Her.ie sat down for a cuppa with Hermitage Green to discuss their lady fans, their initiation process and how drinking and gigging sometimes don’t mix
Hermitage Green are already the bees knees in Limerick but are about to become the next big thing in Ireland. You may know them from their YouTube covers of ‘Cosmic Love’ and ‘Awake My Soul’ but these guys have incredible talent when showing off their own original music and are well worth a listen. The ‘aesthetically pleasing’ lads – Dan, Barry, Darragh, Dermot and another Darragh, play a merging of acoustic folk rock with a flavour of trad.
Hermitage Green will play the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin on March 17th as part of the Storehouse festivities that runs for three days.
HER: You have in your band two Darraghs, two Murphys (Barry & Dan) and one Dermot. Is name duplication a prerequisite to join your band, and if so how did Dermot get in?
Barry: There was an initiation for Dermot in a popular Limerick nightclub.
Dermot: I had to beat Dan in a push-up race.
Barry: With his pants down.
Dermot: I had to get naked in a nightclub in Limerick city.
Dan: Dermot’s reputation precedes him in that legend has it that he’s quite well endowed.
HER: How did you pick your band name?
Barry: Dan and I grew up in a housing estate in Limerick called The Hermitage (we’re brothers). We never had a green so when we were younger we tried to make a green over our back wall in a field, and we failed with that. Our dad wouldn’t let us use the lawn mower so we had to use hedge clippers. We painted a sign saying Hermitage Green on the wall and that’s where the name comes from.
HER: How did you guys form? Are you all from Limerick?
Barry: Dermot’s from Ennis in Clare, Darragh (Graham) is from Wicklow. The three of us are from Limerick. Dan and I are brothers and Dan met Darragh (Griffin) at a young age. Darragh (Graham) came to Limerick for University and we became friends and lived below each other in apartments and we decided to play together one night in my brother’s pub in Limerick.
We had a bit of a jam there and it kind of kicked off into something regular for ourselves really and then gradually people started coming to see us. It was all very relaxed. We had another bodhran player who couldn’t commit so we googled ‘unreal bodhran player’ and found Dermot…. No we met him through a friend.
Dan: But I did look him up.
Barry: So Dermot came for one gig and it was love at first sight.
Dermot: I kind of pestered them and ‘G’wan so are you going to let me in the band?’ It went on for about three months and eventually they let me in.
HER: What were your day jobs before?
Barry: I was a rugby player for Munster.
Darragh Graham: I was a strength and conditioning coach.
Darragh Griffin: I was a primary school teacher.
Dan: I was trying to get into Radio production.
Dermot: I’d finished college but I’d been gigging since I was 17.
HER: What’s been your best gig so far?
Darragh Graham: There’s one we did very early on in Kerry and we’d only been gigging a few months and we’d never been outside of Limerick. So we went down to this place, it was the wild, wild west of Kerry. It was one of those gigs where everybody was just hammered. There was a really low ceiling and so everybody, instead of clapping their hands, started thumping the ceiling. We went on to a house party afterwards that went on all night.
Dan: It’s a hard one to call though, favourite gig. Obviously the big gigs with huge crowds are great but then there’s a contrast when we go back to some of the first gigs we ever played, the bars. There’s something special about those ones.
HER: Who is your musical inspiration?
Darragh Graham: Well Darragh (Griffin) writes most of our songs so his influences would be John Martin-
Darragh Griffin: John Martin and Nick Drake would be major ones for me. But then again its not like the songs we write sound anything like them. It’s just personally who I end up listening to a lot. In band form I really like the Fleet Foxes and I like when bands play music that is difficult, just beyond completely simple.
HER: You do great covers of Florence and the Machine, Timbaland and Mumford and Sons and released them on YouTube. Do you feel you’ve been typecast as a coverband?
Dan: We started off as a cover band and putting videos on YouTube. They kind of snowballed and at the time it was great for getting the word out there. Now we kind of resent them a little bit because we are established as ‘that band that plays Timbaland’ and sometimes it draws peoples attention away from your own original stuff.
But at the same time, it has gotten people’s attention so it’s not something to turn your back on. But we don’t play covers anymore. We might play ‘Cosmic Love’ on occasions, but the focus is on our originals and has been for quite some time.
HER: What do you say to the comparisons with Mumford and Sons?
Darragh Graham: It’s inevitable when you’re an up and coming band that people want to know ‘well who do they sound like?’ So they’ll say ‘they’re like this band, Mumford and Sons’. It’s really nice though and it’s a compliment because they’re so good.
Dan: It’s a catch 22, we’re not actually aspiring to be like Mumford and Sons but it’s a very flattering compliment to get.
HER: Who came up with the idea to do The Simpson’s Baby on Board in an elevator?
Barry: It was Dan’s idea to do it but we were just going to a hotel we’d played a wedding party at a week before – the Carraig hotel in Limerick. We said we’d shoot the video there and we were on our way up in the lift and we had done it up on the roof first.
Darragh Graham: It was a spur of the moment type thing.
Barry: And this kid, a girl who I’d seen in the hotel with her parents, must have been bored out of her mind, she was about ten. She was on one of the floors and just kept pressing the button on the lift and so we kept stopping on her floor. (She didn’t get into the lift though).
HER: You’ve released an EP. Have you an album in the works?
