Stoat

Other men of our age plod around golf courses. We load our cars with equipment and meet in our drummer’s attic a couple of times a month to drink tea, make up songs and make each other laugh.

The musical project that we call Stoat has been running more or less continuously since the late 80s. We’ve hit pause for babies, illness, bereavement, work – all the things that punctuate lives – but there’s always been a gravity that keeps us in orbit around the music.

There have been lots of ups and downs of course. One year we had to pass on Electric Picnic because guitar-player John had a head injury and couldn’t sustain a performance. He still tried – we did one gig where he sat in the car bundled up in a sleep mask and earplugs until stage time and afterwards he had to lie in a dark room for 24 hours. We’ve played to packed houses - with Explosions in the Sky on their first visit to Ireland in the filthiest pub in the country - and empty ones - in London with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar player borrowing our amplifier. We’ve recorded grand piano in a fancy studio, and cheap guitar in a cowshed.

When our kids were little we used to write songs about the trials of parenthood, but these days those kids are our biggest supporters. One of them is our guide through the current Dublin music scene. Another made our latest video. Another does art for our single covers.

A lot of what brings us together is our enduring friendship, but underlying everything is genuine artistic endeavour. There’s a purity there that emerges when all other motivations (money, fame etc) fall away and cease to matter – a freedom to forge our music from the reality of our lives.

People don’t come to see us to escape their day-to-day, but to join us in celebrating it – the absurdity, the mundanity, the whimsy, the dread, the disappointments and the delights. To see things as they truly are and still to love them.

… and also to dance and sing along and go home with smiles on their faces.