Friendship comes first for Original Rudeboys

The Original Rudeboys play Monroe’s Live on Wednesday, December 18th. Hailing from Dublin, the trio who fuse acoustic pop, rock, indie and hip-hop, recently released the single, Never Gonna Walk Away. It’s a taster from their second album, which they are currently working on.

 “We’ve got about five or six tracks 90 percent done, which we recorded in London,” says Neddy Arkins, the band’s rapper and vocalist. “We’re heading over for another three weeks to finish off what will be the next album. It’s still early days in terms of song selection, but there’s a nice repertoire there that we’re going to choose from.”

Robert Burch is the band’s lead vocalist and guitarist, and Seán Walsh plays ukulele. The three lads all have a hand in writing songs, with Neddy responding to the melodies his bandmates come up with.

“I’ve got my laptop and a notebook that’s littered with all sorts of lyrics about everything,” he says. “So if the guys come to me with a hook and it’s about, for example, falling in love, I’ll scrape through the notebook for anything that relates to it.”

It’s fair to say that writing pop songs that include a ukulele and an Irish rapper is unusual. Perhaps, then, it’s no surprise to hear the Original Rudeboys formed almost by accident.

“Before the band, we were college students,” says Neddy. “We’d go out at the weekend, have a few beers. There was one place we used to go to, but they closed down. They did the cheapest beers in Dublin, so when they closed we had no money to go elsewhere. I came up with the great idea of just buying a few beers in the off-licence and chilling in mine, listening to music, seeing what happened.”