The New Cue #364 March 8: The Mary Wallopers, Swim Deep, Oisin Leech, La Luz, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Porij, Camera Obscura, Wand

"They were wearing kilts. That’s not Irish."

Good morning!

That’s right, positive manifestation. It IS a good morning. It just is. How can it not be a good morning when we’ve got The Mary Wallopers giving you their guide to touring? Or Swim Deep telling us why they love The Verve’s debut album? Or Ted, Niall and Chris recommending the best music they’ve heard this week? See, told you, it’s a good morning!

But it’s only a good morning if you are a paying subscriber as most of this edition is behind the paywall. It only costs £5 a month and you’ll receive full access to every Friday’s TNC plus a leisurely stroll and scroll through our whopping archive. Take a map, it’s massive! If you are not a paying subscriber, it’s just an OK morning. 6/10.

Here's this week’s Recommender playlist:

Or click here if you’re more of an Apple Music kind of person.

Enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

---

End The Week With… The Mary Wallopers’ Guide To Touring

Picture by Sorcha Frances Ryder

Lock up your crates of Guinness, The Mary Wallopers are heading out on tour! Later this month, the brilliant Irish folk rabble will embark on a jaunt around the UK, bringing their rowdy euphoria and captivating ballads to a town near you – click here for dates and tickets, not that there are many left.

Live is where the Dundalk seven-piece hit a thrilling peak so who better to give you a guide to life on the road than Andrew and Charles Hendy, the brothers at the core of the group? “We’re well versed, it’s all we know,” they told Niall earlier this week. Here is The Mary Wallopers and their 10 Rules For Touring…

1/ Pack Efficiently

Andrew: I’ve started packing lighter and lighter. If we’re doing festivals, I’ll just put some underwear in my banjo case and arrive with that. If it’s a longer tour, packing cubes are great. You just bring enough clothes for a week and then wash them once a week wherever we are. Last year we were doing tour after tour, so we’d be away for a month – last October we were in America for a month and then we were home for two days and then we started the UK tour, so that was another month.

Charles: You’ll need headphones, cos when you’re travelling a lot you definitely want headphones.

2/ The Key To Maintaining A Harmonious Dynamic In Your Band When Touring Is…

Charles: Don’t talk to each other!

Andrew: We started playing a bit of Xbox which is a good bit of craic. We were playing a bit of Mortal Kombat.

Charles: That lets us get out our frustrations against each other.

Andrew: Generally speaking we’re pretty good at travelling together as a group. You know a rat king, when all the rats are living in a tight space and their tales intertwine so they move as one unit? That’s The Mary Wallopers.

3/ Control Your Booze Intake

Charles: We don’t drink on the tourbus. If we start getting pissed on the tour bus, it’ll just start making us cranky.

Andrew: If you’re not on the piss and other people are on the piss, it’s like being held hostage in a pub because the pub is moving to the next venue. Generally speaking, we only drink on nights off or a big gig. It definitely helps, the less you drink…

Charles: If you want to make touring a hundred times harder, drink every night.

Andrew: If you’re going to drink on tour, you might as well drink and do drugs and do everything 24/7 so you don’t really know what you’re doing, you don’t notice the tour happening. Other than that, you’re probably better staying off it.

4/ The Driver’s Cabin Is Your Refuge

Charles: We have a no smoking rule on the tourbus but our driver lets us smoke up the very front in his little place.

Andrew: It’s like the diary room in Big Brother, sitting up there in the passenger seat, telling him all your worries.

5/ Be Prepared To See Strange Things From The Stage

Andrew: We were doing loads of festivals last summer and we got asked to play an Irish festival in Sion, Switzerland. When we got there everyone was dressed like Viking pirates and they were all doing synchronised dancing while we were playing. It was kind of like the Wicker Man. They had a very skewed idea of Ireland and they were playing it out.

Charles: They were wearing kilts. That’s not Irish.

Andrew: And loads of them had dreads. And they also had big cow horns and they were blowing them. The women were dressed like serfs.

Charles: It was really weird, we couldn’t stop laughing. It was so stupid.