Is it metal? Is it trad? Who cares - as long as it sounds like The Scratch. The band's front man Jordan "Jordo" O'Leary talks to Alan Corr
Are The Scratch incredibly brave or incredibly foolhardy? The Dublin-based band play two of the most unfairly maligned musical styles of all time - heavy metal and Irish trad but by alchemising a mutant hybrid of both, they've become one of the most talked about new bands in Ireland.
Bodhrans collide with power chords and drones serve as a backdrop to the folky growl of lead singer and guitarist Jordan "Jordo" O’Leary on a kind of headbanging session music. It is trad revival/metal crossover but hold the dancing dwarves and fun-sized Stonehenge replicas.
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Sitting in the house the fourpiece share in Naas, Co Kildare, Jordo is drinking coffee and is so laidback about the whole question of how to pigeonhole his band of brothers that he might as well be languishing on a chaise longue being fed grapes.
I chuck a lazy journo cliche at him and ask if he'll break out in rash if I say, "Celtic prog rock fusion?"
"Hahaha. No, I won’t break out in a rash," says the affable native of Ovens, Co Cork. "Although, I’ve broken out in a rash for several unrelated reasons. We’re always asked about what type of music we play and I never know what to say. It’s whatever you want to call it. Celtic prog rock fusion is fine by me."
The Scratch’s fans don’t seem to mind what you call them either. The night we speak, the band played the first of two sold-out nights in Dublin venue Vicar Street and their second album Mind Yourself has just debuted at No 3 in the Irish album charts, just behind Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.
It’s quite a record. A rough and ready tumble, it has shades of The Pogues, Horslips and early Thin Lizzy and the band’s profane and surreal songs tackle subjects like the demon drink, family feuds and the serious business of having the craic. The Scratch know that metal music is pure theatre and these multi-tattooed and bearded wild men also shrug off accusations of cod Celticism.
It wasn’t always this way. In fact, before they were The Scratch, the foursome of Jordo, Daniel "Lango" Lang, Cathal McKenna, and Conor "Dock" Dockery were a "a full-blown metal band" going by the fantastic name of Red Enemy.
They landed a record deal and toured extensively in America but success eluded them. "It can be difficult to stand out in the metal thing," Jordo says. "And most people don’t like it anyway but we loved it. So, after doing it for a number of years, we did a tour in the UK in 2016 and we came home and we had been playing the album we’d just put out and it flopped. We never had a discussion about stopping playing but we all a bit dejected, it fizzled out naturally.
"At the time we were all living in Dublin 12 and there were acoustic guitars lying around and we started playing again. There were no plans to form a new album. We just love playing music together and we had stopped doing with Red Enemy so we started doing it in another way and it just started, it grew legs and here we are."
Reborn as The Scratch in 2016, the foursome first caught people’s eyes and ears the following year after a video of their performance at the annual Rory Gallagher festival in Ballyshannon went viral. EPs Old Songs and The Whole Buzz followed and they released their debut album Couldn’t Give A Rats one month into the Covid lockdown in 2020.
Once the shutters came up again on Ireland’s music venues, they began building a rabidly loyal fanbase with shows in Dublin’s 3Olympia, and gigs in the UK, Europe, and North America.
Jordo is all too aware that the metal community - possibly the most dedicated music tribe out there - are scorned by music snobs. Something he remembers from his childhood growing up in Ovens.
"I don’t know what it’s like now to grow up listening to metal but when I grew up listening to metal, nobody in my school liked it," he says. "I was at a family party in my uncle and auntie’s house when I was 13 and I snuck away to my uncle’s CD collection and I was putting on metal albums and I remember saying to my auntie, I don’t think I’m ever going to find anyone who is into this.
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"I was so desperate to talk about metal music and my uncle was the only person I had and thank god for him. It wasn’t until I started going into Cork city that I met other fans. This was my tribe and I started playing in bands."
And so, The Scratch have joined fellow Irish acts like Lankum, just awarded album of the year for their latest offering False Lankum by Uncut magazine, The Mary Wallopers, Fontaines D.C., and The Murder Capital in a new Celtic Revival of Irish acts.
The cover art of Mind Yourself certainly captures The Scratch’s sense of devil may care irreverence. Designer Aidan Cochrane aka Scribbler Creative really eh, nails it and who knows? Ten years ago, it may even have seen protests outside record shops.
"It shouldn’t be controversial," says Jordo. "But I did see a comment online from someone criticising our use of religious imagery and that it is blasphemous but I don’t think a f*** about all that. There is nothing inherently disrespectful about it."
Humour is all important to The Scratch. Mind Yourself kicks off with a conversation between two young lads in Moyross talking about the banshees who used to live nearby and from the ridiculous to the sublime, the rock `n' reel of Cold Eye is inspired by Under Ben Bulben by WB Yeats.
On a mission to get into what Jordo calls "a cheeky headspace", album track Cheeky Bastard, a real Horslips homage, rejoices in the line, "He won’t stop singing Champagne Supersonic". And, yes, it is based on a true story about their manager Eamo’s stag night.
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The Scratch have a deadly serious side, too. Album standout Shoes is a dark tale of a family feud. "That was something I have personal experience of," says Jordo. In Ovens? "Yeah, it was a family thing . . . there’s themes of alcohol, something that seems to come up a lot. I’m very happy with the song and happy the band let it on the album. It was originally part of a solo project so it’s very personal to me."
They may seem like odd bedfellows but Mind Yourself was produced by James Vincent McMorrow, architect of sonorous folk and alt-rock, in Black Mountain studio in Louth and it turns out he did a lot more than toil behind the mixing desk.
"His music and our music is different in so many ways but I think the big thing we learned from making this album is that it is more about how you get on as people," says Jordo. "James was a counsellor for us throughout the process so the differences between our music didn’t matter.
"If it got tense between the band when we were writing the songs or someone was upset about something, he’d chime in and settle things. There were a lot of big chats, big arguments and shouting matches at times. We were getting in our own way a lot of the time and James essentially was trying to get us to get the best out of ourselves."
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Does that friction between the band members add to the energy? "When you have four people who really care about what they’re doing and there’s no friction and it’s just one person doing what they want, that’s just a solo project with session musicians. Learning to communicate more effectively is always something that we’re working on so that friction doesn’t turn into a fight."
The Scratch supported Boston-Irish band Dropkick Murphys across Europe last summer and they’ve also got a long UK and Europe tour coming up. What’s life on the road like for the Scratch - do they sit around reading the complete works of James Clarence Mangan or are they on the lash every night?
"We used to be on the lash every night but now we’re on the lash less," says Jordo. "After Covid, we were a bit wound up and ready to go so there were a few mad tours. There was a sense of this could stop again so let’s make the most of it and also because we, like everyone, had been locked up, there was a real animalistic buzz going on.
"Now it’s a lot more chill. We just did a tour with Dropkick Murphys and they’ve been on the road for years and they really look after themselves and really smash it on stage every night. That was very inspiring to see because it’s just not sustainable to party every night. We’ve done our fair share of that already."
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
Mind Yourself is out now on Sony Music Ireland
