The Eskies Interview – Look who's Knockan

We’ll get to the music in due course, but first let’s talk great onstage banter. According to approximately everyone who has caught The Eskies live, the boys have it in spades. “It’s something that people keep commenting on,” says singer Ian Bermingham, a man with a fantastic Sid James laugh. ”I think we just like taking the piss out of each other!”

So they don’t script and choreograph the between-song repartee? “We sit around in the van and say, ‘between these songs, you’ve to say this and I’ve to say that’,” he deadpans. “It’s all very well-rehearsed. We’re scrupulous. A lot of practice goes into between-songs banter! We actually started off as five people who got on stage and just shouted at each other. And then eventually we just started writing songs.” Nobody’s buying that. But then, it’s as plausible as the rest of their band bio. If you were to believe the internet, the five-piece formed eight years ago as a “gentleman’s club come minor social movement” in Germany.
“There’s all sorts of reasons why I can’t go into that,” Bermingham continues mischievously. “I’m sure you’ll understand. It wouldn’t be a gentleman’s club if we disclosed all of our secrets… No, we didn’t actually meet in Germany in 2006. That’s somewhat of a myth. We also tell people that it was a terrible, terrible accident. That we got stuck in an elevator somewhere. We had to fight our way out.” The truth lies somewhere in Dublin suburbia and is likely far more mundane. What Bermingham will admit is that some of the band met as kids and The Eskies have been a proper going concern for two years. They play folk, but not as the charts know it.
Their influences are broad but their Venn diagram contains “an awful lot of gyspy music and ragtime music”. Think Gogol Bordello if they’d stumbled, naked and raving, out of the Dublin mountains rather than Eastern Europe. The aim is to be the dark flipside of the Mumfords and Lumineers of this world. “It’s the Hyde to that Jekyll,” Bermingham notes. “It’s a lot darker, more shouty. Not quite as pleasant as other ‘folk music’ that’s around. A little bit more deranged. If folk and bluegrass spent a couple of weeks drinking sherry, broke up twice, smashed the kids and developed a drug habit, you’d get us!” Which, coincidentally, could be the narrative of one of their songs. “Everyone has something terribly wrong with them in our songs and everyone dies. All kinds of miserable things happen. It’s very much in keeping with the Billy Connolly way of looking at country music. He had this whole theory for those sick country songs: you have to have religion, a member of your family, something terribly wrong with them, accidents and catastrophes. And you can be pretty free with those tragedies. So Connolly wrote a song called ‘My Mother Drowned In The Grotto At Lourdes – Because A Hunchback Pushed Her In’. We’re going through that checklist: ‘feck it, let’s have a storm! Let’s have a hurricane and a load of kids getting stuck in it!’”
With debut EP Sherry Go Round available for free on theeskies.com, a full album of macabre tunes is in the works and should be with us this autumn. Before that, The Eskies gig all summer long. They’re Knockanstockan-bound and have a particular affinity for the Blessington festival. “It’s been brilliant to watch and brilliant to be part of, because it’s a festival that started in a pub car park,” concludes Bermingham with true sincerity. “It’s flourished into this monster of a thing, all the while maintaining the same ethos. Having gotten to know the people who run it, what they’re like and their passion for music, it really comes across in the festival.”

Knockanstockan takes place at Blessington Lakes, on July 25-26