Because I had tried that for ten years and seventeen line-up changes with The Bruisers, and it was like pushing a square up a hill. Then Mike left and I joined the band, and I realised that I was with people who were giving their all for something. “We used to get the call all the time to open up for national acts. “My band The Bruisers predated the Dropkicks by almost ten years,” Barr says. They became a punk phenomenon in Boston, graduating to regular gigs at the dingy basement club The Rat, where local bands including the Pixies earned their stripes before them. “We come from families where we’re meant to work,” he says. That’s been the band’s hallmark since their singer-songwriter Ken Casey founded them, when relentless drive compensated for their rawness. “Hello at the back!” The Murphys in full swingīarr and Brennan are in London to take care of business, flying back to the US after they’ve talked to Classic Rock. Their Claddagh Fund has raised more than two million dollars, often for addiction recovery, and their desire to help friends and neighbours inspired many of the new songs, not least an unlikely cover of You’ll Never Walk Alone, a song for decades sung by Liverpool FC supporters. But what draws their desert record together is a social conscience that has seen the band fervently support unions, play local firemen’s funerals and raise funds for the victims of 2013’s Boston Marathon bombing (commemorated on the album’s quietly unifying anthem 4-15-13). The band’s new album, 11 Short Stories Of Pain & Glory, typically ranges from trad Irish opener The Lonesome Boatman to the bar-room-blitzing yarn I Had A Hat. Brennan, his bandmate since 2003, is bearded and more affably amused.
And in two and a half weeks, we were done.”īarr, Dropkick Murphys’ lead singer since replacing Mike McColgan in 1998, is tattooed right up his arms, lean and rangy, the black-framed glasses and the white hair beneath his cap suggesting the disciplined 48-year-old family man, the bratty, rabble-rousing wild man now a thing of past. It was a thirty-minute drive to anywhere other than a dollar store and a gas station that looked dangerously close to running out of gas. We were told that cow had probably wandered off its ranch and died of thirst. There were acres of pecan trees – and sand. “As people from New England it was very strange. “The studio was in the second-biggest pecan farm in America,” explains guitarist Tim Brennan, sitting with me and singer Al Barr in London.
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