Family Business

Date Published: 19-Sep-2008

ACHIEVING a top twenty single in the Irish music charts is no mean feat, especially when it is your first single release. For one Galway band, this dream has been achieved and last week The Kanyu Tree released their second single and are hoping that it will go straight into the charts.

Unlike many bands, brothers Daniel, Shane and Oisín Cluskey from Salthill never thought they could make a full time living out of music and so, while they played together all through their teens and early twenties, the three pursued the traditional academic route, all going on to university.

“Forming a band was never an intention,” explains Daniel, who is the eldest of the three. “It just came about, we always played together forming harmonies and then after listening to music you want to write your own music and I suppose then about three years ago we started to record our songs”.

The brothers, who spent many of their early years growing up in Japan before their parents decided to move back to Salthill, set up the band three years ago and once they had their songs recorded they put them on their myspace site on the internet before gig bookings began to flow in slowly but surely.

Daniel recalls the very first gig they played in the Music Factory in County Carlow as “the most nerve racking experience of my life”. The brothers had contacted another band and asked if they needed a support act and Daniel recalls; “We went down on a road trip with about ten of my friends. It was great craic”.

About a month later the band supported The Saw Doctors in the Róisín Dubh; “It was only our second or third gig. I was so nervous and with the heat wave at the time it was impossible to…