Review: The Mary Wallopers belt it out for appreciative Cork audience

A Friday night gig at Live At The Marquee is never a subtle affair.

While a comedian might be able to turn the end of the working week energy into a giddy evening of laughter, when the seats are out and the handbrake is off, people are there to cheer, move, sing along and have the all important craic. 

There is probably no better live band in Ireland at the moment to fufil that criteria than The Mary Wallopers.

What started as a trio singing at a weekly ballad night in a bar in Dundalk has become an almost constantly touring full band. 

The core remains the Hendy brothers, Charles and Andrew, who share vocals and, between them, play guitars, banjo, and bodhrán, taking the lead with song introductions and chatting to the crowd, with backing from bass, drums, accordion, tin whistle, and uilleann pipes. 

The third founding member, Sean MacMahon, left the band recently (amicably), so they made a few humorous references to him on stage.

Humour is a constant in their song introductions, keeping the energy going throughout the set, but their politics and values aren’t far from the surface at any time, at one point finding parallels between Dominic Behan’s lyrics in ‘Building Up And Tearing England Down’ (perhaps better known as ‘Paddy On The Road’, under which name Christy Moore released the song in 1969), while focussing then on the Irish emigrant experience in England then, and the immigrant in Ireland now. 

The Catholic Church were in their sights with their performance of ‘Gates Of Heaven’, with the line about septic tanks being particularly poignant this week, they segued from that song into the air of ‘Raglan Road’ (originally called ‘The Dawning of the Day’).

However the evening’s soundtrack wasn’t all serious topics, with perhaps the two biggest sing-alongs being ‘Cod Liver Oil And The Orange Juice’ and ‘Eileen Óg’, both performed with gusto, with one lead vocalist and 4000+ backing vocalists!

As seasoned pros, the Hendy brothers knew the secrets of how to please a Cork audience, 1) repeatedly mention loving Cork, 2) baiting Dublin and 3) playing songs about Cork. So we heard ‘The Holy Ground’ which is set in Cobh, and ‘The Blarney Stone’, which they say the learned from the singing of Cork’s Margaret Barry.

The Mary Wallopers are no longer a ‘young’ band, but they are by no means near the end of the road, and will surely be back playing Live At The Marquee in years to come, digging out more and more old Irish songs and reworking them for excited crowds.