Behind-the-scenes with The Coronas: "We just started booking gigs. There was no plan. We didn’t know what we were doing"

So here we go,
Heroes or ghosts one man’s mood
Can break another man’s soul
Or am I just
Too cynical for my own good,
Too scared to say,
We’ll get there if we should
We’ll get there if we should
–The Coronas, ‘Heroes or Ghosts’

I’m sat in Kruger’s, in Dún Chaoin in County Kerry, the most westerly bar in Europe, supping a pint and wading through scribbled notes. Kruger’s, the bar that featured in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter, is swathed in images of the great and the good who have passed through – Eamon De Valera, Tom Cruise, Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Maria Simonds-Gooding and far too many more to list here. In amongst these legendary characters, some gurning at the camera and some looking oddly apprehensive, there’s  a photograph of Danny O’Reilly, Graham Knox and Conor Egan.

The Coronas: a band of and for the Irish people.

They are one of Ireland’s most popular bands – their last three albums have all reached No. 1 in the Irish charts, making them the first and only self-released Irish band to have a third consecutive No.1. So what makes them tick? And how is it that their music intersects so well with Irish music fans?

Well, there was one way to find out – or at least to try. I joined the band on the road for their headline summer gigs at Fairview Park, Dublin and King John’s Castle, Limerick – in many ways a prelude to the release of their brand new album Thoughts & Observations, in the final week of September.

As it happens, we are talking about one of Ireland’s most private bands. You never read about Coronas-related high jinks or bare-faced mischief. To date, their seven, soon to be eight albums, have done the talking. It was, therefore, an intriguing proposition: I’d shadow The Coronas on the road, have access all areas, chat to band, crew, fans and write a fly-on-the-wall piece about what went down.

Why would the band let themselves in for this? A clue may rest in the fact that The Coronas derived their name from the brand of typewriter that William Miller – the protagonist in Cameron Crowe’s archetypal rock and roll-meets-journalism movie, Almost Famous – writes on, the classic Smith-Corona. And, well, obviously the former name was already taken.

At the beginning of the movie, the fifteen-year-old Miller, aspiring to be a rock journalist, is writing freelance articles for underground papers in 1969 San Diego and later becomes an embedded Rolling Stone reporter with a 1970s southern rock band. So it was perhaps by more than happenstance that the band’s second single, their first hit and the track they finish their nightly epic 24-song set with is ‘San Diego Song’. But ours is not to wonder why. Instead, let’s spool back to the moment when, bag packed to bulging, I hit the road…

Fairview Park, Dublin 3

And you know, you know,
It’s harder than it looks,
It’s harder than it looks
But I, I know,
It’s gonna take a lot of time and a little bit of luck
–The Coronas, ‘Heroes or Ghosts’

The Coronas’ manager, Jim Lawless, is entrenched in the production office at Fairview Park, taking calls and checking charts. Production assistant Sarah Cotterell provides me with the bands’ schedule – arrival time, soundcheck, return to hotel, return to venue, doors, support act stage time, photo shoot, meet and greet, Coronas’ stage time, curfew. I can hear support act Sorcha Richardson sound-checking and the noise of the last pieces for the stage show being moved into place – there’s a teeth-rattling grating noise, as some fierce heavy metal object is dragged across gravel.

Rock ’n’ roll.

I walk out, the sky is bruised, a tad angry. Tibetan-style festival flags groan in the breeze. I take a walk around the site, past hand-painted graffiti notices for Two Door Cinema Club and Zara Larsson, who are also part of the Fairview Park series. Festival personnel stroll buy, sipping cups of coffee. Two gaffers and a huge dog speed past me in a giant bobcat. Eddie Rockets’ staff are opening their rig; forklifts honeypot around the Heineken bars; Mr. Whippy is already dolling out 99s; The Hippie Chippy is blinking into life; so too the Pilgrim Pizza Company, while White Claw Hard Seltzer remains cryptic. The city beyond is curiously quiet.

Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ breaks the silence, then a mean electric blues guitar. It’s a little after 3pm, and The Coronas are beginning to soundcheck inside the colossal, yellow and blue striped, ten-topped circus tent, perched on the banks of the Tolka River. Without a crowd, it is serene, vast and daunting. At the sound desk, marooned on a massive sea of grass, a cluster of sound engineers hunch over blinking monitors. Over the thump, thump, thump of the kickdrum, I hear Coronas’ frontman Danny O’Reilly’s call out. “Yis might get blown out of it? Have ye any headphones kids?” he asks bassist Knoxy’s children, who gambol around the arena, a wonderland of possibilities for them, while Daddy works.

