Punky trio Rural Savage are lighting up the live scene

Date Published: {J}

Rural Savage are a loud, punky Galway based trio. Fronted by songwriter Farren McDonald, the line-up is completed by Jay Burke on bass and Mosey Byrne on drums. They’ve been a regular fixture on the city’s music scene since their first gig in Róisín Dubh a year and a half ago. As debuts go, Farren was happy with it.

“It seemed like it went well!” he laughs. “So Cow [the alias of songwriter Brian Kelly] was there. He really liked it; he came up to us afterwards and said ‘that was great.’ It was kind of an ego boost to keep it going.”

Although he sings and plays guitar, writing lyrics is Farren’s real passion.

“That’s the only thing that I actually do work on,” he says. “I do that every day; I write about five songs a week. I just have a feeling – it’s turnover, until you get to something good. If I can’t come up with lyrics I just watch TV and write the stuff people are saying. Sentences I think are interesting; I collect them and come back to them later. I get some good stuff out of it!”

Farren also avoids the well-trodden path of writing about heartbreak, and prefers to purloin phrases from his peers.

“Things your friends would say are far more interesting,” he says, recalling a night out with David Boland, from The Deprivations. “We were at a party and he didn’t know whether to stay or leave. And he said ‘where would I go and why would I stay?’ So I stole that!”

Rural Savage will be playing the Salty Dog at this year’s Electric Picnic. Earlier in the summer they made their festival debut, at the literature and poetry flavoured Flatlakes weekend in County Monaghan.

“We were booked to play but when we got there they didn’t know that we were playing” says Farren. “So we had this e-mail from the organiser – a kind of a magic e-mail that got us through the door!”

“Then they said they had no slot for us. So they put us in this tent and the place was blown away. It was really stormy, and we ended up playing in this bale of hay, with two other musicians playing over the top – a drummer and another guitarist. It was good fun though, it was different.”

Given that he’s played at Flatlakes and the time he puts into writing, does Farren see a poetic side to his work?

“Yeah, I do think there’s some poetry to the lyrics but I don’t consider it too political,” he says. “I like some political bands – I like the Dead Kennedys, but when I first heard them first I was too young to know what they were on about.

“At the start [frontman Jello Biafra] used to write from a more sarcastic perspective. The first song on the first Dead Kennedy’s album is called Kill The Poor. Now that I’m older, I realise he was writing from a cartoonish version of a conservative. But when I was 14 I thought maybe he really does want to kill the poor!”

Farren was a little disappointed by some aspects of Jello Biafra’s recent Galway show.

“At that gig he was saying something political, a really obvious thing like ‘f**k the bankers’ or something. And there was someone behind me going ‘oh yeah, speak it, tell it.’ I thought, there’s nothing interesting happening here, it’s just somebody giving an opinion with a backbeat.”

Rural Savage will be releasing their debut album I Fell In The Bog And Saw God in October. Farren, Jay and Mosey recorded 11 songs in three days in The Forge studios, Galway. The record was produced by Lost Chord frontman Dave Phelan.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.