A month ago Ireland’s The Mary Wallopers were little known outside their home country.
They had been garnering a solid yet loyal fanbase through persistent gigging across Europe, North America, and Australia but were not yet household names. However, a prematurely terminated festival appearance foisted the feisty folk band into global headlines in mid-August.
As the band stepped up to the main stage on the first afternoon of the three-day Victorious Festival in Southsea, England, they barely got their first song started before a member of festival staff interrupted their set. A worker had taken umbrage to the Palestinian flag The Mary Wallopers had hung on an amp stack and walked on to the stage after one-minute of music and took down the flag.
A videographer recorded the entire ordeal, showing band members requesting the return of the flag, leading the audience in a “Free Palestine” chant, and then having their sound abruptly cut off.
In the hours that followed, other bands including The Last Dinner Party quit the festival in solidarity with The Mary Wallopers, while Saturday headliners The Vampire Weekend issued a statement of support. Festival promoters then released a statement accusing the band of making a “discriminatory chant” which was retracted after the band posted video evidence that this never happened.
As the incident became news around the world, instead of silencing The Mary Wallopers the festival had opened them, and their message, up to a wider audience.
Just days later, band founder Andrew Hendy (The Mary Wallopers were formed by Hendy, his brother Charles, and friend Sean McKenna, who has since departed the band) is insistent that the incident not distract from the current events in Gaza. “I don’t really want to talk about it too much in a way because I think there’s a very clear video of exactly what happened there, and I think it’s important to realise that all over the world, particularly the western world, people are trying to play down what’s happened in Palestine, they’re trying to hide it,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
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It did seem a bit puzzling as to why a promoter would book a band widely known for their political stances. “To be honest, we always played with a Palestinian flag on stage,” Hendy acknowledges, “for the last five or six years. We’ve always been vocal about it, standing up for what’s right.
“They’re trying to put on music festivals and events that are supposed to be fun, [promoters] book rebellious bands like us or outspoken bands like us and then expect us to not say anything and hide what’s happening to the listeners and to the general public.
“And I just think it’s important to stay educated on what’s happening in Palestine, and the murder we are watching unfold in Palestine, and even look back into what’s been happening to the people of Palestine for years upon years upon years even before any of this war started. I don’t even know if you could call it a ‘war’ because they have nothing to fight back with. It’s just really disappointing and tragic that, at this stage into the genocide, people are still trying to hide the truth of what’s happening and what’s going on.”
Hendy tells us that the festival promoters apologised and is “going to donate to Palestine now.”
He’s appreciative of the other acts who removed themselves from the festival after The MaryWallopers’ set was shut down — Cliffords and The Academic joined The Last Dinner Party in boycotting the festival’s second day. “All the bands pulling out made it a big enough problem that the festival had to respond in a more mature way than they had been responding.
“So, if anything, hopefully that thing happening with us will just inspire more artists to speak the truth and speak up for what’s right and not be afraid about your career… Nobody’s gonna threaten me by telling me that I won’t get paid for a gig. I don’t care because I think what’s happening here in Palestine is much more important. It’s important to stand by your morals and I think if you stand by your morals nine times out of ten you will get people standing with you.”
The Hendy brothers aren’t strangers to virality.
Based in the regional town of Dundalk (close to the border that separates the North and South of Ireland, and only a 90-minute drive from the Irish capital of Dublin), the brothers’ first taste of notoriety came about in 2015 when they were known as the hip-hop outfit TPM. The Specials-inspired clip for their song “All the Boys on the Dole” clocked up over a quarter of a million views on YouTube, pushing the song to half a million streams on Spotify.
The Hendys and fellow Wallopers went viral again in 2020 when, wearing tin foil hats and utilising the slogan “Bring back dial-up”, they counter-protested a right-wing conspiracy theorist rally against 5G. Also in the COVID lockdown era, they live-streamed raucous musical sessions from Hendy’s makeshift living room pub that featured Zoom guest performances from the likes of fellow on-the-rise Irish star CMAT.
Since then, The Mary Wallopers’ penchant for collecting traditional folk songs (which Hendy refers to as “ballads”) as they travel around has allowed them to build an enviable musical catalogue. At last count, Hendy estimates, “We probably know a few hundred songs each or more, maybe.”
Hendy’s band has mostly filled two albums (2022’s self-titled debut and 2023’s Irish Rock N Roll) and two EPs (2019’s A Mouthful of The Mary Wallopers and last year’s Home Boys Home) with their interpretations of traditional folk songs, the likes of which you might find on second-hand vinyl by The Chieftains or The Dubliners.
The Wallopers have given the songs a muscular boost (with inevitable comparisons to The Pogues, who they have covered) and sometimes a lyrical update. Their musical renown led to them being invited to feature on Dropkick Murphys’ For the People album earlier this year (which also included legendary post-punk folk troubadour Billy Bragg).
Ahead of their return to Australia — this time playing bigger venues than their 2024 visit — The Mary Wallopers have released original composition “The Juice”. Without doubt one of the year’s wildest singles, it captures the raw, unfettered energy of a Wallopers’ gig. The tune’s fiddle and drums-led minute and a quarter outro will have your head spinning as it storms towards its swirling climax. As they proclaim in the song, “this is Irish rock and roll.”
“The melody in the song is based around a traditional Irish tune called ‘Colliers’,” explains Hendy. “I had the idea for the song about seven or eight months ago and it was just going around in my head all the time. I went up to a cottage in Donegal and it was on a wee peninsula, there was no phone reception or anything, and I had this old tape recorder and I was messing around trying to make songs and it was like this little tiny cottage and there were pictures of Jesus all over the walls.
“There was a massive storm and I fairly went deep into it and I just started playing the tune on my guitar and I was thinking about the drums and where they should be. I kind of wanted to make like a garage rock song based on traditional Irish song.”
He adds what sounds like it should be The Mary Wallopers’ mission statement: “It’s good to find another way to continue bringing traditional Irish music forward.”
Their respect for Irish tradition runs deep, as can be seen in the video for “The Juice” where the band are casually standing around a rock in a field. That’s no ordinary rock, reveals Hendy. “That stone that we are standing in front of is called Cúchulainn’s Stone [aka Clochafarmore] and he was an ancient Irish warrior. [His story] was kind of like the Irish version of The Illiad, it’s called Táin Bó Cúailnge, it’s like our ancient mythology epic.”
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Sharing their love of traditional Irish folklore also spurs on The Mary Wallopers’ busy touring schedule. Hendy was hoping for a less hectic gigging calendar this year so the band could work on creating more original material, but the allure of bringing his traditions to a wider audience proved to be too strong.
“It makes it worthwhile,” Hendy says of the live shows, “to see that connection with people and to see people singing along with songs that years ago I’d be playing and no one would know or people wouldn’t care about. Like some old Irish songs — to see thousands of people singing songs that some of them didn’t even have recordings of and seeing people go mental singing them is a very good feeling.”
Hendy is proud to be a part of the wide variety of Irish musicians currently grabbing the spotlight: Kneecap, Fontaines D.C., Lankum, and the aforementioned CMAT. He contemplates why this might be happening at this point in time, “The general public is becoming more receptive to Irish culture. We’ve always had great writers: James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, we’ve always had those people. We’ve always had great musicians and singers like Sinead O’Connor, like countless amounts. Globally, people are just at a time and place where they’re catching on to the Irish style of expression.”
Ticket information for The Mary Wallopers’ Australian tour can be found here.