Otherwise all is placid. We’re in the calm before 8,000 rabid Coronas fans will whale in, in around about four hours time. For a while, there’s just the sweet sound of drummer Conor Egan kicking stuffing out of the drums. It is one of rock music’s most sacred, arcane rituals. Boom, boom, boom, boom – “That sounds alright. Are we going to be able to hear the snare?” Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack… “Now let’s hear them together…”

It’s summer in Dublin. A mammoth gig season is in full swing. Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Pink, Doja Cat and Green Day have all passed through Dublin with AC/DC, Coldplay and Niall Horan on the way. Fatboy Slim had rocked Fairview Park the night before, CMAT the night before that again. Now, it’s the turn of The Coronas. Or perhaps we should say The Coronas supergroup, with – for live purposes – the band now a twelve-legged groove machine which includes singer, songwriter, musician and O’Reilly sibling Róisín O; True Tides polymath Cian Sweeney; and one half of Choice Music Prize nominated outfit All Tvvins and now honorary Corona, Lar Kaye.

The Coronas at Fairview Park. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

The line-up can shift and change, depending on the musicians’ other commitments. But Coronas 2.0 occurred organically. Róisín and Cian had been writing with Danny, and so were an obvious fit. With the departure of guitarist Dave McPhillips, however, they needed an axeman who brought something else to the table, reaching into the more synth territory the band had begun mining. Enter Lar, with his mega pedalboard. “He plays his pedalboard as much as he plays the guitar,” Knoxy quips, with a nod in the guitarist’s direction. It’s indicative of The Coronas’ essential humility that they didn’t think he would want to join the band – his former outfits Adebisi Shank and All Tvvins being ‘cooler’ bands! However, attending a gig in Galway, with Cian Sweeney’s band True Tides in the support slot, Lar stood in the wings, watched and was blown away by The Coronas’ live show and the connection to their audience. He was in.

The band continue their sound-check. They work the songs methodically, but when Miracle Bell man, longtime Coronas ally, and live visual director John Broe bounds onto the stage, they pause for warm hugs. They return to working their way through ‘Some Else’s Hands’ with its plaintive but valiant cry – “Cause I’ve seen my fair share of broken-hearted love / But it just don’t scare me half as much as it should.”

Hearing a song that has fired up a fair puck of late-night make-ups and break-ups in a cavernous, empty tent is fantastically peculiar. It gets me to thinking of the 8,000 Corona fans preparing themselves for tonight. Thousands of little stories and journeys – driving down from Belfast singing along to Coronas songs on the car stereo, flying in from Manchester, Dart-ing in from Kilbarrack, walking from Georges Street – all roads leading to where a band that has pervaded all facets of Irish society are set to perform.

Danny is practising his crowd walk, which he’ll do when the band perform ‘The Best Worrier’. He’ll leap into the crowd, he says, and walk through eager, surprised fans as far as the sound desk and back. There’s a kind of messianic, biblical aspect to it, with the Red Sea of fans parting before the singer. Danny outlines his strategy – “Off stage, straight over to the middle – try to get my moment in the middle of the arena – and then make my way back.” He strikes a McCartney-esque note: “Alrighty, then?”.

He practises the manoeuvre, pacing through the empty tent, dressed in simple black t-shirt, jeans and runners. As he grips the microphone, I’m struck by the solitary nature of it – and how small he looks in this large space, for a tall, well-built man. Later, when I ask him, does he picture the arena empty during the performance, he just laughs. The truth is that he has a lot to think about. During ‘We Couldn’t Fake It’, he’ll be hefting a self-cam around the stage: now, he practises camera angles, charts the plan. “I’ll go around the band –and then hand it down to you,” he explains to a video operative. “Then, I’ll try and get the crowd to sing.”

They’ve been at it for over an hour now. The 27A bus goes down Annesley Bridge Road, its top deck visible over the festival site hoardings. The weather is improving. Jim Lawless is everywhere, marshalling his troops, as he has done for over 20 years. Long-time tour manger Terry McGuinness carts guitars on and off; Roisin O belts out ‘Lost In The Thick Of It’; meanwhile, someone has the job of inflating giant balloons at the side of the stage.

