Flogging Molly

With St. Patrick's Day just gone, most people have had their fill of green clothing, Guinness stew and Irish stereotypes for the year, but LA based celtic/ punk rock group Flogging Molly can't get enough of it. In fact, when I speak to multi-instrumentalist Bob Schmidt (he plays banjo, mandolin and bouzouki, to name a few), the band is in the process of making sure the festivities don't end and trying to "spread St. Patrick's Day over a couple of months."

"We've been doing this tour - we call it the Green Seventeen Tour - and we've been doing it for the last four years," Schmidt explains from Atlanta, where the tour is stopping over. "We would go to different cities for St. Patrick's Day in the years leading up to that and people would go 'oh, I wish you'd play our town on St. Patrick's Day' and since it was always a good time for us to be touring anyway, it seemed to make sense to try to do that, so this is just our way of trying to bring that St. Patrick's Day show to every city in the country that we can."

Though every show on the tour has sold out venues with a capacity between 1,000 and 3,000, the band will soon be making their way to Australia for a run shows that will be much smaller, not that Schmidt is bothered by the step down in scale. "Well, I mean, you've got to start somewhere, with whatever you're doing. We're not these big rock stars that can't relate to 300 people," he laughs. "I think when you're a musician and you play music you just want to play to as many people as you can, wherever you can. So in Australia, we only started going out there last year and the fact that we actually had 300 people show up to a show is still pretty phenomenal to us."

In fact, in some ways the smaller shows are something that the members of the band are looking forward to, a reminder of what things used to be like - the fact that some of the audience is unfamiliar with the band's music merely acts as extra incentive to put on a great performance. The band's live shows are certainly renowned as being memorable affairs, and with good reason - as well as the incredible levels of energy onstage, their songs are perfectly made for rowdy singalongs, not unlike the more explosive side of The Pogues. "I think our crowd, up until this point, they thrive off the live show and that's always been what we want to do. The songs are fairly personal and it takes a lot of energy to take them out to the world, but once they're out there, all the joy for us is to get out and play them, so I think that's always been more of a focus for us, to tour as much as possible," Schmidt agrees, adding that it's something that the band will try to capture on record in the future to complement the live/ studio compilation released two years ago, and the '97 record 'Alive Behind The Green Door' that captured a very early version of the band.

"I think at some point we'll do a proper live album, just because a lot of people have requested that over the years. There's a certain spirit to this band that I think you can't get in a studio - you can't capture that creative energy, that power that really happens in the live arena, so I think at some point we'd like to do a live album, but I don't think we'll ever stop writing new songs."

Though Flogging Molly has only released four albums over the band's decade long existence, this is the result of a determination to try new things rather than a reluctance to record. "I think that even throughout the course of each of our albums, we've maintained the spirit of what our sound is and who we are, but I think we always feel like we're trying to push the boundaries of what people expect us to do," Schmidt explains. "It would be easy for us to do [debut album]'Swagger' for ten albums in a row and we'd have a certain amount of loyal fans who want just that sound but if you really love music you always want to try new things and see where you can go."

Alexis Buxton-Collins

Flogging Molly plays at Live on Light Square on Wed 9 Apr.