John Francis Flynn on his new LP, crème de menthe and being Irish

After bewitching us with his first album I Would Not Live Always in 2021, traditional and folk multi-instrumentalist singer John Francis Flynn returns with another rough (green-tinted) diamond.

He talks Look Over the Wall, See The Sky below.

We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

Listen: John Frances Flynn talks to RTÉ Arena

What inspired your new album Look Over the Wall, See The Sky?

I didn't really have an idea of what it would sound like. As I was working on it, some kind of themes started merging. I was thinking a certain way because of how I was living, what was happening around me at the time and might have been drawn to certain songs because of that. That sculpted the way the album flowed, what songs I didn’t use and that had been recorded. At the end we had seven tracks, and we needed one more to finish the album. There was one track, The Zoological Gardens, that was the one that tied it all together and made me think "This is very much a Dublin album", even if all the songs are not all necessarily about Dublin, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just about where I was and what the songs mean to me. The Zoological Gardens was actually recorded for a different project but we thought we needed to use this, it basically situates you in Dublin from the start of the zoological gardens, so immediately you’re located in the city and the arrangements start getting weird and trippy. You’re in Dublin and kind of floating and you don’t know what’s going to happen next.

We need your consent to load this Spotify contentWe use Spotify to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

What about the title?

It’s from the last song that’s on the album, a Ewan MacColl song. I played it at one of my gigs and my dad’s friend said "Look Over The Wall, See The Sky, that’d be a great name for an album!". There’s a lot of hope in that. You might be struggling in your life, in our case we’re talking about Dublin and the struggle of living here generally – so this title means that you’re trapped, but there’s still hope there. That made a huge amount of sense with the themes.

Listen: John Frances Flynn talks to Culture File

What about the cover art?

I just think crème de menthe is a very funny drink. It's luminous green and it tastes like mouthwash. I always thought it was funny because beyond the fact that it’s a weird drink, I was kind of thinking it’s like the essence of Ireland in a little green cup. If you go anywhere in the world on Saint Patrick’s Day, they start to dye drink green! So I was thinking, as an Irish person, "What does that mean to me?". People have this view on Ireland and what that means, and when you’re Irish you’re just like "What’s going on here?". It’s just kind of poking fun on how Ireland is imagined and how it actually is. It’s not this kind of weird land, full of leprechauns and rainbows with lots of gold at the end of them.

Why did you choose to do a cover of Dirty Old Town?

I had the idea to do Dirty Old Town way before I started on the album. I love it, I think that it’s just been done so many times and was really made famous by The Dubliners, and then even more famous again with The Pogues. The original by Ewan MacColl is so sombre and soft, and I wanted to bring it back to that. I love The Dubliners’ and The Pogues’ versions, but I thought it’d be a challenge to do something completely different with it, change people’s perception of the song and bring it back closer to Ewan MacColl’s version.

There is a melancholy in your songs - can you tell me about it?

I connect with songs in a certain way, and I’m just being honest with whatever emotion is in the song. However I perform songs, I don’t really intend to force an emotion, I’m representing how I interact with the song. I’m just being honest, really.

How did you link your cover of the song Mole In The Ground to Dublin’s housing crisis?

There’s a Jackson C. Frank version where he says "If I’s a mole in the ground, I’d root that mountain down", and I thought it was very much a metaphor of tearing down the system. The last verse about the railroad man is really another metaphor for the boss man - at the time the railroad man in the States would have been very powerful. It’s a very anti-establishment kind of song.

In Dublin, The Cobblestone pub, our central pub for the traditional music community, was going to be turned into a hotel and there was a big protest. I was listening to the song around that time and it sparked something in me, I was thinking about it a lot. It made sense in that way.

What do you want to say to people through your music and this album?

I just want mostly to challenge people’s perception internationally of what 'Irish’ is and can be, how you can be Irish. You don’t need to necessarily be Irish to be Irish, you just have to engage with Irish culture, in a very honest way. And not force this paddywhackery of things onto that identity, just enjoy something that’s a bit different.

What’s next for you? Any collaborations in the pipeline?

The tour is coming up in Ireland in December, and then in a lot of other places in January and February. I also have another album in the works with Paddy Cummins, he’s a banjo player but also plays trad tunes on the guitar, it’s called Paahto and the Bull. I’m still working with Skipper’s Alley, which is my other trad band and I’m going over to the Irish cultural centre in Paris in May doing a residency there for the month. Then, working on album number 3 as well!

Look Over the Wall, See The Sky is out now.

John Francis Flynn: 'You don't need to necessarily be Irish to be Irish'

More stories on

Read Next

More stories on

John Francis Flynn rocks the house on The Tommy Tiernan Show

Read Next