It’s half past four when they’re eventually done. They stride off, silhouetted in blood red light. Everyone goes their own way. Back in the production office, Knoxy comes in looking for a pass, to get back in for the show.

The Coronas at Fairview Park. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

The Coronas released their first single ‘The Talk’ some 17 years ago. But let’s go even further back, to when The Coronas were to be found playing lunchtime gigs in their secondary school assembly hall at Terenure College, over two decades ago. If you are willing to get up and play in front of your entire school, two things spring to mind – first, you want desperately to be in a band; and second, you possess serious cojones. There were different line-ups – manager Jim Lawless was, at one point, the singer. There were different names – Kirros, Corona…

Still in school, their first proper gig was in the Clifden Court Hotel on Eden Quay. “The type of gig where the promoter gives you the tickets to sell,” Knoxy explains to me. “You sell it out, give him the dough and he gives you a few pound back.” But they loved it. It was what they wanted to do.

A live mini album – Coronas, Live At The Voodoo Lounge – appeared in 2004. “Five songs,” Danny reflects, “recorded out of the desk. Sounded absolutely terrible.” He laughs. It didn’t matter. They burned a load of CDs and gave them out to mates before schools and colleges broke-up.

Summer over, they played Whelans – and it was sold out. “There were touts outside,” Danny grins. “We thought there was another gig going on in The Village.” Some people already knew the lyrics of the songs – ‘Temporary Release’, ‘Take Your Lies’ and that first single, ‘The Talk’. There was no online presence – “I think we had a Bebo,” Knoxy jokes. UCD’s student radio station, Belfield FM, gave them the odd spin but there was no radio play worth talking about either. It was all down to word of mouth on the live mini-album.

There were disappointments. Danny recalls playing Whelans to two friends – everyone else had retired to the bar to watch Ireland play France in a World Cup qualifier. They did a nightclub in Kilkenny to half-a-dozen souls. Stood on a stage in Donegal made of plywood and kegs. For two years they did every gig they could get, more or less, reckoning that playing to half-a-dozen people was more beneficial than a rehearsal. “We just started booking gigs,” Conor remembers. “There was no plan. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

They were raw: no piano, no electric guitar, no backing tracks. But their fanbase was growing. Looking to play bigger venues, they thought they needed to add some sonic heft – enter Dave McPhillips.  “We were such a tight-knit little three piece – we still are,” Danny confirms. “So it was a risk.” But they bonded over Kings Of Leon in Vancouver and decided to give it a go.

The following year, ‘San Diego Song’, buttressed by heavy rotation on FM 104, became the song of the summer.  They were booked on a 2FM Tomorrow tour with Boss Volenti and Juno Falls. They watched those bands, observed how tight they were, and how professionally they conducted themselves. Danny is still embarrassed that, during the tour they were elevated into the headlining act, because of the radio play that ‘San Diego Song’ was receiving. “They were way better than us,” Knoxy affirms, grinning widely.

Steadily, they climbed the Jacob’s Ladder of venues: Whelans, the Village (now Opium) and the Button Factory in Dublin. The small room at Dolan’s Warehouse and the Milk Market, both in Limerick. MCD believed in them, and when they sold out the Ambassador in Dublin, that belief was reinforced. Now, as the end of 2024 starts to loom into view, they have just sold out a whopping five nights in 3Olympia in December, making them one of the biggest attractions in Irish rock bar none.

And I’m beginning to think I understand exactly why...

The Coronas at Fairview Park. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

An hour before doors, I lie on the grass in Fairview Park, listen to the rumble of trains, watch the spray of planes above. All is quiet, quiet, quiet, but there is an air of expectation. Then the crowd starts coming in, drip, drip, drip at first; then it’s a deluge.

Across East Wall, Marino and Drumcondra, they hear the roar of the crowd, as Sorcha Richardson hits the stage in the already packed tent. It’s quiet backstage now. Lar Kaye sips a beer, I take a coffee with

Hot Press photographer Miguel Ruiz, and we wait for the arrival of Danny, Graham and Conor. When they appear, the band gamely pose for Miguel’s swiftly orchestrated photo shoot, utilising what’s to hand – giant balloons, mammoth bobcat and stage ramp. We glimpse the raucous, anticipatory audience, and I ask Knoxy how’s he’s feeling? “Grand,” he replies with the air of a man who could be preparing to head out for a couple of pints. We leave them to their pre-planned Meet and Greet, watching from afar a long line of nervous fans, all of whom are dealt with warmly and courteously.