Barry: We haven’t started recording yet but we have enough material for an album. So whether if someone will sign us (to do it), or to do it independently, we’re not really sure yet.
Dermot: We’ve had interest from various different companies but its just that catch 22 situation where music is changing; that its now so downloadable maybe signing wouldn’t be the best idea in the world for us. The music industry has changed so much what with the likes of HMV closing.
Darragh Graham: But either way if we do it ourselves or not it (recording the album) will be within the next six months.
HER: You played Electric Picnic last year. Are you doing that this year?
Dan: We’re playing the festival circuit yeah, Electric Picnic haven’t released their line up yet so we don’t know if we’re in there. It went down really well there last year. Off the top of my head I’m not sure which festivals we’re playing but we have a few lined up.
HER: You do a lot of gigs in pubs. Do you indulge in some dutch courage and what’s your drink of choice?
(Nervous laughter) Club orange.
Darragh Griffin: I don’t think any of us need Dutch courage at this stage, in fact it becomes a bit of a Dutch disaster at times.
(Group laughter and some mention of one of them drinking a bottle of whiskey at New Years and falling off the stage. More laughter.)
Barry: If you come to our gigs you’ll see the stage littered with everything and anything – pints of Guinness, bottles of Jameson. That’s the standard really. The staple in our diet. We do like to go a bit wild on stage.
Darragh Graham: When we were touring in Australia, it was necessary to keep us going. We toured five cities, Cairns, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Newcastle.
HER: Do you find you have to ward off the females with the old ‘man-on-stage-syndrome?
(Embarrassed looks all around) No, we don’t ward them off, we embrace them.
Dan: I can only speak for myself but they do be all over me. Sometimes I can’t even get off the stage.
Darragh Griffin: We have a special German groupie with our lyrics tattooed across the back of her neck.
Darragh Graham: You can sometimes feel you’re in a shop window on stage with the girls pointing at you. You kind of feel like saying ‘I’m right here, I can see you (pointing)’.
Dan: Don’t slag off our female fans. We love our female fans.
HER: Are any of you single?
(Lots of talking amongst themselves and slagging with no straight answers)
Barry: three of five are single…its complicated.
(Darragh Graham proposed to his girlfriend at the show at The Academy on Saturday March 2nd after singing her a love song. He then jumped off stage to give her the ring and she said yes.)
HER: What are the plans for the future of Hermitage Green?
Barry: In the next month we’ve got Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and the big venues like the Roisin Dubh and Dolans. Then we go to Abu Dhabi in a few weeks as well for the week of Paddy’s. And then we’re home doing the gig in the Guinness Storehouse for Paddy’s Day. Then we’re going to London the first week in April, then a regional tour of Kerry and Cork.
Darragh Griffin: A world tour of Cork…
Barry: Then we’ll try and do the same thing in between festivals in the summer. Basically try and play as many gigs as we can in the next six months. Then writing and recording.
Darragh Graham: Just keep the momentum going and get our name as big as we can over the next few months while recording the album as well.
HER: If you could collaborate with anyone who would it be?
Dan: One Direction and Barbara Streisand…
Darragh Griffin: Glen Hansard I think is a bit of a stand out among Irish musicians. He’s got a lot of credibitliy and he deserves it. But there’s loads – Damien Dempsey…
Dan: I’d actually really like to (work with) Jerry Fish. I think he’s incredibly underrated. I’m not sure how well he’d work with our style but he’s someone I’d really like to work with.
Barry: We’ve spoken about having a female vocalist. A friend of ours, Lisa Kenny, an up and coming female artist that we plan on working with. She’s a great musician and singer so keep an eye out for her.
Darragh Griffin: We’d like to collaborate with the Hardy Bucks. We were going to do a song for their movie. They could be us in a music video. Who would play who though?
HER: What have you got out at the moment in terms of singles?
Darragh Griffin: We’ve started recording our own original stuff, live, with good quality videos and releasing it that way (on YouTube) instead of just on iTunes. We had ‘Let the ink flow’ in January and we’ve got a new one called ‘Song for Paul’ now.
HER: What’s ‘A Song for Paul’ about?
Barry: It’s a touching kind of song.
Dan: Barry was quite close with Paul (Darbyshire – the strength and conditioning coach for the Munster Rugby team), who died of motor neuron disease. (It’s in memory to him.)
HER: What is the manliest thing you’ve ever done?
Darragh Griffin: Jumped off a fifteen-metre cliff in Perth.
Barry: A sixty-year old woman did it.
Dan: I watched Darragh jump off a fifteen-metre cliff.
Darragh Graham: There were sharks in the harbour at the time and we didn’t even realise it.
Dermot: I did the smaller jump.
Barry: Dan is the Munster Intermediate Boxing champion, and Dermot’s a black belt in Taekwondo. Darragh (Graham) was the national 200 metre champion two years ago. Darragh (Griffin) was very posh as a rower and has tea with his mam afterwards. And I played against the All Blacks on their tour of Ireland and the UK. I retired –
Dan: He was dropped-
Barry: I retired because of a foot injury. I played for Munster.
HER: Who is your perfect woman?
Dermot: Lisa Hannigan
Darragh Graham: Beyonce
Dan: Anne Doyle
Barry: Dan loves Gemma Hayes. He got shot down by her. He asked for her phone number and she gave him her email address.
Hermitage Green will play the Guinness Storehouse on March 17th. Their music is available to download from iTunes.
