to these people, who are just roaring and shouting over us’.”

It’s easy to understand Geraghty’s frustration, especially as travel costs for bands increase and the spreading of, what he jokingly refers to as, “the gospel of Bell X1” lands solely on the band’s shoulders. Luckily Geraghty and the band haven’t encountered such a concert in a while and can identify some lightness in this difficult past experience.

“There was this fad that we still laugh about, that’s just gone. I don’t know how, I’m just glad it has, were people just shout parts of Dublin or Ireland that they are from. It started off with cries of “CELLBRIDGE” “LEIXLIP” “LUCAN”. What are we doing lads just practicing our geography? What’s going on? There was that strange element that thankfully has stopped....So it hasn’t happened in a while thankfully but when it did happen it was pretty grim. We had gone all that way and spent all that money getting there and we end up playing like what feels like The Temple Bar in Temple Bar.”

Bell X1 will embark on a four date tour in Australia this July , stopping in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth; four cities that have no doubt been receiving care packages of Barry’s Tea and Tayto for some time. Here’s hoping that the band have a successful run far from the events of that fateful night in Boston