Latest Release: The Road Not Taken
Label: Celtic Collections [independent]
Folk music is a wide and varied musical style that can encompass everything from traditional songs, steeped in various cultures, to more contemporary fare that could be seen as musical poetry. Whatever the case, much like blues and roots music, there are no limitations to the genre, and it is often seen to spread influence into other musical circles that are considered out of bounds. Be it through possibilities of different and eclectic instrumentation, our broader vocal harmonies that audiences can participate in, and numerous other aspects of musical expression, it is an open canvas.
One such band that embraces such a musical approach is Irish folk rock band The High Kings, who return to Australia for a tour across the country, having had sold out their last tour here. Their eighth studio album, titled The Road Not Taken, consists of original music, and involves a cast of musical collaborations that most bands would envy. Discussing all things The High Kings, and other musical adventures with anecdotes that any serious rock music fan should enjoy, front man Darren Holden took the time to chat, providing a wide-ranging chat with plentiful life experience.
Darren Holden: Nice to see you.
Stroppy Baby: Oh look, you’ve got an Australian vintage band t-shirt [AC/DC logo with ‘High Voltage’ in big writing underneath].
DH: I do, but do you know what, I didn’t do that on purpose. I was doing the last couple of interviews and thought, ‘Oh my God, I am wearing an AC/DC shirt, they will think that I did that on purpose.’ Ha-ha, it’s good, that’s a happy mistake.
SB: If you know that original album, you might be conflicting with the Scottish.
DH: Ha-ha, oh yeah, yeah. Big time. Have you seen them on tour yet?
SB: Oh yeah, many, many times. They are an institution here and I seem to recall that after their 1981 tour when they brought along a dirty great bell, and being massively loud, they had issues on getting back into the country for subsequent tours. Or at least that was the rumour for the next seven years between tours here.
DH: No way, well, I can tell you a funny story, when back in the late seventies, I was a bit too young to have Highway to Hell, so a friend of mine got me a sneaky copy. My mother wouldn’t allow it into the house because of the cover. My Mum would not allow it into the house, so I wasn’t allowed to listen to it, I swear to God. Unbelievable, only in Catholic Ireland.
SB: Oh wow, when the title track is not even about Satan, but hey.
DH: There you go, all they needed to know was from looking at the cover.
SB: Yeah, and what an unusual thing that is, anyway, look, you’re up to album number eight, and The High Kings are returning for what looks to be a very well selling tour. How is your voice holding up at this point?
DH: It’s pretty good at the moment, and the album, The Road Not Taken, has been out for almost a year now, and it has lifted us to heights that we had never imagined. But it is the first, one hundred percent original High Kings record, and it seems that people were waiting for that for the longest time. We’d dabbled with originality before, as well as doing new versions of the older Irish classics, but people have really kind of reached out to us and said, ‘This is was what we want from here on in, we want another album of original material, or songs that have been written specifically for you,’ to grow the genre and to keep it going now. There is a big buzz happening for folk music in Ireland at the moment, with a lot of new bands coming up. so, they are keeping it fresh for everybody, and making sure that we keep on our toes and that we keep writing, keep recording, and keep prepping for the new record. So, the voice is good, the vibe is good, the band is ready, and we are really looking forward to getting over there again.
SB: When you are doing a song [‘The Streets of Kinsale’] with singer such as Steve Perry [ex Journey vocalist], who has a huge legacy internationally, do you find that intimidating at all? Or does that encourage you to sing better?
