JERRY Fish and the Mudbug Club return to Dolan’s on Saturday May 30. The debut album from Jerry Fish and The Mudbug Club, Be Yourself, was described as ‘Leonard Cohen doing Dean Martin’ a description so rightly fitting. Eager crowds have flocked to Fish’s travelling musical show. The debut album reached multi-platinum status, with the single, True Friends, ingrained in the Irish hum-along psyche when it was featured on a Vodafone advertising campaign.
The band played three consecutive nights at Glastonbury, “we were like the court jesters it was fantastic” and turned a triumphant gig at the Spiegeltent into a best selling live album.
Already, the latest offering The Beautiful Untrue is garnering positive reaction. “We’ll be playing quite a bit of the new album at the live shows which is really good fun. I’ve really been enjoying playing it and it’s a real anything can happen kind of show really. Anyone that’s been to a show before will know I really like to involve the audience, so by the end of the evening, it will be a big mess of a carnival. I will have a seven or eight piece band with me and a full brass section. I have been working on this record for quite some time, it’s something that I got quite fussy about and now that it has been so well received I’m happy I did really”.
The lead single Factory Floors is a duet with Carol Keogh, formerly of The Plague Monkeys and Automata, “she’s a kind of an Indie queen really”. A strong album has four or five radio songs on it and this album certainly has that. The next single from The Beautiful Untrue will be Dig a Dog a Bone Story which is about “getting happy and passing it on which I think many of us need at the minute” says Fish. Jerry is joined on vocals on this track by Imelda May. “Imelda is an old friend of mine and she came in on the earlier recordings and I had her over here playing a few shows with us before she hit the big time. It’s fantastic to see her do so well”. This particular track is Jerry Fish’s personal favourite on the album. “It keeps changing, but live I’m really enjoying Dig a Dog a Bone Story, it’s the first time I’ve played guitar on a record. I play a lot of instruments but all of them very badly”.
Jerry Fish is the alter ego of singer Gerard Whelan who through the 1990’s was the main creative force in An Emotional Fish, the Irish rock band who released one of the most successful debut Irish albums ever. The band were signed to Atlantic Records by the labels legendary founder the late, great and much loved Ahmet Ertegun. “Ahmet really took us under his wing in the early days of An Emotional Fish, he brought the band to his holiday home in Turkey, and told me stories about Otis Reading and his band, Ray Charles, his brother Nesuhi, he was a great storyteller. Ahmet was a legend, and is one of the main reasons I still write songs and make music today.” With a career that has gone from Rock to Cabaret, Jerry explains he is still a big rock fan. “I’m a big Iggy Pop fan, we used to play in Limerick a lot as a rock bank (with An Emotional Fish), we played a lot with The Cranberries too but I don’t think I want to be an old rocker, I think I still have the rock personality with a more crooner style. There have been massive changes in the music industry since I released Be Yourself, so you have to take all that in. This is the first album I’ve completed digitally. I became a sound engineer under the tutelage of Dick Meaney (The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine) and Phil Hayes (The Cake Sale, Bell X1) I got to re-learn how to make a record. This is a one-man show. I am the record company, manager and artist”. Of other Irish acts he adds, “Jape is great, RSAG and Candice Gordon. Myspace and the technological ebb have changed everything. I did some of the recording for this album at home. My plan is to play to every man, woman and child by the end of the year”.
He is also extremely proud of the troubadours that make up the Mudbug Club. “I went to see the Rolling Stones and we have a better brass section. I am surrounded by incredible musicians and I wouldn’t swop them for the world, better the devil you know. I mean I’m a massive fan of Keith Richards but I don’t think he and I could handle life in a tour bus for very long.”
Jerry Fish and The Mud Club always attract a diverse audience at the live shows with people of all ages and walks of life packing venues around the Country. “Your average emotional fish fan would be in their forties now, also a lot of students dig it, we play so many festivals, I really like to see that (the diverse audience), we lose a lot of society not mixing up generations, so I’m really proud that the band and its music can do this”. He is looking forward to the gig in Dolan’s adding “I don’t think you can beat a club, we’ve played stadiums, and festivals are just to die for but there is something really special about clubs. It’s the positive energy, we love what we do and I think people get off on that”. Catch Jerry Fish and The Mudbug Club at Dolan’s on Saturday May 30, “the new album is making people feel better, beg borrow or steal a copy and if that doesn’t work buy one”!
