“We’re the Mary Wallopers,” says Charles Hendy, Irish brogue thick with mischief, getting straight to the point, “and this is a song about the Queen of England.”
To the twang of a banjo and high trill of a penny whistle, he launches into Bold O’Donaghue, a traditional about a County Armagh lothario with blarney so charming it could bed him a royal. Any staunch monarchists thinking maybe this isn’t a show for them surely have no doubt about it by the time Irish folk’s new young rabble-rousers run through The Rich Man and the Poor Man. It’s another age-old song sung with a recently departed sovereign in mind, about how wealthy people all end up in hell, “shovelling coalium”. “The moral of the story,” sings Hendy to the beat of a bodhrán, inciting a tremendous roar from the crowd, “the rich are fucking cuntiums.”
Propelled to fame by livestreamed home concerts during lockdown, the Mary Wallopers are a Dundalk seven-piece centred around multi-instrumentalist frontman Hendy, his banjo-playing brother Andrew and guitarist Seán McKenna. Stout of heart, voice and beer – Guinness cans never far from hand – they’re revitalising Irish trad for a new generation with rowdy reinterpretations of hand-me-down odes to sex, devilry and drink (mainly drink). Like the Dubliners, the Pogues and Jinx Lennon before them, they elevate the displaced and the downtrodden, sticking two fingers up to the establishment and, in doing so, yanking a thread that unites all rebel music from folk to punk and rap (the Hendy brothers also perform as political hip-hop outfit TPM).
Sung eyes-closed by the mulleted and tracksuit-trousered Andrew, John O’Halloran is a haunting ballad about the horrors of immigration that hushes the room. Charles’s ragged Building Up and Tearing England Down mourns Irish blood spilled in the foundations of the British empire. The Mary Wallopers’ Celtic soul is heavy, but their best moments are their least complex. A raucous final slew of floor-shaking singalongs starts and ends in righteous, booze-sodden nihilism: first with the Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice – a Glaswegian drinking song popularised in the 1960s by Scottish singer Hamish Imlach – then finally with All for Me Grog, as most famously sung by the Dubliners. They’re timeless tunes that have been performed by many – if rarely with such wit, fire and infectiousness.
