The Hothouse Flowers to play Monroe’s Live

The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

The Hothouse Flowers play Monroe’s Live on Friday next, September 18. Liam Ó Maonlaí, Fiachna Ó Braoináin, Dave Clarke and Peter O’Toole have been playing together for 30 years now. They have all pursued other projects, but the Flowers have endured.

Lead singer Ó Maonlaí has a few different projects on the go, but this tight-knit band are close to his heart.

“When I’m at it, they’re central,” he says. “I’ve been doing a lot of solo, and then I have Ré, which is a traditional band. I had Rian for a while, a show with eight dancers and musicians, including myself. That was put together by Michael Keegan-Dolan, who’s a great theatre maker, a genius.”

Ó Maonlaí is very proud of Rian, which played to audiences at home and in Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany and New York.

“It had a great tone and really did honour to traditional music,” he says. “We had dancers from Nigeria, Ghana Greece, Finland, all contemporary dancers mostly living in London. Young, and empty vessels as far as Irish music was concerned, but with different cultural identities. They all brought their own cultural accents to the show. It was an amazing thing to be part of.”

The Hothouse Flowers released their last album in 2010, but are returning to the studio to see what they can conjure up.

“The Flowers are about to record tomorrow, for a week,” Ó Maonlaí says. “We’re going into Windmill Lane.  We don’t have a strict agenda, I want to capture some of the improvisational energy that we have. There’s a couple of songs that I’m sure the lads have up their sleeves.

“We’re going on tour in England in October, that’s the first big tour we’ve done there in a good few years. We thought it would be a good idea to have something ready for that, and there’s been a desire to go into the studio for a while anyway.”

So many bands crash and burn – especially after the chart topping success the Hothouse Flowers enjoyed earlier in their career. What has kept them together for so long?

“It just stays fresh,” Liam says. “I go off and do a lot of stuff on my own, and that gives me a strength and different aspects that I can bring back to the band. We’re very jam-orientated anyway, and a lot of the songs change dynamic. We rejuvenate them in different way. And I like the songs anyway, there’s always a sense of the present in them, they still reveal stuff.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.