‘People of all ages get very emotional at our gigs’: how ‘trad punk’ folk band the Mary Wallopers became a live sensation

On a Monday night in the backstreets of Camden, the three founding members of the Mary Wallopers are mere days away from the biggest show of their careers, playing to many thousands on Glastonbury’s revered Park Stage – and to considerably more watching on TV. And how are they warming up for this massive breakthrough gig? By headlining a fundraising evening for the London Irish Centre, to a crowd of barely 100, alongside the Irish Pensioners Choir. At one point, a woman in her 80s called Breda is brought on stage beside them to sing the ballad Slievenamon and they watch like polite grandchildren, humbled by the performance of a singer three times their age. Later, they will be summoned back to draw the raffle winners from a tombola. It’s not rock star glamour in its conventional form.

Four days later, they take the stage at Glastonbury in their enlarged live form as a seven-piece, the bass amp draped with a Palestinian flag, and the crowd is packed, even at 3.15pm. Bleach-haired Charles Hendy sets the tone with a grin: “ We are the Mary Wallopers , and this is Bould O’Donahue, a song about riding the Queen’s daughter.” (As a marker of the song’s longevity, the monarch in the version popularised by the Aran sweater-wearing Clancy Brothers was Queen Victoria.) At another point they play a 400-year-old song, The Rich Man and the Poor Man, with lyrics tweaked to incorporate the c-word, to gleeful cheers. They induce moshpits with their punked-up versions of jigs Frost Is All Over and The Blarney Stone , and the crowd seems to be singing along to every word of Hamish Imlach’s witty tale of boozy regret, Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice.

It is a reception that has been repeated across venues in the UK, the US and Australia, as well as Ireland, in the past two years – during which the Mary Wallopers have become a word-of-mouth live phenomenon. At the heart of this is their ability to move seamlessly between crackling cabaret-style banter, raucous tales of pintmen, laughter and getting laid, chaotic, Pogues-style punk velocity – limbs and spilled pints everywhere – and pin-drop silence for heartrending songs about the vicious crimes of the Catholic church, or renowned Irish Traveller singer Pecker Dunne.

“At the Roundhouse gig in London this year there was a fella crowd-surfing, and he had a walking cane and a Covid mask,” recalls Andrew Hendy. “That was absolute class. I love to see the auld fellas who look like they’ve never been near a moshpit before, dressed quite conservative, absolutely going for it. Our audiences are very welcoming.” His brother Charles agrees. “People of all ages get very emotional at our gigs: whether it be elation or a kind of catharsis, it’s fucking unreal. And that’s what it’s for, of course.”

On a Tuesday afternoon two weeks after Glastonbury, the original Mary Wallopers trio – the Hendy brothers and their friend Seán McKenna – are gathered in the sunlit beer garden of O’Carroll’s bar in the Seatown area of Dundalk. Seagulls caw overhead, and the Guinnesses arrive with metronomic regularity. Dundalk is halfway between Belfast and Dublin, right on the border with the north, and consequently earned the nickname “El Paso” during the Troubles. With a population of about 45,000, the town has not seen much trickle down from the surplus of billions accrued from the lightly taxed global tech firms an hour down the road in Dublin. The effects of Covid haven’t helped either – there are a lot of closed-down businesses in the town centre.

Dundalk is also a town with a rich musical heritage – after picking me up from the bus station, the Hendy brothers show me the now-closed pub McManus’, and its mural of the Corrs, a local band who started out there, just as the Mary Wallopers did. Bill Clinton, his nose in a Guinness, has found his way into the painting too. “It was pretty funny gigging there at times,” Andrew recalls. “It was a fairly rough pub, drug dealers about, fights starting, then you’d get a bunch of American tourists walk in to all that, going,” – he switches from his Louth accent to excitable American – “Oh my gaad, is this the Corrs pub?”

I had a dream one night where I met [the late Dubliners singer] Luke Kelly, and he said to me: ‘You should learn ballads’

There is a palpable air of relief that they are finally having a break from touring. Have they missed Dundalk? “Yes!” they all say as one. “But it does make sense though, our plan over the last two years,” reflects Charles: “Just absolutely gig the bollocks out of it. Because our gigs are great. And we cut our teeth playing gigs for nothing – all over the place. Like wherever we were asked to go, we’d just go.”

Their ascent in the past two years is built on deep foundations – years on the dole, playing sessions in exchange for a steady supply of beer and whisky, singing largely unaccompanied. One St Patrick’s Day they were asked to play in McManus’, and showed up with one guitar to share between them. Sitting in the corner of the pub, they played from 2pm until 2am. By Andrew’s estimation, they probably knew about 100 songs each at that point, drawn mostly from the vast reservoir of Irish folk music some call “trad” and the band refer to as “ballads”. “It was often an endurance event,” laughs Charles. “Eventually we’d run out of ballads, around midnight, and switch to country and western or dancehall songs – Shabba Ranks, things like that.”

While all three core members grew up surrounded by, and singing, traditional songs, they were just as invested in punk, jungle and rap as teenagers. Yet the Mary Wallopers began with an intervention from a hero of Irish ballad singing – sort of. “I had moved to the Netherlands and got a shit job in a factory,” recalls Charles. “I was a factory picker; it was horrific, I hated it. And I had a dream one night where I met [the late Dubliners singer] Luke Kelly, and he said to me: ‘You should learn ballads’ – and I was that hopeless in my life that the next morning I was like: ‘Well I’ll just start doing that, then.’” Charles called his brother, and they hatched a plan to move back to Dundalk and become musicians.