Decency pays.

A call goes out – 10 minutes to set. The Coronas hang easily with their families. A hurrah rises from the crowd as a roadie walks on stage. One minute! The crowd roar magnificently as a live video of the band in a huddle, singing a cappella beams from a stage size screen. The six of them strut onto the stage. Danny’s in a black leather shirt, white t-shirt, black jeans and black runners; Knoxy’s in a knee-length trenchcoat, white t-shirt, wide black trousers and white runners; and Conor wears a black jacket, white tee, black jeans and black runners. Róisín O looks positively statuesque. Lar Kaye and Cian Sweeney exude readiness. The sound is at Fatboy Slim levels, and confetti rains down from the off – a big Coronas moment – the crowd reacting like it’s the encore.

Coronas gigs offer a series of moments, which they continuously hone and adapt. There is a short debrief after every gig, reflecting on what landed, what didn’t, what might be improved. Later, Danny tells me that they always start big. That, they do. From the first chord, the band is cooking: ‘Addicted To Progress’ is followed by ‘Mark My Words’. The mammoth bouncing balls are unleashed for ‘Strive’; there are thousands of phones in the air for ‘The Long Way’ – we’re just four songs in and the place is jumping. The Heineken bars are deserted. They are singing all the way to the back – “We don’t have to talk; we can just make sounds.” There’s a lot of romance in the air – old lovers, new lovers, soon to be lovers.

The hunger to catch a live Coronas show is immense. The tent is rammed. Danny takes the opportunity to thank everyone for coming, telling them that he doesn’t take it for granted. Tomorrow is Father’s Day, and he calls out to his father in the audience and to new dads on the stage. “This is ‘True Love Waits’ – love you, Dad,” he declares. It’s the title track from their 2022 album, a record that followed the departure of guitarist Dave McPhillips and a global pandemic that attempted to rob them of their name. The crowd sings back every syllable.

The Coronas live at Fairview Park. Photo: Jason Doherty

During ‘The Best Worrier’, as planned Danny descends – shadowed by his aide-de-camp Jim Lawless, as ever glued to his charge – into the baying mob, miraculously making his way through masses of upturned hands, astonished faces, slaps on the back. Best laid plans often go awry: the crowd closing in behind him make it too difficult to go back the way he came. Instead,  Danny runs out of the tent, circles it at a rate of knots, returns to the stage from the side and scares the absolute bejaysus out of Knoxy by leaping on his back.

For ‘Heroes Or Ghosts’, Conor joins Knoxy and Danny at the front of the stage, recreating that original trio from which all this beauty and madness emanates. Danny stops singing; Conor and Knoxy stop playing bass and keys, while the audience boom back every word pitch-perfect, and man there be goosepimples. It’s a masterclass in working the crowd.

That sense of connection with their audience has always been a trump card. In the early days, the summer party anthem that was ‘San Diego Song’ converted hordes of students to The Coronas’ ranks. Debut album Heroes Or Ghosts laid further groundwork, while the hits from sophomore outing Tony Was an Ex-Con – ‘Listen Dear’, ‘Warm’ and ‘Someone Else’s Hands’ – further cemented a connection with couples and an older demographic. Danny tells me about his relief, after their debut album was released, that they were not going to be a one-hit band. But that first hit still resonates powerfully.

They finish with ‘San Diego Song’, a hundred golden laser-style lights piercing Fairview Park, lighting up an ecstatic audience in the throes of a Corona delirium…

King John's Castle, Limerick City

It’s beginning to happen,
It’s beginning to move
I’ve seen a reaction,
Yeah, I’ve watched us improve
And you could say we don’t care
Or that we don’t believe
But this is what we’ve got
And there’s nowhere we’d rather be.
–The Coronas, ‘Heroes or Ghosts’

The sun is shining for The Coronas’ soundcheck. Hertz rental vans arrive en masse to drop gear and kegs of Rockshore beer. Jim Lawless is roaming the Castle, headset on, hands on hips, charting territory, fielding a million calls. Terry McGuinness is on stage, struggling with heavy flight cases, gaffer taping stuff down and checking with the band. They are eating ham and cheese rolls at the sound desk. Photographer Johnny Wolff – strapped with half-a-dozen cameras a la Apocalypse Now Dennis Hopper – moves about documenting the sound check.