DH: Well, how that happened is that Glen Power, who is the drummer from The Script, and a really good friend of mine; well, I popped over to his studio to record that song about a year and a half ago, and so I did my vocal. At the time, I didn’t know that Glen was friends with Steve, and that they had met years ago in LA at a Script show. So, about a month later he called me and he said, ‘I need you to come back to the studio,’ and I had assumed that he wanted to put some fixes on, or put some harmonies on the song, so I went over and he said, ‘You need to sit down, I’ve got to tell you something,’ and then he said, ‘Steve Perry heard this song, he wanted to know who sang it and he wanted to know if you would mind if he could sing with you?’, and I was like, ‘What do you mean, ‘if I’d mind?’, I mean, I grew up listening to Steve, he is iconic. When I spoke to him on the phone that night, he was the nicest guy in the world, completely down to earth, unassuming, even with all that success, and we did a bunch of press together in the UK last year, and it was phenomenal, he is the nicest guy, and he still sounds amazing. But he definitely pushes you to get better and better, but just to have him say some nice things about my vocals, coming from him, I don’t know if it gets any better than that. He is just a really cool cat, and we were so lucky to have him on the record.
SB: Certainly, and there are plenty of other great contributors on the album too. It is quite an impressive list. When do you say, ‘Okay, that’s enough for now’?
DH: Well, you know what, we were getting so many messages and calls from people. We had Kodaline on there, The Script, and Sharon Corr [singer and violinist] from The Corrs, who has been a good friend of mine for years and we always look for an excuse to do something together, and we were doing another project, and I said, ‘Look, I have this piece of music [‘Go with the Flow’] that I think I cannot finish, can you get in there?’ She loved it, and so we recorded it, did a video for it, and she is phenomenal, she is a great girl, and they are a great band. But there was some other stuff that started to come out of that as well, but the word spread out of Ireland that we were accepting material, including a couple of other international artists. When I was over in Australia last time, well, I am a huge INXS fan, and I was immersed in Australian music, such as Cold Chisel, so I was getting to relearn all about those bands, but then I reached out to Andrew Farriss to see if he would write a song with me, and I’ll say that nine times out of ten, people don’t respond, and probably just go, ‘Oh, who is this guy?’ But Andrew did respond and came back very quickly, since then we have been chatting since last year, so we now have this really cool song. We just want to have it absolutely perfectly right, and I was talking to him last week, so we are still fixing it, he is recording it in Sydney, Nashville, and wherever he finds himself, but again, one of the nicest guys I have ever had the pleasure of writing a song with, and I am really looking forward to hopefully catching up with him when I am over there, but the next album may have that song on it. That is what I am hoping for, that is what I am striving for.
SB: Maybe the next one could be an Australian contributors’ version with maybe even Jimmy Barnes?
DH: Oh, could you imagine? I have to admit it now, I would be intimidated if I were to sing on a record with him. I mean, that guy has the best voice ever, I love him, I love Cold Chisel. They are fantastic.
SB: These days, is the production side is done primarily by the band?
DH: Yeah, I mean I write a lot of music for the band, and I send it out to the band on WhatsApp and that, and then everybody comes back, and we all reconvene in the studio, and then everybody has a say on what goes on. We’ll then have a couple of producers who are then sort of in the midst of it all, but yeah, I think that a lot of it has gone very organic now. There was a time when recording was people getting into the studio at different times for days, here and there, and whatever, but I don’t think that works because when you’re a band, you need to have collective energy, or a collective spirit which comes from being in the room at the same time. I think that really shows on the recordings when you have done that. Then it is really organic, it is natural, and you can feel the energy. I think that is the only way to go, especially with folk music, and with the upbeat folk music, which we do, you need to have everybody present for it to sound both present and relevant.
SB: Indeed, and you have a lot of instrumentation going on, with thirteen odd, if not more instruments between the band. Are there particular instruments that you gravitate towards when you’re writing songs?
DH: Ah, well I do a lot of song writing on piano or guitar and piano would not necessarily be what you’d call a folk instrument, but it was my first instrument. Guitar sometimes, or even mandolin, but it depends on what I am hearing in my head. I am writing one song at the moment that I’ve just kind of messed around with on piano, this morning, before I sent it out to the guys, but it depends on what you are feeling. We just did one last week, and I wrote it on a banjo. Now, I don’t really play banjo but I figured it out, and it is a banjo song, because everything you hear these days has banjo in it, and all of a sudden it is the cool instrument, so I guess maybe that is where I get the idea from but it depends on the song. If it is a slow song, it might be written on an acoustic guitar, if it is a fast song, it will be mandolin, banjo, or whatever, and then the guys come back and they will have say low whistles or mouth organs and bouzoukis on there, and bodhráns, all kinds of stuff. It just works its way up from there.
