Asked to recall the craziest thing he’s ever seen looking out from the stage during a St. Patrick’s Day gig, Flogging Molly singer Dave King replies, “Oh god, Jesus, where do I begin?”
Just whatever comes to mind. Then King continues, “I’ve seen this one girl in a wheelchair hauled up in the mosh pit and everybody’s handing moving her forward to the photo pit at the stage. And the security dropped her then and I was like, ‘Just leave her there. She might enjoy the show right at the very front, you know?’”
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It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting band going these days to see on St. Patrick’s Day than Flogging Molly. The Irish-American band’s fireball mix of punk-rock and trad-Celtic influences, as heard on “Devil’s Dance Floor,” “Drunken Lullabies” and “Seven Deadly Sins,” were made to soundtrack March 17 reveling. And Flogging Molly’s ballads, like “The Worst Day Since Yesterday,” are ideal for nursing March 18 hangovers.
This year, Flogging Molly’s St. Patrick’s Day show is at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, the city where King founded the band circa 1997. The performance will also be livestreamed, with tickets available at floggingmolly.veeps.com. The L.A. gig is part of the Flogging Molly’s latest tour, which kicks off March 8 in Knoxville and culminates Aug. 18 in London. A complete itinerary can be found at floggingmolly.com/tour. Support acts on the trek include Texas alt-country combo Vandoliers and Austrian ska-punkers Russkaja.
In addition to King on lead vocals, guitar and bodhran (a traditional Irish drum), Flogging Molly’s lineup features King’s wife Bridget Regan (violin, tin whistle, vocals), Dennis Casey (guitar, vocals), Matt Hensley (accordion, concertina, vocals), Nathen Maxwell (bass guitar, vocals), Spencer Swain (mandolin, banjo, guitar, vocals) and Mike Alonso (drums, percussion).
Flogging Molly has been busy prepping their first new studio album since 2017 LP “Life Is Good.” The as-yet-untitled disc should be out by this summer, a band rep says. On a recent afternoon, King checked in for the below phone interview from tour rehearsals in Nashville. The Dublin-raised singer was an amiable chat. Edited excerpts below.
Dave, the new Flogging Molly single, “These Times Have Got Me Drinking,” drops March 10. Any chance you’ll play that song the night before at the Mars Music Hall show here in Alabama?
I think definitely there might be a chance. Yeah. [Laughs]
Have you guys ever played that one live before?
No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. Actually, when we were writing the (new) album, that was one of the last things to come up. I said to Bridget and the guys, I was like, “I’ve got this little idea and it’s ‘These times have got me drinking,’ and people were like, ‘Oh let’s give that a go.’ We mix it with a traditional song called “Tripping Up The Stairs.” It was one of those songs that’s an extra special nugget at the end, you know?
You’re 60 now. How are you still able to summon the energy onstage required for Flogging Molly’s music at that age?
Well, I think it’s a vitamin water that I used to drink but it’s called Guinness. Yeah, I mean, it either keeps you young or I don’t know … Being in front of a live audience, you don’t get bigger adrenaline than that. And I think that it really doesn’t matter how you feel before you go on sometimes, like the minute you step on stage and you start playing and the crowd is there, all that’s thrown out the window.
What can you tell us about the upcoming album? Judging by the clip I’ve heard of “These Times Have Got Me Drinking,” which mixes Celtic acoustic dervish and punk explosion in your band’s signature way, it doesn’t sound like this will be a synth album. AC/DC and Motorhead are two bands that can do the same album over and over and it still works. Is that the case with Flogging Molly too?
Well, I mean, at least we do a few ballads. But I know what you’re saying. The thing was for this album for us was we really wanted to go back with Steve Albini and do an album. Because we wanted to have that live feel again and when you record with Steve that’s what you’re going to get. And all the songs on the album are at most four takes, maybe. The amount of overdubbing is minimal, to say the least. Maybe a couple bits of fiddle or a little tin-whistle or maybe a little accordion or a banjo, and then the vocal. And that’s it.
That’s the way we did it and the way we wanted to do it. I think coming back after having such a long period of time that we didn’t necessarily want off (because of the pandemic), we wanted to come back with a short, sharp shock, really just the way it was at the beginning, with us.
Previously, Flogging Molly recorded (the band’s 2000 debut studio album) “Swagger” with Steve Albini producing. A lot of fans have read Albini’s name on credits on great albums (including most notably 1993 Nirvana LP “In Utero”). But what’s his mojo as a producer? What does he bring to the recording of an album?
I think he would say himself, he’s a man of no opinion, when it comes to if you ask him, “Well, what should we do here, Steve?” He’s simply there to record what the band is all about. Whatever you’re about, you’ll get with Steve, because Steve does not interfere in any way.
