“One day you’ll wake up and my face will be all over your television,” Daniel Hoff, the Gurriers frontman, sings on their single Approachable. When the band wrote the song they probably didn’t envisage performing it on Later … with Jools Holland, but a few weeks ago they joined an illustrious line-up when they appeared on the opening show of the iconic BBC music programme’s 65th series, alongside Jade, Blossoms, Laura Marling, Nubya Garcia and Roger Taylor.
“We were mostly star-struck,” Hoff says. “I cried watching Laura Marling. Playing on Jools Holland wasn’t an experience we thought we would ever have. It was a surreal, grounding and grateful moment of our lives.”
Their debut album, Come and See, which they released in September, explores what those lives mean in the first quarter of the 21st century, broaching contemporary disenfranchisement, emigrating friends, the rise of the far right and the corrosive influence of social media, all soundtracked by Gurriers’s fast and furious postpunk. A lyric on Dipping Out, their most recent single, nails young people’s disillusion, “failed by a system that never really lets you exist”.
“If we didn’t have the band, I wonder how many of us would still be living in Ireland,” Hoff says, sitting alongside Pierce O’Callaghan, Gurriers’ drummer, in the kitchen at Yellow Door, a complex of rehearsal studios in North Wall in Dublin. He acknowledges that, although their lyrics question the wisdom of allowing digital platforms to shape so much of modern life, they have greatly benefited as a band from using the internet as a positive tool.
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“We sent our music to Enola Gay before we even had a name,” Hoff says, referring to the Belfast-based band. “They brought us on our first ever tour and got us involved with our manager. Idles said the one piece of advice they give to bands is to initiate a conversation with your favourite band. I love talking about music, whether it be to people in a pub or anywhere. I like to be involved with culture and be in culture.”
As with Fontaines DC and The Murder Capital, the band’s members are from all over Ireland. O’Callaghan, who is originally from Armagh, went to school in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, where he met the band’s guitarist Mark McCormack; McCormack then met Hoff when they were working at a fast-food restaurant in Carrickmines, in south Dublin.
“We were doing eight-hour overnight shifts and badly needed to pass the time,” Hoff says. “We had these headsets while taking the drive-through orders. If you walked past that McDonald’s you’d hear me and Mark babbling away to each other through the headsets about films, music and books. I was in a band at the time called The Innocent Bystander. Mark and I bonded, so we wanted to form our own band.”
[ Gurriers: Come and See – Debut album agitates in all the right waysOpens in new window ]
Gurriers came together in January 2020, shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic. “All we wanted to do was be back in a room together and practise,” Hoff says. “I remember at one stage screaming into my pillow because of the extended lockdowns.”
But, rather than doom-scroll on their phones, they decided to hone their vision. Over numerous Zoom calls they meticulously discussed every aspect of the band, plotting strategies while venues, studios and rehearsal rooms were shut. Their productively proactive pandemic meant that, when they played their first gig, at the Workmans Club in Dublin, at Halloween in 2021, they were much more fully formed than most acts making their live debut.
The five-piece are now on their first headline tour. “We’ve done some festivals in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and France, so you’d expect some pockets of support there,” O’Callaghan says. “We’ve never played in Denmark but we’ve nearly sold out Copenhagen, which really surprised us.
“The rule of thumb is, generally, that anything over 40 per cent of tickets sold means you should sell it out on the night. To have only 9 per cent of tickets left six weeks before a show in a city and country we’ve never been to on our first headline tour is crazy.”
Hoff says they’ve been explaining to music journalists around Europe that Ireland’s music set-up is changing. “Everyone asks about the Dublin music scene. We say it isn’t a Dublin music scene, it’s a nationwide scene, and that they are overlooking Belfast, Cork, Galway, Limerick and everywhere else ... The community is not just Dublin any more. It’s a wider community.”
Irish acts have also benefited from a more positive, constructive approach. “Everyone is ambitious, but not to the detriment of anyone else,” O’Callaghan says. “Everyone wants everyone else to do well. This makes it very collaborative.” As Hoff puts it, “just be sound rather than bite each other’s necks off. Irish music is working very well lately because it has such an open and supportive attitude.”
The pair say the Other Voices festival was an important live milestone for the band; they also regard some of their other performances as particularly significant. “For me, selling out the Windmill in Brixton was massive,” O’Callaghan says. “That venue has been at the centre of music in south London for the last seven or eight years. Coincidentally, a guy from Tyrone runs it.”
Festivals have been critical to Gurriers’s burgeoning profile. In the early days they’d often start their sets playing to about 100 people in a field. But the audience would quickly swell, and they’d find themselves performing to a few thousand curious onlookers.
“Sometimes at a festival you don’t see a band first, you hear them first,” Hoff says. “Then you see their singer and guitarist running around like lunatics and jumping up and down, which immediately draws people in. If you are enjoying your performance, the audience picks up on that automatically and starts having fun. It all feeds off each other.”
Gurriers played Glastonbury this year – although it clashed with an Armagh victory on their road to All-Ireland glory. “I went out to the car and watched it on my phone,” O’Callaghan says. “Armagh have had such bad luck the last few years in losing loads of penalty shoot-outs and never getting past the quarter-final. The line-up for that Saturday afternoon was excellent, so I missed The Last Dinner Party and Kasabian doing a secret set, but I got in for the last 20 minutes of Lankum.
“I bumped into a group of 40 Irish people that I knew, such as NewDad, Nell Mescal and her brother Paul, and the Fontaines lads. It was genuinely one of the best days of my life. It was unbelievable.”
O’Callaghan adds that his fellow county folk keep him in check. “I’ve a group of mates from home who don’t really care too much about the band,” he says. “I think it’s why I’m still friends with them. I told them we were going to be on Jools Holland. One of them asks me if that’s the show on New Year’s Eve. I say that it is but that we’re not doing that one, so he says, ‘Ah, no good then.’ They know how to keep you in line.”
Hoff got a considerably more positive reaction. “My nanny was really impressed that we were going to be on TV with the Hootenanny man,” he says. “She still thinks we play gigs to our mates, so it was a big deal for her.”
Gurriers say they’re constantly writing. “New music will be released soon,” O’Callaghan says. “Sprints are already releasing new music after their album coming out last January. It’s a very old-school way of working, but it is really important to keep the momentum going. Once you achieve relevancy you must work to keep it. The only way of doing that is by doing more shows and recording more music.”
Gurriers play Kasbah Social Club, Limerick, on Thursday, November 14th, followed by concerts in Belfast; Listowel, Co Kerry; Dundalk, Co Louth; Dublin; Galway; and Cork. More details from gurriers.net