SB: I suppose so some extent folk music provides a home for all the instruments that rock music pretends to reject.
DH: Ha-ha, yeah, I like that, that is very good. It is like the unwanted instruments place but funnily enough a lot of the folk music that is around, whether it is coming out of America, Scotland, or England, or wherever, a lot of it is almost like border line rock and roll as well, there is a certain element there now that if you cross the line a little bit you can put one foot in rock and roll, and one foot in folk, and you know, in country as well. I just think that there are no rules anymore and I think that if it is a good song, it has got relevance to any style because you can change it, such as rocking it up, or you can folk it down, and do whatever you need to do with it, and I think that is really cool. There was a great song from Chris Cornell, God rest him, several years back called ‘Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart’ [from Higher Truth] and it had tonnes of mandolin on it, and that was the first time that I realised that rock and roll could actually delve into folk, and it was sort of like an eye-opener for me.
SB: Fair enough but I would have thought that some of Led Zeppelin’s material had all sorts of interesting instrumentation from Jimmy Page.
DH: Yeah, and then of course, where Robert Plant went afterwards, musically, in the last number of years, he is a predominantly folk artist now, but it was only when he did that, that you go back to Led Zep and listen, then you’ll go, ‘Oh, now I hear it.’ It is just crazy, you know, it really is, and I always find that I am fascinated that it is Robert Plant. He just doesn’t want to do rock and roll anymore, maybe once or twice, here and there, but he is just so happy doing folk music, and I think that is cool.
SB: If you go back to the eighties, This Is Spinal Tap satirised the mandolin quite well.
DH: Oh yeah, yeah, listen, and it is so funny because folk gets a bit of a rap, but I think that deep down, everybody really likes it, you know what I mean? Certainly, in tough times, people resonate with folk music. I don’t know, there is something about the lyrics, the message, or the delivery, and even during lockdown, our Spotify went through the roof. People were just drawn towards that, and not just us, but I guess that everybody who was a folk artist at the time, were seeing it at the time, but that was interesting.
SB: How much work goes into the backing vocals and the harmonies for The High Kings? Harmonies are a big part of the show.
DH: Yeah, there is a lot of work. When we launched, we were a very harmony driven band, and we always pride ourselves on that. It was our little calling card; that and acapella pieces as well, you know. I just love harmony and my brother back in the 80’s had a Beach Boys cassette that he must have played for the whole summer, one year. I just feel in love with their harmonies, along with The Eagles, and you know, there are the Irish bands like The Dubliners, and Planxty, and all that, it was just something that I thought that there wasn’t enough of in folk music. It is a little maybe commercial sounding sometimes, but I do think that it sets us apart but I do think that is important for us, not just when we get into the studio, but when we get the instrumentation right, you’ve got to look at who is singing what part, whose voice suits what part, and then, where the walls of harmonies come in, while not overdoing it and killing it with harmony, but I do think that it has an important place in our music.
SB: The live show consists of two sets, is that right? Is it daunting to choose the song list?
DH: Yeah, but I think that the audience do a lot of choosing for us. We could have a thirty-song set at the start of a tour and then it would be whittled down to maybe 25 songs. Then the audience informs; you’d think you might have something great happening but then you get on stage, and you do it, and yeah, it might fly, or it might get a bit of a dull reaction. So you kind of do that for a couple of nights and then you’ll go, ‘Right, that needs to go, and we need to bring back something else,’ but for the Australian shows last year, we found that the audiences really loved the more upbeat, full throttle, powered kind of folk stomp with banjo powering on, all that kind of stuff and it was really killing it with them. I think that our setlist will reflect that and we’ll have to give them the kind of ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, and ‘The Irish Rover’; all the big hitters, and then we might have one or two surprises as well, because we are working on stuff at the moment.
SB: How many people realise that Thin Lizzy are Irish, and the late Gary Moore was in the ranks?
