THE third Rocky Mayhem Festival takes place in Kilfinane this Saturday June 29, and welcomes The Riptide Movement, Damien Dempsey, The Cast Of Cheers along with native Limerick acts Raging Sons and Going90.
The live action is happening in a high-walled courtyard in the town, set in the Ballyhoura mountains with no muddy fields to contend with, where you can get up close and personal to the action on stage with this intimate venue capacity of about 1,000. “The ticket sales and interest in the gig is huge this year. Our www.rockymayhem.ie visits are up an amazing 74 per cent. There are already fans coming from 15 counties and three countries. Online sales alone for Saturday are up nearly a staggering 300 per cent already,” organiser Adrian Wells informed Limerick Post this week.
Dublin band the Riptide Movement will perform at Rocky Mayhem in between lucrative live appearances at the legendary Glastonbury festival the previous night and then open for The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park this Summer. The band has just completed recording their third album. The band sold out the Olympia recently, has toured Germany, Russia, France, India and the UK and has been regulars at the Irish festivals.
The music of The Riptide Movement is bluesy and guitar driven harking back to Canned Heat or early Fleetwood Mac with a strong batch of songs and a reputation as a quality live band. “The new songs are absolute monsters. We had a week off while on tour in Germany last December and rented a place and started writing new songs from there,” Gar Byrne of the band explained to Limerick Post.
Riptide Movement prepared for this recording with ten days of pre-production in Blessington under the watchful eye of producer Ted Hutt. He has sat at the desk previously with Old Crow Medicine Show and Dropkick Murphys and was a founding member of Flogging Mollys.
“Ted Hutt has brought clarity, brought out all our strengths. He has made the songs so much more sculpted and stronger. Recording has been an amazing experience, he is particularly good at getting guitar sounds as witnessed by his work with Gaslight Anthem.”
The Riptide Movement released sophomore album ‘Keep on keepin’ on’ in 2012 and picked up ‘Best Irish album of 2012’ at the ERIC awards (entertainment.is) last January.
Joining The Riptide Movement at Kilfinane is The Cast of Cheers, another band that has got a lot of coverage on these pages. The jittery math-rock stomp of their debut album ‘Chariot’ earned The Cast of Cheers a Choice Music Prize nomination for Album of the Year.. not bad going for a self-produced album that was recorded in just three frantic days in a studio in Blanchardstown. The band put ‘Chariot’ on bandcamp.com as a free download. With no hype and little radio support, the downloads reached 150,000 as music blogs began to take notice and newspapers wrote obituaries for the music business using ‘Chariot’s free downloads as an example.
Now signed to School Boy Error the band released the album ‘Family’ in 2012 and its lead single of the same name hit the radio airwaves and hooked listeners. It saw the band championed by the influential Zane Lowe and Fearne Cotton in the UK. In Australia the influential indie station Triple J gave ‘Family’ Album of The Week: “They were really getting behind us and that was making so many new fans for us over there”, explained guitarist/synth player Neil to Limerick Post. “When Family came out we got a great reaction in Australia and toured there. We played really good shows and the venues were packed, the radio stations were loving us”.
The Cast of Cheers are setting about preparing album number three at the moment and debuted some new songs, ‘Half-Century’ and ‘Chameleon’ at the Jameson Live show in March.
The band has also been busy remixing tracks for Two Door Cinema Club whom they supported on tour.
It will be a quiet summer for live gigs for the Swords band as they prepare new tracks so their appearance at Rocky Mayhem will be a rare chance to see them debut new material.
Rocky Mayhem takes place in Kilfinane this Saturday June 29 featuring The Riptide Movement, Damien Dempsey, The Cast Of Cheers along with Limerick acts Raging Sons and Going90
