This time last year Limerick’s Hermitage Green gave their Electric Picnic debut performance on The Salty Dog stage. Twelve months on and the band is playing a very lucrative Sunday evening slot at The Electric Arena, the festival’s biggest stage under canvas. Hermitage Green’s Barry Murphy spoke to Limerick Post this week
NEXT week Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally will celebrate its tenth year. The festival has always hosted acts that would grow in profile in the future alongside reviving the fortunes of vintage innovators such as Chic and Kraftwerk. Bands on the cusp of mainstream success, Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem played epic sets there in 2005.
On the first Sunday of September 2012, Hermitage Green played Electric Picnic’s Salty Dog stage. Hermitage Green’s Barry Murphy remembers, “We were over the moon with that last year. It went really well. We got a great little crowd there, a great Limerick crowd, and lots of people wandering in.”
The Salty Dog stage is located in the forest outside the main venue at Electric Picnic where campers passing through will stumble upon unexpected acts playing on an old shipwreck under the trees, the kind of place to hear a sea shanty from Jerry Fish and The Mugbug Club or The Rubberbandits MCing in the wee hours over a drum ‘n’ bass DJ set.
This time around Hermitage Green will play in the Electric Arena on Sunday September 1. Their move to the festival’s second largest stage is a good indication of just how fast the group’s profile has grown in just 12 months. This year Sunday ticket holders will be able to see Hermitage Green perform unlike last year where the Salty Dog stage was out of bounds for one day ticket holders.
This will be Hermitage Green’s biggest gig so far. The Electric Arena has a capacity of 7,000 which opens out onto the festival’s most popular hangout area by the bars. Barry says, “At the same time last year The Electric Arena was rammed for Ben Howard and Of Monsters and Men. I wouldn’t be overly confident that we will get that kind of crowd, but it is that kind of festival that people go to listen to bands that they haven’t heard before and we will be hoping for that. We have spent a lot of time on the road in this last year. We have been playing nonstop and hopefully it will stand to us.”
After their Salty Dog appearance last year Hermitage Green played their first full all-original material gig to a full house in Dublin’s Academy 2 venue, months later they sold out the bigger capacity Academy 1. Multiple gigs in Whelan’s, The Róisín Dubh in Galway and The Pavilion in Cork were followed by a busy Summer festival schedule this year. Their appeal isn’t just confined to these shores, Hermitage Green have toured Australia twice, France and UK a few times and also brought the show to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and South Africa.
It has been nothing short of a phenomenal rise in profile for a band with little radio play, no record contract, not even a manager.
What the band does have though is 8,000 Twitter followers, 20,000 fans on facebook and 700,000 views on YouTube for their self produced videos. Barry says, “We have had incredible support from people. We have been lucky, releasing stuff on YouTube and keeping pretty active on facebook and Twitter. We have got massive support from that and a lot of the same people return to our gigs.”
It is the kind of exposure that had punters queueing on the streets outside sold-out venues in Perth in Australia. One post on Hermitage Green’s facebook site can reach over 60,000 people via re-posts and discussions.
“The videos from the Curraghgower Bar and the tracks recorded at Franciscan Church have got a great response. You just can’t pay for that kind of exposure when people have been re-posting the videos on facebook,” concludes Barry.
The Limerick band will play their biggest show to date at Electric Picnic on a night that will be headlined by the UK’s Arctic Monkeys, about to release their fifth album, who in 2004 were one of the very first bands ever to come to the public attention via the Internet on fan site MySpace.com and pioneered how new bands are promoted and marketed today.
Next on the horizon for Hermitage Green is finding the right record producer, studio recording and finding new venues and intimate locations to express their craft but first the band play Electric Picnic on Sunday September 1 alongside Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Kodaline and The Strypes to name a few.