Initially, they made rap as TPM (TaxPayers’ Money), and had a surprise semi-hit in 2015 with All the Boys on the Dole . “It was a great anthem for us at the time, we were really poor,” says Andrew. They can still imitate the alarm the pay-as-you-go electricity meter would make when running empty, living together in digs in “the gut” area of Dundalk. The success of that song daunted them, however, so the brothers turned to ballads instead, drafting their old friend Seán – who Charles had first approached on the school bus because he was carrying a bag depicting Irish socialist James Connolly.

DIY is at the core of everything we do. Every good subculture that has ever existed is people just doing it themselves

“Jesus we’ve had some great times at sessions,” says Charles, fondly. “Because at their best they’re fucking lawless . There’s no hierarchy to it, no gatekeeping. At the core of it, it’s not about preserving heritage or whatever – it’s supposed to be fun.”

The band have always taken a zealously hands-on approach to everything they do. Pre-Covid, they put on gigs in a barn outside Dundalk, drawing water from a well, and driving gig-goers out from the town centre in a transit van; some friends sold home-brewed beer, others made food. They paid all the bands – including their local hero, punk poet Jinx Lennon – and didn’t take a profit. When far-right, anti-5G conspiracists turned up in Dundalk in May 2020, they improvised a satirical counter-protest that went viral, donning tinfoil hats and calling themselves Dundalk Against Change, with the inspired slogan “Bring Back Dial-Up: the internet is too fast!” On 21 July, they were pictured putting their money where their mouths are again, leading the chants through a megaphone at an anti-fascist protest in Dundalk, following horrifying recent arson attacks on refugee accommodation.

It’s ironic, given the Mary Wallopers’ emphasis on live performance, that the Covid lockdown was the making of them – they built a makeshift pub in their house and started livestreaming regular trad sessions on YouTube. These immediately captured a mood, and an audience: providing the connection and warmth we were all missing, cracking jokes, singing, and swearing like dockers. “We just needed to be performing, so we set about fixing it,” says Charles. “We approach everything like this. The livestreams, our first EP, organising gigs, putting on club nights – DIY is at the core of everything we do. Every good subculture that has ever existed is people just doing it themselves.”

That tinkering spirit extends to treating the canon of Irish traditional music with a healthy irreverence. In any case, they argue, their habit of rearranging verses, writing new ones, tweaking wording, changing instrumentation, tempo and even tunes is entirely in keeping with folk music’s true essence as a living, breathing thing, always open to adaptation. All for Me Grog , their euphoric set closer on recent tours, is a fine example, transformed from a cheeky sailors’ drinking song into a frantic anthem that exclaims: let’s go down swinging, sweating and singing. “Usually it’s delivered quite jovial-like,” says Charles, “but I much prefer the desperation in the way that Andrew sings it live – I mean, it is about an alcoholic.”

Like their friends in Lankum , who have won acclaim for contorting trad standards into altogether darker new shapes, the Mary Wallopers have no patience at all for censorious gatekeepers: “In certain circles the guitar is still not considered a traditional instrument. Traditionally males didn’t sing harmonies… there’s a lot of stupid shit like that,” says Seán. To record their third album this autumn, they intend to bring in more new instruments, and some careful use of samples, and to write more new songs: to date, only three of their own have seen the light of day. “We could do 20 albums like the last one,” says Andrew, “but where’s the fun in that? There’s no point being complacent and just doing stuff because that’s what people like, because then we may as well be still working on building sites.”

They’ve never really given themselves space outside of relentless gigging before – their second album, last year’s Irish Rock N Roll , was recorded in two weeks from start to finish, in between tours. Their recent EP, Home Boys Home, took just three days. “We’ve just put every bit of energy into live performances,” says Andrew, “but it’s been worth it.”

Their zeal for live music is infectious. At many of their recent gigs, after the band have left the stage, the whole crowd has kept singing: first, arms aloft, to the Pogues’ Dirty Old Town, playing over the PA, and then, out on to the street, ballads such as The Fields of Athenry. “From day one we’ve always been trying to encourage other people to sing,” says Andrew, “even friends of ours who wouldn’t normally sing, we’d goad them into singing at a session – and it’s the same now. It’s absolute class to hear people singing on their way out of the venue.”

It all goes back to their roots, playing live on the same plane as their audience. In a sense it’s how this tradition has always existed, for centuries before Spotify or TikTok, or indeed record labels, mediated the relationship between singer and audience, and sucked a lot of the joy out of it. In the Mary Wallopers’ ideal world everyone is having the time of their lives together, with no raised stage, no altar, no pedestal, no stars – just one person in the corner who happens to be holding the guitar, and everyone singing along with the same gusto.

“There shouldn’t be a division between the crowd and the performer,” says Seán. “Because these aren’t our songs – they’re everyone’s songs.”

• Home Boys Home EP is out now. The band play Latitude (25-28 July) and Green Man (15-18 August), and tour the UK in March 2025. Watch their Glastonbury set in full on BBC iPlayer