There are queries about sound, about the possibility of rain. There are apologies for hitting a bum note, apologies for kicking someone in the face with a large beach ball. Danny directs the sound desk. “Don’t turn that sub down too much,” he advises. “I enjoyed the extra woof.” Everything is pored over, as if they were doing it for the first time.

Following the success of Tony Was an Ex-Con, the songs kept coming: ‘Addicted To Progress’, ‘Mark My Words’, ‘Just Like That’, ‘Get Loose’, ‘Give Me A Minute’, ‘We Couldn’t Fake It’, ‘Lost In The Thick Of It’, ‘Haunted’, ‘Strive’. Part of The Coronas’ magic is to be found in the way they cut and dice tracks live. They twigged that ‘All The Luck In The World’ was a live smash if they got the arrangement right, so they reworked it, extending it and adding a breakdown – and it was their show-closer for up to two years.

Indeed, Danny informs me that nowadays he writes songs with a view to improving the live set.

Tinkering and tampering with the set-list is an ongoing Coronas obsession. They are always willing to learn: last year, Danny spent a Coldplay gig taking notes of the little things they do – shortening songs to just verse, chorus, outro – to keep the show moving at a pace, to get to the next hit. In Fairview Park, for new set-list song ‘What A Love’, videographer Johnny Broe was placed in the crowd. Danny asked was anyone on a first date, and they got the couple on the big screen – a scene which got one of the biggest cheers of the night.

I wonder can Danny manage to centre himself in the vortex of the storm that is a live gig? He tells me that he can now, that he tries to be present: that the band take moments to simply stop and acknowledge the crowd, a trick that he gleaned when touring with The Script.

“Just let it simmer,” he says, “let the crowd cheer and then do nothing and they’ll cheer louder and then do nothing and they’ll cheer louder again.” It’s a calmness that he puts down to the trust the band has in their crew, many of whom have been with The Coronas for years, and to whom they refer time and time again as family. “We just have to show up,” Conor quips.

You can work the crowd as much as you want, of course – but if you don’t have the songs it won’t land. Thing is that The Coronas possess the booty. People have walked down the aisle to their tracks; requested their songs for their funerals; and the length and breadth of Ireland, you hear Coronas tracks swirling out of shop radios and car stereos. Beyond Ireland too – to which their growing popularity in the USA and Australia attests. Indeed, since King John’s Castle they’ve been on the road with The Saw Doctors across Boston, New York and Chicago.

I suggest to Danny that his songwriting is above all else honest. “The songs that most connect are the ones that I’m most honest in,” he agrees. However, when I ask what it feels like to have pervaded the cultural consciousness in such a manner, there is a long pause, before all three laugh me out of town. “Can you see us squirming in our seats?” Danny howls. Pretentious they ain’t.

The Coronas live at King Johns Castle

They are six-foot deep at the bar in Katie Daly’s, but the fine loose porter and pictures of Dolores O’Riordan make it worth the wait for a pint.  “The Coronas are good,” a local wit tells me, “but they’ll always be in the shadow of Mary Black!” It’s a reference to Danny’s mother, the pioneering and utterly unique, award-winning Irish vocalist. I gave him a conspiratorial wink and disperse.

Across the parade, past the statue of Michael Hogan, stands King John’s Castle. VIPs are huddled inside, drinking Prosecco, eating pizza, hoping the weather improves. There’s a gusty wind blowing off the River Shannon and a smattering of rain in the air that threatens to spoil the party.

Since the arrival of the Anglo-Normans over 800 years ago, folks have battled over Limerick city. Domhnall Mór Ó Briain burned it to the ground rather than give it up to them, but they took it, razed all and built King Johns Castle to protect themselves from the Gaelic chieftains that surrounded them. Besieged several times in the seventeenth century, it is one of the best-preserved Norman castles in Europe, creating an immense backdrop beside the tumbling River Shannon.