DH: Yeah, absolutely, and I just visited Phil’s grave the other day, as I was in that neighbourhood and so I popped in for a second. But yeah, a lot of their stuff was very folky and the breakout track for them, back in the day, was ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, and I think that track was a record company suggestion but that was in 1972. That kind of broke them on Top of the Pops over here, and there were all these elements, such as the Black Rose album had all these elements of Irish traditional music. Then Gary Moore had ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, and all of that kind of stuff was always there, and if you listen to the newer version of Thin Lizzy, and then Black Star Riders, there was a lot of big folk elements there. Ricky Warwick [vocalist – ex The Almighty] and I have been working on some stuff, and he is very predominantly a folk artist, he is rock and roll but a lot of it is folk, so it is really cool that you mentioned that.
SB: It is one of those things that you’d hope that with Metallica covering it, that people would look into the original songwriters, but instead, they probably just think that it was penned by Metallica.
DH: Yeah, a lot of people do think that it is a Metallica song, and when they played at Slane a few years back, a lot of the comments on the video showed that people were not aware of what it was, and where it originated from, but it was just nuts. It is ancient, absolutely ancient, you know, but it is fun, at the same time. There is always something new to discover.
SB: How was the experience of your first album [The High Kings] reaching number two on Billboard Magazine’s World Music chart?
DH: Yeah, I mean, I was kind of in shock at the time, but we were lucky with the first album in America at the time. We were signed to EMI in 2008 but they had sat us down in New York and said, ‘This is probably going to take about six months to even make a dent, you know, you are going to have to really work this,’ and we were like, ‘Ugh’, and they were giving us this huge itinerary, and it was like, ‘Oh God, we shouldn’t leave home, we are never going to get off the road.’ But, three weeks later, it actually charted, and we were lucky enough to have a bunch of TV and radio that gave us a really good start over there, which has thankfully sustained us all these years later. But to hit that high after a short amount of time was just phenomenal. We were then coming out of some radio interview in Times Square and EMI had this thing on one of these screens congratulating us, you know. We’d thought that we had just made it but then you’ve got to get on the road and work it, and it is such as vast country, as you know, but it was great for us, and it was a great start. To this day, we have fans coming back to us who have been with us for that long, and some newer ones that discover us along the way, on the strength of those records. So, it is fun, it is a lot of fun.
SB: For many in the world, the big Irish band is U2, and The Joshua Tree almost acted as a diary of all of the rich tapestry of the smaller environments across the States, as they toured across it. In that light, does U2 loom large for you, being that you’re an Irish band?
DH: Yeah, and I mean, everybody always looks to U2 for the inspiration and blessing, you know. We have been lucky because we actually, and this is going to sound terrible, but we sang at a funeral for a mutual friend of ours about seven years ago. We were doing ‘The Parting Glass’ at the end of the funeral, which is one of our signature songs, but Bono and the Edge had sung a song from their album at the time, I cannot remember the exact title [possibly ‘Ordinary Love’], and the y sang that right before we sang. When we started singing ‘The Parting Glass’, Bono stood up, and started clapping, and whistling, in the church, and got everybody else to stand up. We sort of felt that was a very strange setting to get that to happen, but we got the chills. It was almost as if he was going, ‘Well done, guys,’ and you know we haven’t really had that chance to sit down with him over the years but that was validation right there, that we had done okay, and you’ll see him every now and again because he lives over at Killiney, so in the country you’ll see him, and he just gives a nod, or a brief hello, and that is really cool. I mean, they are U2, and nobody will ever be as big as them in this country, or probably around the world either, but they are very normal guys, and that was a very lovely moment.
SB: Another excellent Irish band is Texas who have a great discography, and solid touring ethic, but most Americans might know one or two hits.
