The Mary Wallopers
Main Stage, Saturday
★★★★☆
Halfway through The Mary Wallopers’ rapturously received Saturday-evening performance on All Together Now’s main stage, the video screen zooms in on an audience member livestreaming the gig to an elderly relative at home.
Much of what The Mary Wallopers are about would have been familiar to the gent soaking it up via video messages: ballads about working on London building sites, laments about the power of the church, drinking songs that crackle with foot-stomping euphoria.
The Dundalk group, headed by the trio of Charles and Andrew Hendy and Sean McKenna, have achieved huge success since emerging from the pandemic with their barnstorming mix of old and new. Musically, they update The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers, while their politics (of which the set contains a fair bit) are rooted in the present day.
A Palestinian flag is draped across a speaker, they speak out against the idiocy of the far right, and they backhandedly dedicate the uilleann-pipe-powered Gates of Heaven to the late bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey – “may he burn in hell”.
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They drink deep of the wellspring of Irish folk with mossy bangers such as Love Will Never Conquer Me and Turfman from Ardee. Fuelled by duelling guitars, pipes and banjo, the material at times has an almost uncanny folk-horror quality – a version of Home Boys Home, as originally made famous by The Dubliners, could have graced the Wicker Man soundtrack.
The unabashed Irishness of their material has gone down a treat both at home and in Britain, and they even have a quasi-crossover hit in the form of their penultimate tune, Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice. It’s a singalong with a whoa-oh chorus that suggests Mumford & Sons lost on the Cooley Peninsula and working up a sweat as night closes in.
Wafts of azure vapour – smoke streaming from a flare held aloft by a particularly enthusiastic fan – streak over the audience as they sing along. It’s a true-blue moment that confirms The Mary Wallopers as tub-thumpers of the first order and the perfect party-starters as a night-time chill descends on All Together Now.
