Steve Wall’s big viral moment arrived in the grey days of early January when he tapped out a social media post criticising Bono. He was motivated to do so after the U2 frontman accepted a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the outgoing US president, Joe Biden – a development that shocked Wall, lead singer with The Stunning and a successful actor with roles in Dune: Part 2 and The Witcher. “He doesn’t need a medal from a man funding a genocide,” he wrote in reference to Biden’s track record in Gaza. His remarks, initially posted on Elon Musk’s X, took on a life of their own and ricocheted around the internet. Talk about brewing up a storm.
“I was nervous about doing it. I’ve met Bono, yeah, a few times,” says Wall, who has also had success as lead singer with The Walls, a duo he formed with brother Joe when The Stunning went on hiatus. “U2 gave The Walls the support in Slane Castle in 2001. We sent them The Walls’ first album, Hi-Lo. They said they liked it. They put us on the bill. I remember meeting Bono backstage at Slane, very briefly.”
Bono would later help Wall secure a visa to the United States, for which he remains grateful, he explains from his home in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. “I needed to get an O-1 visa for America,” he says, referring to a temporary visa awarded to individuals “who possess extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics”.
“As part of that process, you have to get letters from people who basically [say] you’re a stand-up citizen, and somebody of worth,” recollects Wall.
“Apparently, the more influential people you can find to do that for you, the better. Aidan Gillen wrote me a letter. And then a mutual friend asked Bono. He was the first one to deliver it. I was grateful for it. He delivered a letter saying, ‘I Bono... hereby state, Steve Wall…’ A very generous thing to do. I also sat beside him at a mutual friend’s wedding. Myself and Joe had a great conversation with him.”
It’s a sunny lunchtime in Dublin, and Wall is enjoying a rare breather. He’s recently returned from Northern Ireland, where he has a part in the Game of Thrones spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. He’s also looking ahead to shows later this year by The Stunning, the band he started in Galway with Joe – and with whom he has clocked up hits such as Brewing Up A Storm, Romeo’s On Fire and Half Past Two. But the conversation has inevitably turned to his criticism of Bono and Wall’s long-standing and vocal support for Gaza.
“I’m a member of the Irish-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and have been for quite some time – for years. I’ve been going on marches for probably 15 years or so now. I remember bringing my daughter [Tuccia], who was only five or six at the time, to a march. The unfairness of what’s been happening to Palestinian people has always been on my radar.”
When the conflict in Gaza escalated in 2023, he noted that Bono – in theory modern rock’s great campaigning voice – wasn’t speaking out. “There are so many people who are so upset by the images we’ve been seeing. I was aware U2 weren’t saying anything. They were doing the gigs in Las Vegas at the time. People were saying on social media, ’Why isn’t Geldof saying anything, why isn’t Bono saying anything?’ I wasn’t expecting them to. When it came to the offer of this medal from Joe Biden, I thought ‘Oh, he’s not going to accept that’. The genocide was at its worst. They were talking about America sending more of these 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs. When I saw about Bono being offered the medal, I tweeted ’Surely he won’t accept that’. I didn’t know he already had.”
Irish music is riven with invisible red lines – there are certain artists you simply don’t dare criticise (yes, they are exactly who you think they are). Wall, though, has long been willing to say the unsayable. He’s a vocal critic of Irish commercial radio, which he accuses of largely shutting out Irish musicians.
“They cover their asses by playing contemporary pop acts that are signed to major labels: Wall to wall Dermot Kennedy, Gavin James ... whatever.” In 2012, he led the charge against the ghastly marketing campaign that was Arthur’s Day, which involved UK-headquartered drinks giant Diageo working with a London PR firm to airlift British artists into Dublin to celebrate an “Irish” brand of dark beer.
“There is always the worry that you are burning bridges and going to scupper your career,” says Wall. “Then a year or two passes, and I’ve found it hasn’t affected things. If anything, we’ve garnered some respect within the industry, where people take you seriously and go, ’Okay, we’re not going to mess with them’. You have principles.
“I found it fine to speak out about things as long as you weren’t on silly rants. Even with Arthur’s Day, I was surprised how few artists backed me up. No one was saying anything. They were keeping schtum. Only a couple came out: Declan O’Rourke, Mundy, Christy Moore. The following year, Christy Moore came out and wrote a song, Arthur’s Alco-Holiday, which was the nail in the coffin.”
Wall’s fearlessness has served him well. Born in London and raised between Dublin and Ennistymon in Clare, he initially had success with songs such as Brewing Up A Storm – which, with its cascading “Da da da da” chorus, was inescapable in Ireland in the early 1990s.
But in 2010, well into his 40s, he decided to reconnect with his first love – acting. Since then, his screen career has blossomed, with eye-grabbing character parts in HBO shows such as Raised by Wolves and Netflix’s Black Doves, where he was perfectly cast as the emotionally brutalised hit-man father of Ben Whishaw’s character. He also popped up at the end of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2, playing the captain of the Galactic Emperor’s personal guard – a significant part given that his Imperial Majesty was portrayed by Christopher Walken.
“With Dune, I got 24 hours’ notice to fly,” he remembers. “I got a call on a Wednesday morning at about 11am saying, could I fly to Budapest that night. The next morning, I’m brought to this massive sound stage and introduced to [director] Denis Villeneuve.”
It was a trip into the unknown for the actor, who was only vaguely familiar with the cult sci-fi franchise.