DH: Yeah, I’m a huge Texas fan, and myself and Glen from the Script have written a song that is a duet and I have been chasing Sharleen [Spiteri – vocalist] for the longest time, and I am yet to get a hold of her, but I love Texas, the first album [Southside], ‘Thrill Has Gone’, all of that kind of stuff, and ‘I Don’t Want a Lover’ but yeah, I hear what you’re saying, the US probably only know her for that one song but there is a whole vast array of albums there that are really untouched in the Stateside, and it is a waste really, I think it is terrible because they are such a huge iconic band at this end of the world, and I am sure they are huge in Australia as well.
SB: Yep, and the tours do pretty well. She has a sassy attitude too so anyone trying to heckle her gets short shrift, as she gives it back, and quickly, with lots of wit.
DH: Oh, big time, she is from Glasgow, you are not going to mess with anybody from there, I’ll tell you. Ha-ha, she will kick your arse, big time.
SB: Which brings me to the question of The High Kings dealing with hecklers, as I’d imagine you’d get a few enthused punters?
DH: Oh, yeah you get hecklers bit you kind of get used to it and then you kind of just give it back. It doesn’t happen a hell of a lot, thankfully, but there is the odd time you get a smart arse in the audience just shouting things up at you. There was a funny one once when we were rocking out one night, at a gig in America, and giving it loads to one of the songs, and it was almost like rock and roll. I finished the song, and the audience were going made, so I said, ‘Oh my God, were like Bon Jovi there, weren’t we?’ and then everything went quiet, and this guy shouted up, ‘You guys were more like Bonjela!’ That really put me in my place, and I had no comeback. I just laughed; I did not know what to say. But you get it and give it back – the banter is great, we love it.
SB: You’ve covered Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’ [on fourth album Friends for Life] and that has become quite popular. Do you try to be as authentic to their track as possible, or change it to something a little different?
DH: I think when you try to cover Steve Earle, you have to stay somewhere within the vicinity of where it actually came from, and whilst there is Irish instrumentation on that one, we also had Sharon Shannon [Irish musician] on that particular recording. I think that you have got to keep it as close to the original as possible, and he is so rootsy and organic, you know. I’m a Steve Earle fan and I’d love to do a cover of ‘Johnny Come Lately’ except that I don’t know that it would lyrically suit us to do it, but there are so many songs in his armour that we could throw our hand at, but ‘Galway Girl’ is one of the biggest dreaming songs for us. It is one of the biggest hits we had in this end of the world, and in America as well, it was just one of those lucky-dip songs that we had a bit of fun with, and we had a lot of luck with that one.
SB: I suppose that you wouldn’t be telling Steve Earle that you worked with Backstreet Boys and Boyzone? Ha-ha.
DH: Oh my God! That was from another time, oh my God! You’re going back thirty years now, and that was at another configuration, I guess, and my manager at the time, was Louis Walsh who manages Westlife, Boyzone and was on X-Factor, and all of that stuff. He thought that I would be suited for the pop market and at the time, when he first managed me, I had long hair and he said, ‘Oh, you look like David Cassidy,’ and I wasn’t sure what to think, but anyway, we did a couple of decent radio hits, and that kind of thing, but I was glad to leave it behind, it wasn’t me. My piano was left at home, let’s say.
SB: You missed a calling with The Bay City Rollers?
DH: Do you know what? Funnily enough, I just was out with Phil Coulter [producer and song writer] recently, who wrote a lot of their hits, and we wrote a new song for us, because Phil is still in business, still writing loads, and I went into his office and there were all of these Rollers’ gold discs from floor to ceiling. He told me some great stories and played me some stuff that was never released, and they probably got a raw deal, but I think that there was a bit of talent there. All of the shanga-langs and stuff, they were the big hits that were written for them but if you delve into some of those records, which I have done over the last little while, there were some really great songs like ‘Escaped’ which they wrote themselves, and had they been given the room to grow as writers, I think that they might have stuck around for a while. But that was a phenomenon, and I did wear tartan trousers on stage though.
SB: Well, you can redeem yourself because I believe that at some point Slash was considering you as the new lead singer for Velvet Revolver, is that right?
