Peel Your Own Spuds warm up for Loughrea

Citing The Pogues and The Saw Doctors as key influences, Peel Your Own Spuds play An Sibín, Loughrea, this Saturday, August 15.

The band are a six-piece based in Newport, South Wales, with strong Irish roots.

They began when mandolin player and songwriter Tom Flannelly met lead-singer Rosie O’Donnell.

“We’re eight years going now,” says Tom. “Rosie, who’s a Welsh girl of Irish descent with parents are from Cavan and Donegal, approached me and asked if I’d like to be in an Irish band.

“I said ‘yeah, no problem, but we’ll need some original material, and not just go banging out the same old tunes’. I wrote about four or five original songs, and then we got my old line-up from a rock band many years ago. So we’ve a mixture of old and young in the band.”

The rest of Peel Your Own Spuds are Dave Treharne, Keith Boast, Seán Keane and Mick Vodden. The band members draw from Newport’s large ex-pat Irish community.

“There’s a big Irish community there,” says Tom. “I played for a Gaelic team there as well, Pride of Éire, may years ago. There’s a Comhaltas there, and I started pulling together the main people from there – stealing them, I was!”

Tom is a massive fan of The Saw Doctors – in an email subsequent to the interview, he asked to ‘ put an ultimatum out to the Saw Doctors if anyone of them is interested in playing with the Spuds they’re welcome and we’ll see them in An Sibin in Loughrea!’

“The Saw Doctors are tremendous,” he says during the interview.

“I’ve seen them a couple of times over in the UK. You have to remember we’re emigrants, four of us. I left in the 1980s, and then you have lads who left in the two thousands. We like the Saw Doctors’ stuff and they sing about emigration, just like we do.”

Tom is the chief songwriter in the band, but is keen to credit his colleagues.

“I usually bring them in, and the lads add a riff or some harmonies, and lead parts, and breaks,” he says. “The songs would cover emigration, different topics.

“The single we have out now, I wrote about my kids doing their exams. In the UK it’s the exactly same as Ireland! The kids had to struggle through and had a lot of other influences and distractions. But at the end of the day they had to put their head down because it’s their future, y’know?”

The Loughrea show is part of Peel Your Own Spuds four-date Irish tour. How does it feel to be bringing it all back home? “It’s brilliant, I come to Ireland quite regularly on holidays but the other members, especially the Welsh lads, have asked, for years, to tour Ireland,” Tom explains.

“We finally said ‘right, we’re going home’.

For more about Peel Your Own Spuds and their upcoming Loughrea gig see this week’s Tribune