And now in 2024, the rain has eased, and on the giant onstage screen, The Coronas are knocking on the back door of the Castle. It’s a good trick. Lar turns to the camera, and grins, as we follow them making their way through the castle walls and onto the stage, glimpsing them through gaps in the rigging. Momentarily, they pause at the bottom of the stage steps, hug one another and then walk on to the chimes of ‘Addicted To Progress’, the crowd baying along. “Beautiful,” Danny says, “that was so beautiful that I think we should do it again.” And into the chorus they heave.

The band are looking well pretty. Róisín O’s in a gorgeous  T-Bird style leather jacket; Lar in white satin jacket with Phoenix emblazoned on the back, wide brown trousers and mules.; Cian Sweeney in head to toe black; and The Coronas themselves are all straw-thin and sporting Ray-Bans, looking every inch rock and roll.

It’s Ireland. It’s raining again and blowing a gale, which blasts the mammoth beach balls eastwards across the roofs of Limerick City. “Jaysus, you’d think they let us throw a few parties,” Danny shouts. Then he works the audience. During ‘Mark My Words’, he calls out to all the different parts of the audience; ‘forgetting’ the words to ‘Long Way Around’ to the immense delight of the crowd, he asks them to help him sing it and they do so raucously, fists pumping.

“I know there are a million castles out there, thank you for choosing this one,” Danny says, before dedicating ‘True Love Waits’ to the newly engaged Róisín. He calls out The Coronas supergroup and Lar delivers a quicksilver solo, jumping off his pedal board like he’s been electrocuted. Danny teaches the audience the plaintive chorus of ‘Listen Dear’ that has soundtracked heartbreaks from Castlegregory to Garrycastle. Already knowing every word, they sing it back to him, their booming voices carrying all the way across the Shannon.

Things are damn boisterous down the back. There’s well lubricated Munster men there, but rather than starting a ruck, they mock-waltz to ‘Dreaming Again’, form impromptu disco circles and lift their girls into the air. Couples act out domestic dramas to the refrain of ‘Just Like That’ – “I’m not saying I want you back unless you say it first.” Way up there on the stage, introducing ‘How This Goes’, Danny instructs them: “Hands in the air or raise your drink.” A thousand glasses are raised aloft. Zigzagging my way back to the stage, I stumble upon Danny himself, in the crowd now, performing his walkabout. I now rank among the slack-jawed gawkers surprised by him; with turned, astonished faces they high five him. We glide past one another, he to the sound desk, I backstage.

Standing side of stage, you see the nakedness of it, the vulnerability, the honesty of the artistry, and not just the band: Terry McGuinness taking up and putting down guitars, Jim Lawless beefing around the place wearing headphones. Before hanging with them this past week, I had wondered would the spirit of the band that played those lunch-time school assembly gigs still exist. Watching just the three of them – Danny, Knoxy and Conor - front of stage, conduct the packed audience at King John’s Castle through ‘Heroes Or Ghosts’, I am looking at those same three buachallaí. They are stronger, more solid, and know their stuff. But the energy, passion and moxie that fuelled them then still underpins the mystical electric energy that their audience feeds so hungrily off.

The Coronas live at King Johns Castle

The applause dances in the night air. The gig is done. Backstage, the winding down has started.

Dawn was breaking across Limerick City, as I departed the hotel wing that The Coronas’ cast and crew had requisitioned for the night. I was cutting back to Kerry, ending my cameo in the world of one of Ireland’s hardest-working and greatest live bands, and relishing the thought of a pint in Kruger’s. They, meanwhile, were headed out to the East Coast of America for shows in New York, Boston, Chicago; keeping the show on the road, lighting up towns, turning on Coronas fans and winning new ones.

Now, there’s a new album, their eighth, Thoughts & Observations. The songs are being incorporated into their live set. There’s a furious week of promo shows. There’s gigs in the US and Australia. There’s those Olympia nights on the way in December.

Big wheel keeps on turning. The Coronas are in the premiership. They have built something special. They are winning games. They are gathering momentum. They are showing with every fresh step that they are the real deal. These are my thoughts and observations. I’m sure you have yours. As indeed do The Coronas...

Thoughts & Observations is out now. The Coronas play 3Olympia, Dublin (December 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17); Ulster Hall, Belfast (19); Vicar Street, Dublin (21); Gleneagle INEC Arena, Killarney (28); and Live at the Marquee, Cork (June 27, 2025).