Hermitage playing to their own tune

HERMITAGE Green have won a fairly sizeable following lately and the uninitiated in Clare are getting plenty of chances to see them.

They were in Kilrush last week, are in Kenny’s of Lahinch this Thursday and will be at the Doolin Folk Festival next month.

 

Strongly associated with Limerick where they came together, there is one Clare member, Dermot Sheedy from Darragh. He says the band have been very busy lately.

“This year has been a bit mad for us, we’ve done a lot of travelling. We were in Australia in January, then we went to South Africa and we went over to France. We were over in London as well and we had a fairly successful Irish tour. In the last couple of months we managed to sell out the Academy in Dublin, Dolan’s in Limerick, the Pav in Cork and Róisín Dubh in Galway.”

The group formed out of a session at the Curraghgower Bar in Limerick. They began playing a number of bars in the city but last September decided to give it a real go and went into music full time. Having built up a following, an album is on the horizon.

“We have the bones of 20 original songs and we’re gigging the whole time, building towards an album. We’ll hopefully go into the studio in the autumn time.”

There’s a wide mix of instruments involved. “It’s all based around acoustic instruments; we have acoustic guitar, dobro, tenor banjo, five string banjo, bodhrán, bass guitar, four part harmony, didgeridoo, whatever you want yourself! It’s very different, I think that’s what makes it so attractive to people, because it’s not your run of the mill rock band set-up.”

There are a lot of diverse musical influences on the members too. “Dan (Murphy) would have grown up listening to a lot of heavy metal, then Darragh Griffin, the main songwriter, would have grown up listening to anything and everything, he’s a classical pianist but did a masters in trad last year. I’d have grown up in a very Trad background but it’s a new challenge for all of us. It’s exciting.”

Given the range of instruments involved and the diversity of influences, he says it’s quite hard to put a fitting label on Hermitage Green.

“You really have to come to a gig to get why it’s so different, and I presume that’s why people enjoy coming back, because it is different. It has trad elements and more vocal elements as well. A lot of people try and pigeon-hole us as being like Mumford and Sons but that’s because of the instruments we play, we might look a bit like them but it’s not at all like that.”

He says as they get more established, people are more inclined to listen to the songs at their shows rather than having conversations with those they came with.

“We try to make it as intimate as possible. We recently did a tour of Cork and Kerry, loads of small venues. They all had a minimum of 50 and the biggest was the Pav, but the next biggest was about 150 and they were all seated. So it was very different for us because our history would have been of playing in bars that were relatively noisy and loud with people chatting.

“As people are getting to know our music, they are listening to it more and singing along. You can expect a mixed bag and a big array of music.”