That’s why we wanted to go back to him because the last couple of albums we’ve had “quote unquote” producers, and I don’t think it really worked out in Flogging Molly’s favor. I think at the end of the day, we as a band when we sit down to write songs, we basically produce them ourselves in the sense that we totally arranged them ourselves. We know what instrument goes where, how it should go. So we wanted to cut out that. Our first two albums we didn’t have anybody over shoulder going, “You should do this and shouldn’t do that.” And we wanted to get back to that. And that’s what Steve does.
You mentioned Flogging Molly doing ballads earlier, and “The Worst Day Since Yesterday” is one a lot of people know. Tell me what inspired that song - where you wrote it, how you wrote it down, how it came together. What was the specific day and the yesterday that inspired that song?
Well, actually, it was to do with the fact that I was at rehearsals I think with the band, and I was living in (the Los Angeles neighborhood) Echo Park and I locked myself out. I remember crawling up the drainpipe to try and open the window to get in. [Laughs]
And the drainpipe just pulled away from the wall and I ended up flat on my back, like with the pipe, just laying there going, “Christ, this is the worst day since yesterday.” And it just kind of went from there.
I think we all at times kind of feel like that. You do one thing and then the next day, “Here we go again.” And so that was just a period of my life where things were not really gelling, as they say.
Shepard Fairey (the visual artist known for creating Barack Obama’s famous “Hope” poster) created the cover art for Flogging Molly’s 2006 release “Whiskey on a Sunday.” What was the collaboration with Shepard like? Or do you just give him carte blanche and see what he brings back?
He’s friends with our accordion player, Matt Hensley. They’ve known each other for years, the skateboard scene and stuff, so there was a contact there and who doesn’t like Shepard’s work, you know? It was more like a DVD than actually an album and it was more to do like with capturing a period of time in Flogging Molly’s life, like a documentary.
And Shepard was great. He knew the band, and I don’t know why he decided to but he used a picture of me when I was a kid at school and ran with that. He’s very good at taking facial images and making art of it. I love that cover.
Speaking of when you were younger, an album I have in my collection and listen to a lot is the first record by the hard-rock/heavy-metal band Fastway. In addition to you on vocals, Fastway featured Motorhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley. Fastway’s 1983 self-titled debut album was produced by Eddie Kramer (who worked with Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Kiss, etc.) I know you’ve moved on to a totally different hemisphere of music. But looking back on Fastway, what’s a fond memory or something cool you took from that experience?
The thing was, you’re talking about different hemispheres there, that was Eddie’s time to try and get away from the whole banner of Motorhead. He was really upset at the time they were collaborating with (Plasmatics frontwoman) Wendy O. Williams. He really wasn’t into that and I think that was the main reason why he left the band. And he just wanted to experience a new thing. And he was looking for an unknown singer, that, you know, nobody ever heard of. And I auditioned for it and I got it.
It was an amazing experience in the sense that, you know, to be an unemployed youth in Ireland in like 1980, ‘81, with no future prospects whatsoever, to doing an album with Eddie Kramer. I mean, that was an incredible experience playing with Jerry Shirley. And Richard McCracken on bass guitar, he was in Taste, which was a great band with Rory Gallagher, an Irish guitar player back in the day.
And that first album was really raw. It wasn’t overproduced. But then to go on tour with bands like AC/DC that was absolutely insane. Iron Maiden, people like that. There’s no way I’d be here right now, if it wasn’t for that education that I learned from those people. Looking back on it, it was a great experience.
The checkerboard cover art for that first Fastway album is so 1983. That look makes me think of Vans skateboarding shoes.
Oh, yeah. You know, we weren’t even really aware of that, but yeah that didn’t do any harm at all. [Laughs]
Is it true after Fastway and before Flogging Molly, Epic Records tried to get you to be Jeff Beck’s singer? And if so, what’s the story there?
That’s true. They were trying to like get him going again. He was going through a very quiet period at the time and they suggested that I should hook up with him and maybe do an album together and do a tour together. Unfortunately what happened was he was into cars - really into fixing cars, getting old cars, working on them at home. He basically had no interest in doing anything else.
So that when I started kind of writing songs myself. I was like, “I don’t want to be somebody’s right hand man,” or whatever you want to call it. “I think it’s about time now I started going off on my own,” and I started playing acoustic guitar more often and things start to go on the way they did. I did a lot of shows at Molly Malone’s, just acoustic, and that’s where I met Bridget and where Flogging Molly started to take shape. (The band’s name was inspired by Molly Malone’s, an Irish pub on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.) So everything happens for a reason.
Flogging Molly’s tour hits Alabama on March 9, with a show at Mars Music Hall, at the Von Braun Center, address 700 Monroe St. in Huntsville. Tickets for that 7:30 p.m. show start at $37.50 (plus applicable fees), available via ticketmaster.com and the VBC Box Office. More info at floggingmolly.com.
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