“I hadn’t seen the first Dune. I didn’t even know who was in it. He [Villeneuve] was such a nice man. He said, ‘Oh, Steve ... Thank you for coming at short notice. You have saved my life’. And I said, ‘I bet you say that to all the boys’. He was a really warm person. And he said, ‘Come over here, let me introduce you to your fellow cast’. And I walked over, and literally there was Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Austin Butler, who I’d seen in the Elvis film two weeks beforehand. And Christopher Walken. And Villeneuve goes, ’Hey, everybody, this is Steve… He’s playing Bashar’. And they all turn around. They went, ‘Hi, Steve’. I was nervous. But I was even more nervous then. I had one line to say, but I was sh*tting bricks.”
An unexpected side effect of his success as an actor is that it has renewed his passion for music. “It’s the one thing where you’ve got some kind of power. As an actor you can be quite powerless. Unless you’re an A-lister being offered involvement as an executive producer. Where you’re at that stage, where you’re enough of a name where someone will back the project. When you’re an actor like myself in a supporting role, generally pretty replaceable, you can be very powerless. That’s not a nice feeling. I started out trying to be an actor before The Stunning. It’s funny – recently I’ve been reminded why I stopped it and decided to start a band. It was exactly that same feeling where somebody else has the power to point the finger and say, ’No you can’t work’.”
His feelings about The Stunning are complicated. Brewing Up A Storm, Half Past Two and Romeo’s On Fire made the band beloved in Ireland. However, they were unable to attract much of an international following despite major touring, which included a run supporting Bob Dylan in London.
“We broke up out of frustration in 1994. We were funding everything ourselves through the gigs in Ireland – that funded all the trips abroad and also all our releases. We weren’t managing to get that break to get our music released abroad, to get booking agents, to get the festival circuit. Then myself and Joe formed The Walls and we had another frustrating time. Again, it was all self-financed. We didn’t intend to reform The Stunning when we reissued [1990 debut album] Paradise in the Picturehouse in 2003.”
He has thoughts about the state of the record business in 2025 – in particular, the soaring price of concert tickets. “The Oasis debacle is going from bad to worse,” he says, referring to the controversial use by Oasis of a “dynamic pricing” model for their reunion tour that resulted in punters paying hand over fist to hear Liam Gallagher belt out Wonderwall.
“Now they’re talking that the set will be just under an hour [a claim recently made by Liam on social media, presumably in jest]. I’m kind of sniggering to myself. I have no intention of going at that kind of money. It’s horrible, the whole thing. If you spend €400 on a ticket, you want some value for money. It puts a lot of pressure on the artist to deliver.”
Wall despairs, too, for the state of modern music – especially the mewling, messianic pop to which he is exposed when out and about in Dublin. “There’s so much over-anxious, emotive singing. I’m not going to name names. You’ll know from the description who I’m speaking about. There’s so much of that stuff. It’s formulaic – music that sounds like it was made on an app. It’s horrendous – over-emotive. I cannot listen to it. I would have to leave if it was on in a shop. It’s ego-eccentric, indulgent. The melodies are like nursery rhyme melodies. You feel like saying, ’Will you please listen to a Beatles song, a Radiohead song, a Pink Floyd song, a Cole Porter song’.”
Still, there are glimmers of light. He is full of praise for a younger generation of Irish artists such as Dublin post-punks Fontaines DC, the Murder Capital, from Cork and Dublin, and Belfast-Derry Irish rap trio Kneecap.
“I have huge respect for Fontaines DC and their stance on Palestine [they spoke out about Gaza at the recent Brit Awards]. I think that is so important. There are so many people – not just musicians and actors – afraid to speak out in case they are blacklisted. But there are so many people that are sitting on the fence as well – ‘Oh I don’t watch the news any more’. They stick their head in the sand. Who is going to fight the monsters? The world is now full of monsters, and they’re brazen. They’re putting their atrocities on social media – Trump is parading his ignorance in front of the world with his meeting with Zelenskiy. If everyone sticks their head in the sand, then there’s nobody to fight the monsters. And the monsters end up ruling the Earth.”
Despite The Stunning’s lack of international success, in many ways Wall has had a gilded existence. Supporting U2 at Slane, reading lines with Christopher Walken – what a life to have lived. Yet there has been personal tragedy too: in 2017, Wall’s niece Estlin, aged just three, died in a car crash, and his brother Vincent sustained a severe and significant brain injury when he had to swerve to avoid a truck that had pulled out from behind a bus. The tragedy has indescribably marked the entire family, and, perhaps, it’s one more reason why Wall feels the need to speak out, while he has the opportunity to do so.
With St Patrick’s Day behind us, he feels, for example, that “every Patrick’s weekend our Government dances a jig for the American administration in Washington”. “What’s happening in the US right now is like an updated version of the McCarthy era, but it’s even more dangerous, with the involvement of big tech companies and media organisations that are controlling what we see,” he adds. “It’s propaganda in our pockets. That’s why it’s really important for people to look at a variety of news sources, including Al Jazeera. What we’re seeing now in Gaza, in Palestine, is the death of the human soul. [...] Europe needs to pull together and let America implode, which they will. There’s another four years of this Oompa Loompa.”
But while rarely reluctant to voice an opinion, he feels he is far mellower than earlier in his career. He used to get wound up all the time – often over the most trivial things. Today, with The Stunning playing to sell-out audiences and his acting going better than he had ever dared to dream, he is happy taking life as it comes.
“I used to get upset if our album didn’t get reviewed or they did some kind of thing about ‘New Irish Music’ and we didn’t get included. Or we didn’t get airplay with the new single. Those things, I used to take to heart, because we put so much work into it. And then when my daughter was born, I changed. I gave less of a sh*t. My priority was my child. Everything changed. I felt better for it.”
The Stunning play the Olympia, Dublin, on September 13th, Dolan’s Limerick, November 28th, 29th and Cyprus Avenue Cork, December 20th