DH: Yes, that is right and that was in about 2009. I had performed as Billy Joel in Broadway for four years, in the musical Movin’ Out, so a lot of the guys in that band, well, they know everybody, you know. They’ve played in different bands such as with Billy Idol, John Mellencamp, and a lot of that kind of stuff, so everybody knows everybody. I then got some messages from Velvet Revolver’s management in LA, around 2009, to see if they could send demos on, and would I write lyrics and then go and sing the lyrics? So, I did, and I did a couple of songs with them, but it never materialised because I don’t think that they knew what they wanted to do. I think Scott [Weiland – late singer] was leaving the band, or they were asking him to leave it at the time, I don’t know what happened, but it was happening for a bit. For about six or seven months I would keep getting emails, and updates, but ultimately it all fizzled out. I still have that recording, and I’ll whip it out every now and again. It is cool that they…and I know that Slash and Duff [McKagan – bassist] wrote this piece of music, and it has my music, or words, so that is kind of nice. I have never been shy of trying my hand at anything, you know, and I think that there is a lot of that stuff down through the years.
SB: Having seen them live, Scott very much reminded me of Bowie.
DH: Oh yeah, he was great, man, and it is so sad that he is gone, but yes, he was one of the great frontmen. I caught them at an outdoor gig in LA in 2004, when they were launching, and kind of had four or five songs, and I just got the chills listening to them, and watching them, because he had that iconic frontman thing going on. He had his own thing, he had the loudspeaker, and the policeman’s hat on at the time. He just looked like a rock and roll superstar. They were a great band, and I actually sometimes prefer the second album [Libertad] to the first album [Contraband], and a lot of people don’t agree with me on that, but I think that I play the second one a lot more. It was an exciting time. They were great and it is good to see Guns N’ Roses back as well. But that band, Velvet Revolver, for me, they had a bit of an edge, they were on the cusp of something really, really big, I feel. But I love rock and roll, I love heavy rock, and all of that,
as well as what I am doing, so, yeah, I am always sort of watching.
SB: Well, going back to The High Kings’ most recent album, is there a particular track that you’re most proud of from The Road Not Taken?
DH: Yeah, but I mean, I love all the ones that we’ve released singles, like ‘Chasing Rainbows’, ‘Connemara Bay’ and ‘The Streets of Kinsale’ but there is a song on there called ‘Song for Kelly‘ that I wrote after a friend of mine told me a story that his baby daughter had died. At the time, it was seventeen years ago, and he was telling me that every Christmas Eve, I go to the grave and leave a teddy bear. So, this Christmas there will be seventeen teddy bears at her grave. That just resonated with me, and at the time, my own Dad was sick just before he passed, so I was just sort of in a bad place. Then all of a sudden, this song, one night, was almost like a door opened, and this song came into me, and I ran to the piano and I wrote it all down. It was almost as if somebody else was writing it, simply because some of the elements of the songs wouldn’t have been particularly what I would write. I played it for him, and he played it for his friends and they were all in tears, so then my manager came and said, ‘This has to go on the album,’ and since I’ve had so many messages about that song, and so many people have connected with it. It is rather sad and performing it or recording it was tough at the time, but it is definitely one of those tracks that has connected with people for, let’s say, numerous different reasons, and all of their different stories. A lot of people mention it at gigs and afterwards, when they come up to us at signings, or whatever, they talk about that song. Probably that song is rather special.
SB: It is interesting how deeply music can affect people.
DH: Well, songs say what you cannot say in person. Sometimes it is a word, a phrase, or a musical piece that will just get you into that place that you need to be. That is the magic of it; it makes you happy, makes you sad, and makes you everything in between. As long as there is music, we are all going to keep going, and keep striving for more. That’s what it is all about.
SB: Well, we shall see you here very soon.
DH: Great Paul, thanks so much, thanks a billion, great interview, all the best. Bye bye.
Tour Dates and Bookings
June 21 Brisbane The Tivoli: Tickets
June 22 Sydney Enmore Theatre: Tickets
June 23 Canberra Southern Cross Club: Tickets
June 28 Melbourne Forum: Tickets
June 29 Adelaide The Gov: Tickets
June 30 Perth Astor Theatre: Tickets