If Arlene Foster listened to the Wood Burning Savages, she might not like what she heard. The band’s songs – upbeat and frequently angry – are often a paean for a new Northern Ireland – anti-capitalist, peaceful and non-sectarian.
Their new album Stability, full of snarls and sniggers, is a direct attack on a political system that collapsed 15 months ago. And while they might seem like tight-trousered emissaries from the republic of conscience, the band says they were surprised themselves at how political the album became.
Frontman Paul Connolly tells The University Times: “We tried writing love songs and flowery War on Drugs ‘love you baby but you don’t love me’ sort of stuff and we realised we were really shit at it. So we were like, what are you annoyed about?”
Plenty, it turns out. Mental health, nuns and struggling families all make appearances on the album. Last night, at their gig in Whelan’s, Connolly, to cheers, called on the audience to go and vote to repeal the eighth.
If you can marry activism and music together, without being a gobshite, that’s the dream
Yet he’s well aware that too often, politics can look like posturing. “If you can marry activism and music together, without being a gobshite, that’s the dream.”
Do they succeed? At their best, yes. It helps that Connolly has stage presence reminiscent of the best of punk, moving around the stage like a Northern Irish Wilko Johnson. There’s something soothing too, amidst the familiar machine-gun clatter of guitars, about how certain they are about their rage.
“I think very much that the anger should be directed at the DUP and Sinn Féin”, he says.
“People should be getting annoyed at Arlene Foster. I think she’s a bit of a crook, to put it lightly. I think Sinn Féin are really holding out so long that the country is basically dying on the balls of its arse.”
“So you want me to die for you, but would you die for me?”, spits Connolly on title track “Stability”, while on “I Don’t Know Why I Do It to Myself” he bemoans the state of the nation: “You’ve stolen our youth and robbed us of a home.”
The Wood Burning Savages played Whelan’s last night
“Stability comes from the Tory party tag line, which was security, stability and opportunity, which was complete bullshit, so we tagged on the word immunity because no one is willing to take any – that really fucking stupid corporate phrase – take ownership of anything”, he says.
And while it might be too far to call them Billy Bragg for the Brexit generation, there’s certainly a sense, watching them live and listening to the album, that there are worse people to represent Northern Ireland.
“We’re definitely a separate church and state band”, Connolly jokes, pointing to the working class, middle class, Catholic and Protestant backgrounds that make up the Wood Burning Savages.
When it comes to the band’s influences, it’s just as eclectic. Yes, the predictable names are there: Joan Baez, Wilco and Tom Robinson. But there’s also comedians, from Robin Williams to Dave Allen.
Of course, growing up in Derry also played a role for Connolly. “It was the birthplace of the civil rights movement, people like John Hume, Eamon McCann and Bernadette Devlin and things like that.”
The band say they’ve always got a good reception in Ireland, in the big cities like Dublin and Galway. But I suggest they might find it hard to exercise audiences on the intricacies of Northern Irish politics.
Connolly agrees. “There is that thing of people don’t know too much about Northern Ireland and there are people from Dublin who’ve never been in Derry or Belfast, which I find nuts. They’ve been to Prague and Thailand and it’s just up the road.”
So what message should an Irish audience take from the band? “Northern Ireland’s not a war zone. It’s a place that’s governed by clowns.”
If Arlene Foster does get a blast of the Wood Burning Savages someday, it might prove a shock. Sure, it’s protest music, plain and simple. But it might one day find itself in a manifesto.
